'The Shield' Actor Michael Jace Arrested for Killing Wife

Michael Jace


Rolling Stone

Actor Michael Jace, who appeared in the cop drama The Shield, was arrested Tuesday morning in Los Angeles over the fatal shooting of his wife, according to CBS News. 

The 20 Best TV Moments of 2013

Jace is reportedly being charged with homicide and is cooperating with the police. The LAPD confirmed that he was the only suspect taken into custody, and CNN says that his bail is set at $1 million. Although specifics remain unclear, a police news release read: "At this moment the motive of the murder is believed to be domestic violence."

On Monday night, Jace's neighbors alerted police after hearing gunfire. When officers arrived, they found April Jace dead with gunshot wounds to her body; two young children were also inside the home at the time.

TMZ is also reporting that Jace allegedly called the cops on himself, allegedly telling officials, "I shot my wife," and then staying on the line with them until police arrived at the actor's Hyde Park-area home. The gossip site is also reporting that Jace's two children witnessed the shooting, and were taken to the police station afterwards where they waited for Child Services to take them to the home of a family member.

Best-Selling Conservative Author and Big Obama Hater Dinesh D'Souza Pleads Guilty to Campaign Finance Violation

Conservative commentator and best-selling author, Dinesh D'Souza exits the Manhattan Federal Courthouse in New York, January 24, 2014.

Reuters

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a campaign finance law violation, avoiding a trial that had been expected to begin the same day in a Manhattan federal court.

D'Souza, known for his biting criticism of President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty to one criminal count of making illegal contributions in the names of others. A second count concerning the making of false statements is expected to be dismissed once he is sentenced.

The plea came four months after Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged D'Souza with using "straw donors" to give funds in 2012 to Republican Wendy Long's U.S. Senate campaign in New York. Long, who met D'Souza while they were students in the 1980s, lost to Democratic incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand.

"I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be made in the name of another was wrong and something the law forbids," D'Souza, 53, told U.S. District Judge Berman on Tuesday. "I deeply regret my conduct."

On Fox News last night he whined and cried to Megyn Kelly about how everyone does this kind of thing and that he was singled out for persecution.

Sanity makes a come back

This is in regard to Second Amendment Scholarship, in particular the interpretation of that clause of the Constitution which references "a well-regulated militia".

Politico published an article by Michael Waldman called "How the NRA rewrote the Second Amendment", which basically says everything I have been saying all along about that part of the Constitution.

Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law effectively banning handguns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previously, it had ruled otherwise. Why such a head-snapping turnaround? Don’t look for answers in dusty law books or the arcane reaches of theory.

So how does legal change happen in America? We’ve seen some remarkably successful drives in recent years—think of the push for marriage equality, or to undo campaign finance laws. Law students might be taught that the court is moved by powerhouse legal arguments or subtle shifts in doctrine. The National Rifle Association’s long crusade to bring its interpretation of the Constitution into the mainstream teaches a different lesson: Constitutional change is the product of public argument and political maneuvering. The pro-gun movement may have started with scholarship, but then it targeted public opinion and shifted the organs of government. By the time the issue reached the Supreme Court, the desired new doctrine fell like a ripe apple from a tree.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856.html#ixzz32IACUa4h

This isn't news to me

For some reason, the US national characteristic of anti-intellectualism is being noticed in the press with MacLeans (Canada) America Dumbs Down and the New York Review of Books, Age of Ignorance. I've also been doing posts on this since 2010, and am not the only person to have noticed this trend. As I said, this isn't really news since Richard Hofstadter won the 1964 Pulitzer prize for a book titled Anti-intellectualism in American Life.  Hofstadter attributed this trend toward the democratisation of knowledge.

In 2008, journalist Susan Jacoby was warning that the denseness—“a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations”—was more of a permanent state. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, she posited that it trickled down from the top, fuelled by faux-populist politicians striving to make themselves sound approachable rather than smart.  Perhaps we can add media consolidation to the contributing factors with fewer good news sources being available in the US and even public broadcasting being throttled by crypto-commercials called "underwriting".

Hofstadter's book was the landmark work on the topic, even though there have been a few more significant books and articles on anti-intellectualism preceded it (most notably Merle Curti’s The Growth of American Thought in 1943), and even though it has been followed, in recent years, by well known books from the Left and Right, including Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, and so on. The list lengthens if one adds in broader books about the “dumbing down” of American society.

Of course, some of the US founders were intellectuals (Jefferson and Franklin) who founded Universities or who praised education (Madison), yet the trend toward anti-intellectualism has taken grasp in the US.  Hoffstadter pointed out that there is a conflict between access to education and excellence in education (although, I am of the opinion that one does not need to be formally educated to contributes to this trend, which is reiterated in the MacLeans article where a US Second Grader wrote to the South Carolina legislature that she believed the States should have a fossil, but was rebuffed by fundamentalist spewing mumbo-jumbo about evolution.

