Thanks for your reply. I see that you want to be principled and retain the moral high ground. Thus, you feel that you cannot condemn others aside from your own Government. There are numerous replies I could make to this, pointing out how this could be the result of indoctrination in the Cultural Marxist "moral equivalence" and "Critical Theory" fallacies. It could be cowardice, since it is easier to criticize a Government that doesn't chop your head off or use blowtorches on you rather than those that do. However, instead I will urge you to consider the following quote, attributed to Hobbes:

If you are a good man or woman, why do you do nothing?
Why do you not rail against the global jihad that all informed people can see is going on in the World? why do you not condemn the barbarity of jihadis whose two stated goals are to force all the innocent people of the entire World to submit to their political order (I'm sure you well know that "submission" is what Islam means after all) - and those same jihadis are prepared to slaughter Muslim and non-Muslim alike to get their goal. Resulting in the deaths of an estimated 270 million since Mohammed and daily carnage around the globe in the name of Islam. Please take a look at the *facts* of the daily death toll (don't worry, the links are apolitical, just the facts):
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html

By withholding your condemnation you are implicitly consenting to the worldwide slaughter of innocents. While you should hold the US Government to account (and it is good you do), surely you should have even an stronger voice for those that are even worse than the US - those that saw off heads, and rape, and brutalize and oppress hundreds of millions of their fellow Muslims around the globe. Being silent on this is taking the moral low ground. We ought to be defending liberty everywhere - and that means blaming the US when it does wrong and consistently condemning jihad and the ideology that grows and supports it. That is the moral high ground.

Thank you for the reference. I hope you also understand that the US waterboarded only three people (although clearly KSM got it multiple times, but worked out the torture had an emphasis on the psychological rather than physical - and that the US did not want to kill him).

Now we've dealt with the US torture of three men (where I agree with you is disgusting), can we get a comment from you about the *thousands* of people tortured by jihadis (where captured Al Qaeda manuals don't use the controllable fright tactics of waterboarding, but instead specify eyeball removal, gas blowtorches to the skin, and the old favorite of Middle Easterners, mains electricity to the genitals). Why do you guys never condemn that? I stand with you in condemning the US, but where we part ways is that I see the jihadis are far far far worse and more frequent in their torture. Surely you find that even more repugnant than the US activity.

No, we didn't try fighting over it. If it were me, in a real fight, I'd have drawn and fired from retention position, so there wouldn't have been any time to fight over it unless my assailant started grabbing it before it cleared the holster. I don't know how Zimmerman claims it happened; I haven't followed the details that closely. I'm about the same size as my son (15 years old -- he's gonna be a big guy by the time he's done growing), though about 15 pounds heavier.

Oh, and I should mention: we didn't use a real gun. I teach pistol classes so I have a few "blue guns", which are molded blue plastic replicas of common handguns. We used one of those. Safety first.

Based on what definition of murder? Not the one in the written law, which says nothing about an unnecessary approach or an approach "like a vigilante" making a homicide a murder.

This is the GP's point: in a society governed under the rule of law, you can't be tried and convicted except in accordance with the law.

It's not improbable.

It's pretty easy to draw from an IWB holster in the standard position while someone is sitting on you, unless the someone is so heavy that you can't life one hip an inch or so. As for accuracy, at a few inches range, accuracy is not hard. Also, I don't think Zimmerman claimed he was nearly losing consciousness, just that he felt that he was in danger of being killed. That's not improbable, either. You can realize you're in a position where you could be killed before a great deal of damage is actually done.

On the question of drawing I posted a more complete answer here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3971423&cid=44274023

You don't understand what "Stand Your Ground" means. It does not give you a right to attack. It just means that you do not have to try to run away if you are attacked. In this case it wasn't applied because it wasn't relevant; per Zimmerman's story he never had a chance to run away after he was attacked.

