All that means is that Martin said that Zimmerman was following him. Since Martin is no longer alive, we cannot ask him for clarification as to what he meant by that. Perhaps he meant that he saw that Zimmerman was not in his truck any longer and assumed that Zimmerman was still following him. There can be several other reasons that Martin thought Zimmerman was following him that do not necessarily mean that Zimmerman was actually doing so, things we cannot find out by asking questions of Jeantel because she was not actually there.
She did not actually see George Zimmerman follow Trayvon Martin, so she does not know that he did so. She is a thoroughly unreliable witness (not because she lied, but because she had a reason to interpret what she knew in such a manner as to put Zimmerman in the worst possible light). However, she was the prosecution's star witness, the witness most damning of Zimmerman, and even she said that Martin started the confrontation. Yet, you want to blame Zimmerman for confronting Martin!
We do know however that Zimmerman put himself in the situation against the advice of the 911 responder...
No, we do not know that. We know that when the police dispatcher (not 911 responder) told him that they did not need him to follow Martin, George Zimmerman said, "OK". We do not know what he did after that. We, also, know that before the dispatcher told him that they did not need Zimmerman to follow Martin, the dispatcher had asked him for information that he could only ascertain by attempting to follow Martin (it is worth noting that the dispatcher would not necessarily have realized this when s/he asked the questions, but we can know that from looking at things in hindsight).
Jeantel says she heard Martin talking to Zimmerman in the background of the call.
"He said, 'Why are you following me for?'
The only part of what happened that Jeantel knew is what she heard said. What she heard was Trayvon Martin start the conversation, which implies that Martin confronted Zimmerman, not the other way around (which was the point I was making, even Rachel Jeantel, whose testimony was clearly biased in an attempt to find Zimmerman guilty, testified that it was Martin who began the confrontation). So, her testimony that Zimmerman was following Martin at that point is meaningless (how does she know?) It is worth noting that when Jeantel was first interviewed about her phone conversation with Martin she reported that Zimmerman said "What are you talking about?" when Martin asked him why he was following him.
The confrontation between Martin and Zimmerman occurred at a T intersection of two paths. An intersection where someone walking down the cross of the T could not see someone coming up the T itself (and vice versa). The evidence of various testimony suggests that Zimmerman was walking along the cross and Martin was coming up the T itself from the house he had been staying at (Rachel Jeantel testified that he told her he was almost to the house at one point before he turned away from it).
Well, that is a possibility, but unlikely, since the existing evidence suggests that it was Trayvon Martin who initiated the confrontation (so testified Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with him shortly before the confrontation started). In addition, the existing evidence suggests that all George Zimmerman did was attempt to answer the questions which the police dispatcher asked him, after calling to report a suspicious looking young man wondering around the neighborhood in the rain (note: Zimmerman did not know, and apparently had not thought about, the race of the young man until after he was on the phone with the police dispatcher).
What exactly do you postulate that George Zimmerman did to provoke Trayvon Martin to attack him? Please stick to possibilities that are not contradicted by known facts and the limited testimony of eye witnesses.
Effectively the whole case has created a precedent where you can go out armed, provoke someone until they attack you, shoot them, and get away with it.
Except, of course, that there was no evidence that George Zimmerman ever did anything which legitimately provoked Trayvon Martin (that is, Zimmerman did not do anything that would have been an acceptable defense against the assault charge which Trayvon would have faced if the police had arrived before Zimmerman shot him).
Anyone who knows anything about Neighborhood Watch programs knows that the absolute, number 1 rule is do not confront someone that looks suspicious,...
That's wonderful. There is NO evidence that George Zimmerman ever confronted Trayvon Martin and some evidence that suggests that Trayvon Martin confronted George Zimmerman (including the testimony of Rachel Jeantel). So, The first part of your argument is a fail. In addition, there is, again, no evidence that George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin after the dispatcher told him that they did not need him to do that (note: the dispatcher did NOT tell him NOT to follow Martin, only that they did not need him to do that). The dispatcher told him that they did not need him to follow Trayvon Martin after more than once asking Zimmerman for information that ZImmerman would have needed to attempt to follow Martin in order to know (such as "Where is he now?"). So, a second part of your argument is a fail.
