306 VS 232 electoral votes... This was a Mandate by the people to stop run away liberal ideals.

I dont subscribe to weird oriental religions which presume being born is a lottery that possibly includes trees and butterflies.

Every person is born to a set of parents into a particular time and place and socio-economic position. That is what defines who you are. You cant say "if I was born black" because that would not be you.

That is not luck, that is your starting line. You race from there, that is where YOU start rolling the dice and having good or bad luck.

You may consider yourself lucky to be who you are and where you are, indeed you may feel some first world shame for being so fortunate, but that is surely superfluous, if you have too much you can offer to help other people.

Humans (unlike newts) need preparation, after you are born you need to practice for many years before you can be let out into the wilderness of modern civilization with any hope of surviving, let alone passing tests.

You remind me of my son, he spent his childhood reading encyclopedias and now he is surprised that he knows everything and other people dont. It came easy to him.

I did not have to work hard most of the time, am doing fine, got most of what I have because I was lucky, but I sure had a lot of opportunities run away from me because I wasnt prepared for them. Also got burned by a lot of things I should have been prepared for.

Waiting for luck is good only if you run out of options to do something.

Likely not.

Wait.
You're saying there's video of him being chased from his gun toting friends by one guy with a pistol? For blocks? And none of his friends helped him at all? That might change my mind completely....but only if they essentially dragged him away, not if he followed along arguing, and if they physically forced him away from his friends, why didn't his friends try to help?

Again, I'll need some evidence of the pepper spray to believe it, because the videos of him running he wasn't acting like a person who had been pepper sprayed, not that it would excuse killing someone else, and I'm assuming the spray came after the first homicide.

(Edit: if the pepper spraying happened, and happened before he shot, then he has zero excuses for any of them. He couldn't see, so had no idea what was happening around him, who threw what, what was thrown, or who he was shooting. You can't see after being pepper sprayed. That makes every shot fired attempted murder of any random person in the area, not self defense. To be self defense, you must know who and what you're defending yourself from. If he was sprayed, he couldn't possibly know, nor could he properly aim.)

A plastic bag mistaken for a Molotov? Not by any American kid, all boys over 7 know what a Molotov looks like from movies and video games, they don't resemble empty plastic bags.

I think you're being biased. I may be too. I'm not excusing any threatening acts by protesters before he killed one, but do excuse any acts committed trying to apprehend him afterwards. (Edit: anything they did at that point would be real self defense, not just in their own minds.)

I can't find any way to excuse him, from going armed looking for trouble to leaving his group where he felt safe to mistaking a harmless object for a deadly one and killing someone out of fear to running away armed to shooting at his pursuers to not reporting it, every act indicates intentional murder and an attempt to escape. He might have had a reason, he may have even feared for his life, but he had no real reason, put himself in the situation that scared him, and opened fire for no GOOD reason.
Children often do things for bad reasons, that's one reason they shouldn't be let loose with firearms unaccompanied, especially not in high stress events like this.
It's not that he had no reason, it's that his reasoning was flawed on all points. He had no legitimate reason, and no legitimate excuse.

Btw, in case you don't recall, I'm not anti gun at all. I am anti armed groups traveling the country intent on killing unarmed people they disagree with, even if those people are being mean and scary, even if they're stealing. If they're committing arson, well maybe, that can be mass murder.

If you find a still live version of him being chased by armed protesters away from his friends, or threatened, I would be interested in seeing them. I find it impossible to envision. It's not that I'm not open to new info, it's only that I've seen none that excuse his killings.

(Edit: I'm looking at it like this....If a 17 year old kid wants to do extreme mountain climbing with little to no training, gets on the mountain and gets panicked and, thinking it will make him safer to have two ropes disconnects his partner's harness and they die, he had a reason, but not a legitimate reason, and not an excuse. This kid wanted to do extreme policing totally untrained, he panicked, people died because of his panicked actions. It's really that simple to me.)

Astonishingly, it looked to me like the cameraman was running away after the explosion.

43 wasted minutes with the critical 10 seconds that included the officer shooting a man who was running away in the back twice, also hitting an uninvolved car with 3 passengers because he didn't bother to see what was behind his target, kicking him as he lay bleeding to death, and refusing to render timely aid, instead standing on his body for at least 2 minutes watching him bleed out.
Cop is now facing felony murder charges among multiple other charges.