In a duty-to-retreat state I suppose the prosecution might have tried to claim that Zimmerman had a chance to run away and didn't , so I guess it's relevant in that the existence of the stand-your-ground law precluded the prosecution from trying that line of argument. However, trying to argue that would have required the prosecution to more or less stipulate that Martin attacked Zimmerman, so I doubt they would have tried it even in a duty-to-retreat state.

+1000

I make this point in my concealed weapon classes. Having a gun means you need to be much, much more careful because the presence of your gun raises the stakes. Most people who carry get that fact pretty much instinctively, but I still think it's important enough that I pound on it a bit in class.

The second half of your sentence assumes a fact that isn't true. Assuming GZ was carrying his IWB holster in the normal position (3:30 to 4 o'clock), it would only have been necessary to rotate his body to the left a bit in order to raise his right hip by an inch or so in order to be able to draw. Unless the person straddling you is very heavy, that's not hard to do. Just for fun I tested it. I put a similar gun in a similar holster and had my six-foot 190-pound son straddle me, and I was easily able to draw. In fact, the only way my son could stop me from drawing was to put his knee on my arm and pin it hard. Even then I was able to work my arm free, though it was hard when he put his full weight on it -- and that was on carpet. On grass it would have been easier.

No, the defense never brought up stand your ground at all. Per the defense theory of the events, Zimmerman was pinned on the ground and getting his head slammed into concrete. In that situation there is no possibility of retreat, so whether or not a person has a legal duty to retreat isn't relevant. If Florida was a duty-to-retreat state rather than a stand-your-ground state, the outcome would have been the same.

Ultimately, this case was all about whether or not it was plausible that Zimmerman was pinned and getting his head pounded. If yes, then his decision to shoot was justifiable self-defense. If no, then it was an illegal homicide and the jury would have had to decide what kind based on whether or not the state was able to prove a depraved mindset beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well, there is one other way it could have gone: The prosecution could have tried to prove that Zimmerman had intentionally provoked Martin into pounding his head into the pavement, in order to obtain legal justification for shooting him. In most states you can't claim self-defense if you provoked the situation with the intent of being able to claim self-defense, but that's hardly ever used because it's really, really hard to prove.

Yeah, Romania doesn't have a problem with putting evil guys in jail. The US is now so politically correct and insane (thanks to decades of Cultural Marxism that has spread from the universities - after being seeded by Marxists of the "Frankfurt School") that every wannabe hotshot lawyer will do anything to get evil guys out - because it'll make the lawyer famous, and most importantly, very *rich*. Even you baulk at the thought of actually imprisoning terrorist masterminds - what is the world coming to!

Reference please. Sounds like more of your Islamicist apologist rubbish - hence, reputable reference please.

FYI :) More than half is nuclear:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/

You don't benefit from cheap and abundant energy ? used for your transportation, food, medicine, iPad, computer, heating, lighting, entertainment, interwebs, etc etc?
It is easy to make a "class warfare" statement pointing at a politician or businessman. How about you own up to the fact that we *all* need the energy and benefit from it. Unless you want to live in a mud hut eating sustainable algae cakes and going to bed at sundown you should accept the fact that for a modern society to function is needs cheap energy - and your current choices to meet the demand are fossil and nuclear (nothing else produces enough cheap energy). We're addicted to energy, once you accept that then you get some perspective on whether the "oil executives" are helping or hurting modern society. Sure, don't let them polute without being accountable - but the demand for energy comes from you and me. They are simply satifying that demand.

Actually, the problem is nuclear fission in the Earth's core that keeps rock liquid and in convective motion (AFAIK).

41 megapixels? 41 megapixels of blurry, grainy crap with heavy chromatic aberration. Even most DSLR lenses don't provide the optical resolution to make a 41MP sensor valuable, not unless you step up to the top-end lenses which tend to be very large and heavy -- because barring some revolutionary new ideas in optics, that's what it takes to make a lens with that much optical resolution.

The only thing you'll get out of this 41 MP sensor that you wouldn't get out of an 8 MP, or even smaller, is bigger files.