Basically, you have reached a conclusion without actually knowing the facts of the case, and then reinterpreted the evidence to support your conclusion.
A couple of things you may not know. Zimmerman's great grandfather was black (50 years ago that would have made Zimmerman black). If the ethnicity of Zimmerman's parents had been reversed (and thus his last name been Mesa rather than Zimmerman) this story would never have made anything other than local news. This story is an example of racial profiling...by the news media, which assumed that George ZImmerman was a white racist of primarily German descent, rather than a Hispanic of mixed descent (including African).
The other important fact is that there is NO evidence that George Zimmerman ever confronted Trayvon Martin and some evidence which suggests that it was Trayvon Martin who confronted George Zimmerman.
As a general rule, when someone refers to one country being in another country's "backyard" they are saying that the two countries are very close to each other (for example, Cuba is sometimes said to be in the U.S.' backyard). Israel and Syria share a border (as a matter of fact, Israel controls territory which used to be part of Syria that Syria wants back), it is not possible for two independent countries to get any closer than that.
This is no different than if we were to support one of the Mexican drug cartels in exterminating another.
There is some evidence that the Obama administration was doing that as well. I read some preliminary stories on that and then the story just dried up. I cannot tell if that happened because there was nothing to the story, or if it disappeared into the black hole that most of the Fast & Furious gun running story went into.
I would say that the biggest problem with public schools in the U.S. is that we keep trying to find a "solution" and apply it to the entire country. Until the people in a local school district are willing to do whatever it takes to teach the children in that school district, no amount of outside intervention will improve the results. It takes very little money to teach kids to read and write, and to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Any school district that is failing to do that should not receive any outside money until such a time as they master those subjects, because if they are failing to teach their kids those subjects, they sure are not going to succeed in teaching them subjects that require more money.
The problem is that there are schools which spend a lot of money on a per student basis that have terrible results and there are schools that spend very little money on a per student basis that have great results. Doesn't that suggest to you that the problem is something OTHER than how much money we spend on schools?
It may be that once we solve the other problems, we will discover that some of our poor performing schools need more money, but at this point all of the evidence suggests that throwing more money at school problems only makes those problems worse.
So, the reason that the Washington, DC schools are bad is because they don't have enough money? Even though they spend more per pupil than schools which are much better? If you are correct, how do those other schools manage on even less money than the Washington, DC school district has?
You know you seem to think that bad public schools are bad, in part, because they do not have enough money. Yet, some of the worst public schools in this country spend more per student than the overwhelming majority of other schools, and some of the very good private schools spend less per student than the overwhelming majority of public schools.
The problem is that a basic life-skills program is easily susceptible to being used to promote one value system or another (I'm not actually sure that it is possible to teach basic life-skills without also teaching a value system) and we as a society do not have a common set of values any longer, if we ever did.
Except that the government had not banned them. The government started the process of banning them. There were still several steps to go before it actually banned them. The company had no customers by the time the government had actually banned them.
No, the company was told to come up with a corrective action plan to deal with the danger which the Consumer Product Safety Board thought that the product posed The CPSB gave them a two week deadline or face a lawsuit. In the meantime, contrary to precedent, the CPSB contacted retailers directly. The CPSB filed lawsuit the morning after the corrective action plan was filed (meaning the CPSB had not had time to review the plan before they submitted the lawsuit).
In response to the lawsuit, the CEO of the company launched a PR campaign to attempt to raise public awareness and political pressure to save his business. When the PR campaign failed, the CEO dissolved the company (since the CPSB had essentially outlawed their only product). Oh, and by the way, my understanding of the legality of the situation is that it was legal to continue selling the Buckyballs until the CPSB got a court ruling in their favor.
