Category: Current Events

From Ian:

“The Memorial Day Parade was led off by a drill team firing blanks, and the empty brass was in demand by the children watching, and I saw the team handing them out.”

This is one particular instance where New Jersey is still a bastion of freedom. When this same thing happened a few years ago in Massachusetts, a school bought the hammer down, and fortunately, law enforcement did not, though they could have, since it’s a felony to do what was done here in New Jersey in Massachusetts.

There are plenty of people still out there who have no respect of concern for the freedom they died protecting.

The Wall Street Journal is running an article by Tom Manion, who lost his son in Iraq. It’s well worth a read this Memorial Day. Tom Manion was the GOP candidate who went up against Patrick Murphy in 2008, and unfortunately lost. I think the idea was that he was able to neutralize Murphy’s anti-war position, due to the fact that he had lost his son in Iraq, but in 2008, the was fighting the last election.

Apparently the Taliban are poisoning school girls, because girls aren’t supposed to get an education, or something like that. As someone who was initially supportive of both wars, and still believes it was ultimately the right thing to do, I’m starting to become of the opinion that these folks just aren’t all that interested in joining the modern world. My lack of regret is because it had to be tried. The specter of the Belmont Club’s three conjectures is still haunting.

Rasmussen shows that 40% of the public believe Zimmerman’s shooting Martin was self-defense, versus 24% that think it was murder (WARNING: This link will auto-play an ad, but I couldn’t find a version that did not, but I provide it for reference).

Our opponents bet a lot that this was the horse that was going to help get them back in contention. It’s looking increasingly like this has turned out to be a lame horse.

Following up from my previous post on Marissa Alexander, where I spoke about credibility when you’re making a self-defense claim, we have yet another example of that. Turns out that Trayvon Martin had marijuana in his system when he was shot by George Zimmerman. Generally speaking, pot tends to render most people dangerous only if you’re a bag of Cheetos, but in some people it can drive feelings of paranoia. The family is outraged:

That revelation drew a furious response from Martin’s family.

“The only comment that I have right now is that they’ve killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” Martin’s mom, Sybrina Fulton, said at the time.

I believe we ought to be sympathetic to a mother who has lost a son, but at the same time I also think we need to recognize that grief is a highly effective emotion at shielding sufferers from reality. Sybrina Fulton’s clingers-on were happy to call out the media dogs to destroy George Zimmerman in public, and now lament that facts have come out showing the precious snowflake was not the choir boy he was originally been made out to be. Grieving mothers should be pitied and given sympathy. But they should not form a basis for rational discussion of public policy, and they certainly shouldn’t form the justification for a lynch mob who aims to circumvent the legal system and condemn a man in a court of public opinion before he’s even had a fair trial. Ultimately, I don’t blame Sybrina Fulton for what she’s doing. She’s going through something horrible, regardless of how legitimate Zimmerman’s self-defense claim ultimately turns out to be. But I do blame the media, and the charlatans that have exploited this case. Ultimately they are the ones who have rendered this injustice, both on George Zimmerman, the public, a grieving mother, and the memory of Trayvon Martin.

UPDATE: More detail here, which describes the levels of THC found in Marin in greater detail. If only the media like CNN, those paragons of journalistic integrity, had gone through this much trouble to educate the public on the subtleties of self-defense law. But unfortunately for the charlatans at CNN, that wouldn’t fit the narrative, so now the headline is that clearly the death is unavoidable. Their article above is actually informative, but unfortunately, it is distracted from by their attempt to main the narrative at all costs. CNN has long had no integrity, and I feel for the folks who did the good research on this article, to actually inform us of what the toxicology report actually said.

From ABC News:

A medical report compiled by the family physician of accused Trayvon Martin murderer George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a “closed fracture” of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation.

In addition, apparently Trayvon Martin had injuries to his knuckles. A clean case of self-defense would hinge on who the instigator was, but with this kind of evidence, it’s difficult to see how the prosecution still intends to support second degree murder. Even if Zimmerman was initially the aggressor, the most this would be is manslaughter.

But the angry mob had to be appeased, didn’t it? We should be ashamed of ourselves as a country for believing what the media said about this case, and more importantly the media should be triply ashamed for practically lying the country along the way to major urban riots.

Please excuse the very off topic post, but you all should know by now that I’m a bleeding heart libertarian. If you like the idea of teaching kids how to read so they can actually read and appreciate our founding documents, then literacy should be a concern. It’s not just a hooked on phonics kind of literacy, but teaching kids how to truly understand the stories they read. Reading with Pictures thinks that they can capture the interest and imagination of kids by using comics. Yup, comics.

Right now, Reading with Pictures is running a Kickstarter campaign to support their first graphic textbook. They are a few hundred dollars short, and their campaign ends Thursday. They just met their goal, but they are trying to raise more so they can expand their plans for the organization!

As a 501(c)3, it’s a deductible donation. They also have all sorts of crazy incentives for higher donations. You can get a custom action figure of yourself ($275), become a Revolutionary War-era sketch in your own copy of the textbook ($70), have a kid in your life drawn into a comic as a classmate of the main character ($75), original artwork & commissions (starting at $75), or a hard copy of the textbook ($25).

In a couple of weeks, Venus will once again transit the face of the sun, on June 5th and 6th specifically. The last transit was in 2004, but this won’t happen again in our lifetimes. The next transit will not be until 2117, well into the 22nd century. It would be interesting to observe this, but I am not aware whether it can be observed with ordinary equipment, such as you can make for viewing a solar eclipse. Does anyone know much about how one would observe a phenomena like this absent a very expensive solar telescope?

I think the holiday is now celebrated more in the United States than in Mexico. But that is probably appropriate. The day celebrates the defeat of the French Army against a numerically inferior and more poorly equipped Mexican Army. The geopolitical consequence was to keep Napoleon III out of North America, and also prevented the French intervening on the side of the Confederacy. So it is no small irony that the reason the Union remained intact is thanks to 4,000 Mexicans who never considered, on May 5th, 1862, that they didn’t stand a chance against a French army twice its size.

Nevertheless, the French ultimately prevailed in installing a puppet government in Mexico, but after the end of the American Civil War, the United States was able to provide assistance to the Mexican liberals to expel the puppet government, thus ending monarchy in Mexico. So today is a day you can drink to Union, the eventual end of monarchal rule in Mexico, and a French military defeat. I can drink to that.

Looks like his attorneys have set up a site for news in the George Zimmerman case here. They’ll eventually be accepting donations to his legal defense fund. There were rumors that Zimmerman had raised 200,000 dollars himself, but I don’t know how true those rumors were, of if he can touch those funds at all.