Pattern Ghost

14 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

The issue is that Abbott appears to be trying to gut the limitations of when it's a viable defense...

I agree. Stand your ground is often misapplied. Abbot is a clown. None of that is what I was talking about. I was merely critiquing the logic of a specific portion of an essay. I'm a pedantic sort of person sometimes, and I like to analyse these sorts of details. 

2 hours ago, Cygnia said:

Today's cartoon (it's not posted yet) is probably going to earn me another 30-day suspension and maybe even have my FB account deleted. I could choose to not post it here, but I'm going to make a point by posting it here.

So if you don't see me around for the next 30 days or so, check me out at claytoonz.com or at Twitter and Instagram (unless they get me there too).

Read that guy's post. While I agree with him on the racism, he's wrong on the stand your ground aspects. Stand your ground laws were not misapplied in either case. Just because the governor is squawking about stand your ground laws in this case, or because the press was in Zimmerman doesn't mean the laws were really relevant. Here's the crux of both cases: Self defense does not apply if you provoke the conflict that leads to the killing.

This was correctly applied in both cases, according to the evidence at hand. In the Texas case, given the evidence of intent and the fact that the moron was driving through a crowd, it was very clear the killer was seeking to provoke a confrontation. It doesn't matter if the victim did point his weapon at the shooter. The killer provoked the confrontation. In the Zimmerman case, simply following his victim was not illegal. Zimmerman was attacked, regardless of the size disparity, with physical evidence that supported that part of Zimmerman's story (being on his back with the victim on top of him, smashing his head into the ground. (And the weight advantage is a non-starter when the smaller guy is fit. Martin was the same size I was when I was in the Army, and I could have easily overwhelmed Zimmerman when I was that age.) The missing piece in the Zimmerman case was a witness to Zimmerman provoking the confrontation. I firmly believe he provoked the confrontation and should have been severely punished, but the law was not misapplied, nor was it "wrong." The system sometimes lets human filth loose because there are strict standards of proof. That's working as intended, no matter how distasteful the results often are.

Balrog, hands down, as Balrogs are on or near the same  power level as the Nazgul's creator. One had to be taken out by a Wizard, and killed that incarnation of the Wizard in the process. The other was taken down by a plucky warrior.

The Doctor from Doctor Who, David Tennant incarnation vs. Professor Moriarity of Sherlock Holmes fame.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the case, which summarizes the evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Garrett_Foster

IMO, while eyewitnesses are unreliable, this guy's Twitter statements are pretty damning evidence of a motive. The prosecutor made a point about the weapon being on safe and having an empty chamber, but that's totally irrelevant, since the affirmative defense was a weapon pointed at the shooter.

Here's a video of the incident. Looks like the car is slowly moving into the protest crowd, provoking them. I'd say his actions with the vehicle align with his earlier tweets. Looks like he was trying to provoke a response:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/texas/video-2217414/Video-Video-shooting-protest-Austin-Texas.html

The conviction looks legit to me.

Not really.

17 hours ago, Bazza said:

Ed Greenwood could have gone on, but restricted himself to just five. He also gives the film a thumbs up and says that D&D players can be proud of the film and don’t have to wince about being a gamer. 

Yeah, I watched the video this morning. I got the impression from the trailer that they were actually attempting to honor the material instead of just slap the name on something. Glad to see it passed muster with the man himself. Looking forward to seeing this one.

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2 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Casting however. .. (A Bit of BBC Stunt Casting)

How so? I watch some BBC stuff, but not familiar with all of their shenanigans.

She's contributed a lot to her field. Definitely deserving of the recognition.

2 hours ago, Sociotard said:

Uh, that link just goes to this page?

That's b/c it was a joke. Just fake news, nothing to see here.

5 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

It's in quotation marks, showing it's referring to someone else's remarks

Thanks, I didn't know what those little curly marks around words meant. 😁

(TBH, I was being a bit unfair to the author, b/c the headlines are often not written by the person writing the article. But the obvious click-baity, biased headline is still annoying.)

Chat GPT Bans Italy: The Great AI Wars Begin

If it only got 5 things wrong, that's pretty amazing, considering past attempts at live action movies in the franchise.

7 hours ago, unclevlad said:

BTW:  the "shameful" refers to how the White House referred to the bill.  

I know, but they still chose to put it into the headline, thus showing their bias.