The Pope being insulted has nothing to do with whether the earth moves around the sun and everything to do with why Galileo was placed under house arrest. Galileo had made powerful enemies. When those enemies used their power to go after him, Galileo appealed to his friend the Pope. The political circumstances of the time meant that the Pope had to at least mildly pacify Galileo's enemies, so he ordered Galileo to write a pamphlet making the best case for both sides of the scientific dispute. Rather than following those instructions in good faith, Galileo essentially called the Pope a fool for not accepting his position outright. The Pope was offended and declined to continue to extend his protection to Galileo in more than a very minimal fashion.
You are mostly right, except that the dispute that got him into hot water was with a scientist who had the backing of the Jesuits. Galileo thought that he could trump that political connection by appealing to his friend Pope Urban VIII. Unfortunately for Galileo's ego, Pope Urban had to at least make a show of appeasing the Jesuits. He ordered Galileo to publish a book laying out the arguments for both sides. This was actually a compliment on the Pope's part because he was saying that Galileo was capable of doing justice for the arguments of the side he disagreed with. Galileo, however, decided to put the arguments for his opponents position into the mouth of "Simplicio" (which most readily translates as "Fool"). Galileo wrote SImplicio in such a way that everyone knew that Simplicio was Pope Urban VIII, which meant that everyone read the book as Galileo calling the Pope a fool/.
One of those listed as a "victim of McCarthyism" was Albert Einstein, would you care to explain in what way he was a victim of McCarthyism? The linked article merely asserts that he was, but I am unaware of anything which would qualify him as a victim. Another one on that list was Dashiell Hammett who was jailed for contempt of court for failing to provide information regarding fugitives from justice who's bail had been supplied by an organization of which he was the trustee. This "persecution" was not a product of his being a suspected communist. This occurred because the government believed that he had information which might lead to the whereabouts of a fugitive from justice.
I am sorry, but neither of these men were as far as I can tell "victims of McCarthyism". I am not going to bother going through the rest of the list to see if maybe some of the rest were.
Perhaps, but I am not sure that you would be able to obtain a police report based on the sketchy information contained in the article (possibly based on his name).
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Or, maybe it was Martin who got close enough to Zimmerman? There is at least as much evidence supporting that conclusion as there is yours.
All that means is that Martin said that Zimmerman was following him. Since Martin is no longer alive, we cannot ask him for clarification as to what he meant by that. Perhaps he meant that he saw that Zimmerman was not in his truck any longer and assumed that Zimmerman was still following him. There can be several other reasons that Martin thought Zimmerman was following him that do not necessarily mean that Zimmerman was actually doing so, things we cannot find out by asking questions of Jeantel because she was not actually there.
She did not actually see George Zimmerman follow Trayvon Martin, so she does not know that he did so. She is a thoroughly unreliable witness (not because she lied, but because she had a reason to interpret what she knew in such a manner as to put Zimmerman in the worst possible light). However, she was the prosecution's star witness, the witness most damning of Zimmerman, and even she said that Martin started the confrontation. Yet, you want to blame Zimmerman for confronting Martin!
We do know however that Zimmerman put himself in the situation against the advice of the 911 responder...
No, we do not know that. We know that when the police dispatcher (not 911 responder) told him that they did not need him to follow Martin, George Zimmerman said, "OK". We do not know what he did after that. We, also, know that before the dispatcher told him that they did not need Zimmerman to follow Martin, the dispatcher had asked him for information that he could only ascertain by attempting to follow Martin (it is worth noting that the dispatcher would not necessarily have realized this when s/he asked the questions, but we can know that from looking at things in hindsight).
Jeantel says she heard Martin talking to Zimmerman in the background of the call. "He said, 'Why are you following me for?'
The only part of what happened that Jeantel knew is what she heard said. What she heard was Trayvon Martin start the conversation, which implies that Martin confronted Zimmerman, not the other way around (which was the point I was making, even Rachel Jeantel, whose testimony was clearly biased in an attempt to find Zimmerman guilty, testified that it was Martin who began the confrontation). So, her testimony that Zimmerman was following Martin at that point is meaningless (how does she know?) It is worth noting that when Jeantel was first interviewed about her phone conversation with Martin she reported that Zimmerman said "What are you talking about?" when Martin asked him why he was following him.