Charles Simic point out in the NYRB piece that:

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

Even better is where Simic points out:

In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth

It seems that the big push for ignorance comes from the right since an educated, well-informed population, which is required by a functioning democracy, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.  It is much easier to spread disinformation to a population which is incapable of critical thinking skills than one which only hears the things which they agree.  That was one of the reason for the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press: to have a healthy and informed debate on public policy.  But one cannot have such a debate if the field is filled with rubbish spread by those who have their own interests at heart.

To some extent, Hofstadter is correct when he mentions the democratisation of knowledge, where someone who has no real grasp of the topic gives an opinion and weight is given to that opinion which is out of line with its value.  The opinion of someone who has no knowledge of a topic does not have the same weight as someone who has studied the topic and developed an expertise of the matter.

Simic points out the common misconceptions which are being pushed and offers this conclusion for why anti-intellectualism has become epidemic:

• Christians are persecuted in this country.
• The government is coming to get your guns.
• Obama is a Muslim.
• Global Warming is a hoax.
• The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
• Schools push a left-wing agenda.
• Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
• Obama hates white people.
• The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
• The safety net contributes to poverty.
• The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.

One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.

Massad Ayoob on the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground Laws

Notice how he conspicuously avoided any discussion of how we determine if the threat was what it was supposed to be when the criminal gets away or ends up dead. For Ayoob, and most of the gun-rights nuts, every gun owner is to be believed. I guess this is their extreme version of innocent until proven guilty. It's convenient for adding up the numbers and protecting each other, even when they do wrong.

Underlying this gun-rights extremism is the faulty premise that the gun owner's life is worth more than the other guy's.  Can you shoot someone for looking at you sideways?  Yes, absolutely, as long as afterwards you exaggerate just a tiny bit the look.  This, of course, goes hand in hand with the famous advice about center of mass.  Dead guys cannot tell us their side of things.

If you think that doesn't happen and if you think the increase in justifiable shootings has nothing to do with gun-rights fanatics like Ayoob preaching his bullshit, you'd be wrong, dead wrong.

US passes 4000 gun deaths

And it hasn't even been six months:

Why Don’t We Know How Many People Are Shot Each Year in America?

Lately, I have been pointing out that the US has a pathetic record for gun violence research and that the debate is pretty much run on bullshit: some of which is pretty absurd on its face.  For example:

Gun rights

To which a sane and sensible retort should be: "why is there a right to own a deadly weapon, especially if the possession of which is more likely to yield adverse results?"

Of course, the usual responses are that they protect homes with a ridiculously high amount of defensive uses, reduce crime, or something else patently bizarre.

But, it goes even deeper than just how effective are firearms for self-protection or do they reduce crime.

It seems that there is no real data as to how many people are shot in the US.  ProPublica points out:

How many Americans have been shot over the past 10 years? No one really knows. We don't even know if the number of people shot annually has gone up or down over that time.

The government's own numbers seem to conflict. One source of data on shooting victims suggests that gun-related violence has been declining for years, while another government estimate actually shows an increase in the number of people who have been shot. Each estimate is based on limited, incomplete data. Not even the FBI tracks the total number of nonfatal gunshot wounds.

"We know how many people die, but not how many are injured and survive," said Dr. Demetrios Demetriades, a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who has been studying nationwide gunshot injury trends.

The problem is that the "pro-gun" freeze on research in this area means that many basic facts about the topic are unknown: some of which really are necessary to have an informed debate on the topic.

Such as: how much does the current lack of regulation of firearms cost society (e.g., the tax payers).  While you may not like it, society bears the cost of this "right".

The Department of Justice has estimates of nonfatal shootings that suggest a similar trend: Its National Crime Victimization Survey shows a decline, from an average of about 22,000 nonfatal shootings in 2002, to roughly 12,000 a year from 2007 to 2011, according to a Department of Justice statistician.

But over the same time period, CDC estimates show that the number of Americans coming to hospitals with nonfatal, violent gun injuries has actually gone up: from an estimated 37,321 nonfatal gunshot injuries in 2002 to 55,544 in 2011. [1]

The FBI also gathers data on gun crime from local police departments, but most departments do not track the number of people who are shot and survive. Instead, shootings are counted as part of the broader category of "aggravated assault," which includes a range of gun-related crimes, from waving a gun at threateningly to actually shooting someone.
There were about 140,000 firearm aggravated assaults nationwide in 2012, according to the FBI's report. How many of those assaults represent someone actually getting shot? There's no way to tell.


The contrast between these  estimates is hard to clear up, since each data source has serious limitations.  One can try to keep track of each shooting as is done in real time by using news sources as is being done by http://gunviolencearchive.org/.

But, each of these methods lacks in accuracy: with some being more accurate than others.

The American Bar Association and medical and public health groups collaborated on an extensive campaign with the message, "what we don't know is killing us". The bottom line is that the topic of firearms regulation in the United States is being debated in ignorance without even the most basic facts being presented.

So, why don't you get back to me when you can provide me with some REAL facts about how bad the gun violence problem is in the US because we can't have a real discussion until that time.

But, I would say you definitely have a problem with gun violence if you don't know the extent of the issue: or even admit it is an issue.



[1] These numbers include only injuries caused by violent assault, not accidents, self-inflicted injuries, or shootings by police.