I mean, I'm from Florida, so I know what a bad idea it is to arm more Floridians, trust me. I just found the obvious slant funny. It seems like subtlety has been abandoned, and nobody in the media really cares about putting up the facade of impartiality.

I can tell from the headline that it's going to be an unbiased read.

DOJ reaches tentative $144.5 million settlement with victims of Sutherland Springs church mass shooting

On 4/4/2023 at 9:27 PM, Bazza said:

Salient point is that Hawkeye with Loki (avengers) Loki wins, when Hawkeye joins/rejoins the Avengers (in the first film) Avengers win. Hawkeye was not in Infinity War, and Avengers lose. When Hawkeye rejoins the Avengers in Endgame, Avengers win. 
 

So Hawkeye is like a lucky charm. 

.... woosh!

I was making fun of the grammar. 😀

23 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

In the Avengers comics, Hawkeye's skill and timely gimmicked arrows have been crucial to the Avengers' victory on multiple occasions.

 

He beat the Grandmaster with his sleight of hand skills one time, too. Managing to trick an Elder of the Universe is pretty impressive.

I think the most salient point it made was "Avengers losed"

Journalism reminds me of that scene from The Princess Bride: It's mostly dead. It may be a little bit alive . . . but it's mostly dead.

6 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

I'm not positing either side of teacher effectiveness.  My point is, the Republicans want THAT to be the topic of debate...not gun control.  The gun control advocates can't win when the agenda item isn't even on the table, and deflection is a means to do that.

I'm not seeing it, but thanks for clarification.

23 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

It can also be argued that this plays into the Republican strategy of controlling the debate, by focusing on the issue of arming school personnel, rather than gun control.

How so? It just looks like bad journalism designed to drive traffic to the site. The article is fairly neutral in tone, albeit the headline seems to slant toward arming teachers being ineffective, which is quite the opposite of what you're positing.

49 minutes ago, Old Man said:

Some of Nashville's Covenant school staff were armed

Click bait:

"It is also not clear whether those staff members were present on campus when the shooting took place. Police have also not stated yet that any staff members at the school had a gun or fired at the shooter."

The headline should read: "A woman who called 911 while hiding under a desk during the shooting said to the dispatcher that one or two staff members carry guns" (Also a direct quote from the article.)

I will say that this:

“ 'We do have a school person, or two ... I’m not sure ... who would be packing, whose job it is for security. We don’t have security guards, but we have staff.' ”

does not strike me as a good idea.

It'll be interesting to see if any details come out on whether these armed staff were on campus and what their story was if they were. Hopefully, they exercised good judgement and took care of the students in their classes as their first priority. If they were there, it doesn't seem like any of them were foolish enough to try to hunt down the shooter, at least.

It'd be interesting to see them ranked for how long they feel.

1 hour ago, GM Joe said:

A.R. Moxon wrote an essay I found to be worth reading: "A Good Guy With A Dinosaur"

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/a-good-guy-with-a-dinosaur

 

The person who wrote that is very, very bad at analogies.

4 hours ago, csyphrett said:

The gun apparently can be put together with pieces over the internet.

Somewhat true. But the major components need to be finished, which in the case of the most popular handgun frames requires drilling out and/or cutting off some pieces of plastic from a mostly-finished molded frame, and drilling some holes through it for the pins that hold the actual working parts like the trigger components in. It's not quite on the level of Legos, and can be very fiddly. Mostly, people end up with ill-fitted parts that take a while to get working properly unless they've got some experience in that kind of work or something similar. I'm going to guess an 18 year old prep school student probably doesn't have the shop skills of a middle-aged fabricator, so there's a less than zero probability that whatever he'd put together wasn't really fitted well. Since he was stupid enough to cover his hand with the muzzle, I'm inclined to think he's probably fairly inexperienced around firearms.

4 hours ago, csyphrett said:

Did he have it together and then shoot himself by accident

Most likely this. He may have tried to chamber a round and had a misfeed, then ended up shooting himself because he didn't understand proper malfunction clearing.

10 hours ago, Lectryk said:

Millenials at least didn't come up under the cloud of potential nuclear annihilation and were out before school mass shootings became a regular thing.  Is that a win? 

They had Columbine.

I remember drills to hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack in grade school. Maybe one of these days, we'll have a generation that doesn't have to drill to futilely hide under desks.