The confrontation between Martin and Zimmerman occurred at a T intersection of two paths. An intersection where someone walking down the cross of the T could not see someone coming up the T itself (and vice versa). The evidence of various testimony suggests that Zimmerman was walking along the cross and Martin was coming up the T itself from the house he had been staying at (Rachel Jeantel testified that he told her he was almost to the house at one point before he turned away from it).
Well, that is a possibility, but unlikely, since the existing evidence suggests that it was Trayvon Martin who initiated the confrontation (so testified Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with him shortly before the confrontation started). In addition, the existing evidence suggests that all George Zimmerman did was attempt to answer the questions which the police dispatcher asked him, after calling to report a suspicious looking young man wondering around the neighborhood in the rain (note: Zimmerman did not know, and apparently had not thought about, the race of the young man until after he was on the phone with the police dispatcher).
What exactly do you postulate that George Zimmerman did to provoke Trayvon Martin to attack him? Please stick to possibilities that are not contradicted by known facts and the limited testimony of eye witnesses.
Effectively the whole case has created a precedent where you can go out armed, provoke someone until they attack you, shoot them, and get away with it.
Except, of course, that there was no evidence that George Zimmerman ever did anything which legitimately provoked Trayvon Martin (that is, Zimmerman did not do anything that would have been an acceptable defense against the assault charge which Trayvon would have faced if the police had arrived before Zimmerman shot him).
Anyone who knows anything about Neighborhood Watch programs knows that the absolute, number 1 rule is do not confront someone that looks suspicious,...
That's wonderful. There is NO evidence that George Zimmerman ever confronted Trayvon Martin and some evidence that suggests that Trayvon Martin confronted George Zimmerman (including the testimony of Rachel Jeantel). So, The first part of your argument is a fail. In addition, there is, again, no evidence that George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin after the dispatcher told him that they did not need him to do that (note: the dispatcher did NOT tell him NOT to follow Martin, only that they did not need him to do that). The dispatcher told him that they did not need him to follow Trayvon Martin after more than once asking Zimmerman for information that ZImmerman would have needed to attempt to follow Martin in order to know (such as "Where is he now?"). So, a second part of your argument is a fail.
Basically, you have reached a conclusion without actually knowing the facts of the case, and then reinterpreted the evidence to support your conclusion.
A couple of things you may not know. Zimmerman's great grandfather was black (50 years ago that would have made Zimmerman black). If the ethnicity of Zimmerman's parents had been reversed (and thus his last name been Mesa rather than Zimmerman) this story would never have made anything other than local news. This story is an example of racial profiling...by the news media, which assumed that George ZImmerman was a white racist of primarily German descent, rather than a Hispanic of mixed descent (including African).
The other important fact is that there is NO evidence that George Zimmerman ever confronted Trayvon Martin and some evidence which suggests that it was Trayvon Martin who confronted George Zimmerman.
As a general rule, when someone refers to one country being in another country's "backyard" they are saying that the two countries are very close to each other (for example, Cuba is sometimes said to be in the U.S.' backyard). Israel and Syria share a border (as a matter of fact, Israel controls territory which used to be part of Syria that Syria wants back), it is not possible for two independent countries to get any closer than that.
This is no different than if we were to support one of the Mexican drug cartels in exterminating another.
There is some evidence that the Obama administration was doing that as well. I read some preliminary stories on that and then the story just dried up. I cannot tell if that happened because there was nothing to the story, or if it disappeared into the black hole that most of the Fast & Furious gun running story went into.
I believe that he is probably talking about the man actually in charge in Iran, Ali Khamenei.
I would say that the biggest problem with public schools in the U.S. is that we keep trying to find a "solution" and apply it to the entire country. Until the people in a local school district are willing to do whatever it takes to teach the children in that school district, no amount of outside intervention will improve the results. It takes very little money to teach kids to read and write, and to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Any school district that is failing to do that should not receive any outside money until such a time as they master those subjects, because if they are failing to teach their kids those subjects, they sure are not going to succeed in teaching them subjects that require more money.