Would have been laid by a fleet's float planes or limited basic carrier aircraft (like---very basic, pre WW II) to mask your own ships under scenarios such as 1) A turn away from an enemy fleet that had concentrated its salvoed big gun fire successfully against you, perhaps by crossing your "T" (1/2 your guns agains all of his--run away!) or 2) to mask the approach of your surface torpedo carriers, the destroyers and destroyer escorts, to close as fast as possible on the enemy's battle line before popping through the curtain and firing some of their torpedoes before popping back into cover and moving to another location and then firing more torpedoes (torpedoes were the ship killers of the small ships of the fleet and the only thing battleships had to fear from destroyers and destroyer escorts/torpedo boats)

Saskatchewan, so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days.

My instinct says Run, run away.... as far as you can....

..and his pants fell down as he was running away.

Why not run away sideway?

*quality

As someone who watches a LOT of kid's movies with my daughter, I notice an alarming regularity of torture in children's media.

You like Pixar movies, right? Pick a Pixar film, ALL of them have a torture scene. It's bizarre.

It's late, so I'll be succinct about these, but let's define torture as follows:
Torture - noun - the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological suffering on someone by another as a punishment or in order to fulfill some desire of the torturer or force some action from the victim

Fair?

This is a short list I can think of off the top of my head

Toy Story
Sid tortures Woody "Where are your rebel friends NOW?" as he burns his forehead

Toy Story 2
Stinky Pete tortures Woody "You can go to Japan together or in pieces. Now GET IN THE BOX!"

Toy Story 3
Buzz gets put in the "time-out chair" with a burlap bag put over his head and is forced to turn on his friends

Monster's Inc.
Mike is put in the "scream extractor" and is interrogated "Where's the kid?" as the extractor inches towards his face.

Wreck it Ralph
Ralph asks "What's going on in this candy coated Heart of Darkness?" Sour Bill tries to run away but Ralph picks him up and threatens to lick him. "I'll take it to my grave" "Fair enough" and Ralph pops Sour Bill in his mouth "Had enough?" "OKAY OKAY I'LL TALK!"

Cars 2
The green-gasoline in his tank, the spy car is put in front of the radiation shooting camera and is interrogated about who the other spy is and who has the information about the green gas he recovered that could unravel their plan to get revenge for being discriminated against for being "lemons." His engine explodes (he's killed?) in spite of giving up the information.

The Incredibles
Mr. Incredible is restrained via some black goop and asked about his family's whereabouts on the island.

Finding Nemo
Near the end of the film when Dory finds Nemo but Marlin has wandered off thinking Nemo was dead, they need to know which way Marlin went and come across the little crabs sitting on the pipe "heyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyy" "Yeah I saw where he went, but I'm not telling you, and there's no way you're gonna make me." Dory lifts him up and threatens to feed him to the seagulls sitting on a small rock until he starts screaming "OKAY ILL TALK ILL TALK HE WENT TO THE FISHING GROUNDS!!!"

I could go on, but I hope to make this simple point:
These films do NOT have to include a torture scene. It's simply odd to me that it appears so often, instilling the idea early on that torture works for getting information or cooperation out of people.

Finally, I point to one of many pieces of research on the matter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325643/

When you have neither speed nor maneuverability, it's your own durability that is in question, not the opponents durability.

It took the capture of the Akutan zero, its repair, and U.S. flight testing, to work out countermeasures to the zero.

The countermeasures were basically :
- One surprise diving attack and run away with momentum, or just don't fight them.
- Else bait your pursuer into a head-on pass with an ally (Thatch weave) (which, is still a bad position, only it's bad for everyone.)

Zero had 20mm cannons. The F4F had .50's. The F4F did not out gun the zero. 20mms only need a couple rounds to down a plane.

Durability became a factor later in the war, after the U.S. brought in better planes, like the F4U, F6F, Mustang, etc... while the zero stagnated in near-original form, and Japan could not make planes like the N1K in meaningful quanitties, or even provide quality fuel for planes like the Ki84 to use full power.

History is history. We screwed up at the start of WW2. Hubris/pride/confidence made us dismiss technologies that came around to bite us in the ass hard, and cost a lot of lives.




Best rockets since the 1960's? Because it had the biggest rocket?
What about reliability, consistency, dependability.
If I had to put my own life on the line and go to space, and I had a choice, I would pick a Russian rocket.

-scheherazade

Well, I guess we can flip it around then and see if it's still funny.

Imagine the same situation with a skinny young adult woman sitting there with her legs spread open. Nervously laughing and obviously doesn't want to be violated by the screwlike device. But she stays there because this is her job and allows the activity to complete until it is too painful and she jumps up and runs away while everyone is laughing.

Hmm.. not funny, even if they are being paid for it. Financial coercion to do these types of degrading acts isn't right but it's probably legal. So I guess you can legally laugh.