The problem is that there are schools which spend a lot of money on a per student basis that have terrible results and there are schools that spend very little money on a per student basis that have great results. Doesn't that suggest to you that the problem is something OTHER than how much money we spend on schools?
It may be that once we solve the other problems, we will discover that some of our poor performing schools need more money, but at this point all of the evidence suggests that throwing more money at school problems only makes those problems worse.
So, the reason that the Washington, DC schools are bad is because they don't have enough money? Even though they spend more per pupil than schools which are much better? If you are correct, how do those other schools manage on even less money than the Washington, DC school district has?
You know you seem to think that bad public schools are bad, in part, because they do not have enough money. Yet, some of the worst public schools in this country spend more per student than the overwhelming majority of other schools, and some of the very good private schools spend less per student than the overwhelming majority of public schools.
The problem is that a basic life-skills program is easily susceptible to being used to promote one value system or another (I'm not actually sure that it is possible to teach basic life-skills without also teaching a value system) and we as a society do not have a common set of values any longer, if we ever did.
Excuse me, they were always sold as toys FOR ADULTS.
Except that the government had not banned them. The government started the process of banning them. There were still several steps to go before it actually banned them. The company had no customers by the time the government had actually banned them.
No, the company was told to come up with a corrective action plan to deal with the danger which the Consumer Product Safety Board thought that the product posed The CPSB gave them a two week deadline or face a lawsuit. In the meantime, contrary to precedent, the CPSB contacted retailers directly. The CPSB filed lawsuit the morning after the corrective action plan was filed (meaning the CPSB had not had time to review the plan before they submitted the lawsuit).
In response to the lawsuit, the CEO of the company launched a PR campaign to attempt to raise public awareness and political pressure to save his business. When the PR campaign failed, the CEO dissolved the company (since the CPSB had essentially outlawed their only product). Oh, and by the way, my understanding of the legality of the situation is that it was legal to continue selling the Buckyballs until the CPSB got a court ruling in their favor.
The Pope being insulted has nothing to do with whether the earth moves around the sun and everything to do with why Galileo was placed under house arrest. Galileo had made powerful enemies. When those enemies used their power to go after him, Galileo appealed to his friend the Pope. The political circumstances of the time meant that the Pope had to at least mildly pacify Galileo's enemies, so he ordered Galileo to write a pamphlet making the best case for both sides of the scientific dispute. Rather than following those instructions in good faith, Galileo essentially called the Pope a fool for not accepting his position outright. The Pope was offended and declined to continue to extend his protection to Galileo in more than a very minimal fashion.
You are mostly right, except that the dispute that got him into hot water was with a scientist who had the backing of the Jesuits. Galileo thought that he could trump that political connection by appealing to his friend Pope Urban VIII. Unfortunately for Galileo's ego, Pope Urban had to at least make a show of appeasing the Jesuits. He ordered Galileo to publish a book laying out the arguments for both sides. This was actually a compliment on the Pope's part because he was saying that Galileo was capable of doing justice for the arguments of the side he disagreed with. Galileo, however, decided to put the arguments for his opponents position into the mouth of "Simplicio" (which most readily translates as "Fool"). Galileo wrote SImplicio in such a way that everyone knew that Simplicio was Pope Urban VIII, which meant that everyone read the book as Galileo calling the Pope a fool/.
What does that have to do with the comparison of Muslim extremists to Westboro Baptist Church?
One of those listed as a "victim of McCarthyism" was Albert Einstein, would you care to explain in what way he was a victim of McCarthyism? The linked article merely asserts that he was, but I am unaware of anything which would qualify him as a victim. Another one on that list was Dashiell Hammett who was jailed for contempt of court for failing to provide information regarding fugitives from justice who's bail had been supplied by an organization of which he was the trustee. This "persecution" was not a product of his being a suspected communist. This occurred because the government believed that he had information which might lead to the whereabouts of a fugitive from justice.
I am sorry, but neither of these men were as far as I can tell "victims of McCarthyism". I am not going to bother going through the rest of the list to see if maybe some of the rest were.
Perhaps, but I am not sure that you would be able to obtain a police report based on the sketchy information contained in the article (possibly based on his name).