So I was right! Hm...I will have to look into the movie, though now it has been so long since I have seen the show.

I can't let people recommend Evangelion the show literally goes nowhere. Akira may be confusing and that is because they cut out like half the story, but you kind of feel like something happened. By the end of Evangelion  I was just left wondering what the heck just happened? I am quite sure they ran out of money about 3/4th of the way through it and then decided to just make the end out of flashbacks and non sequiturs. 

In fact this brings up one of my main beefs with Anime they usually end in a whimper but often begin with a bang. I mean its giant robots and aliens fighting and then by the end it's a magical cat singing the blues to a crying metaphor. Maybe it is a Japanese thing because they tend to do this with their movies too, it is not a good thing though. 

The man loves to hear his own voice. His plan is to give a vacuous speech,  get some compelling photos of himself at historic locations and then have it mentioned on the White House web page dedicated to past presidents that like his predecessors Obama too gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gates. 

I have no expectations of the man, I don't know why anyone does at this point. He is the emptiest suit of his generation and that might be saying a lot. 

Death Note is an interesting show. I would say it is really two shows. The first half is an incredibly dark and suspenseful thriller about a serial killer and the man trying to catch him. The second half is a strange redo of the first half in my opinion.  

Lets not get too depressed here, about our fading honor and glory. We may feel like the lesser sons of greater fathers, but this is hardly a new feeling in human history. Despair is a sin. The future stretches out before us filled with boundless opportunities to prove our worth and redeem ourselves. If in the past we were capable of great things in the future we shall be again. 

As this lyric from a bye gone age reminds us..."The sun'll come up tomorrow, so you got hang on till tomorrow." 

Let me know what you think when you finish it. 

All fine mentions. I would like to through my rhetorical support in favor of Twelve Kingdoms and bring up two more Animes I thought brilliant though for different reasons. 

The first is Beserk the series basically covers a small chunk of the mangas, but if you like violent gritty fantasy this is the mother load. The end will leave you speechless and angry that it doesn't continue further. 

The other is Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit  this is another fantasy Anime that I just loved. Not only is it brilliantly animated it has a full and complete story that is neither obscure or obtuse which can be one of the biggest problems with Anime. There is action but none of it is over the top, and the whole show is about characters rather then their need to obtain larger swords and more powerful attacks (another flaw of many fantasy Animes). 

If memory serves me right, I believe the rope seller is still in business while Lenin is not. 

Breakfast for dinner is my absolute favorite dinner, maybe followed closely by desert for dinner. You are not alone my friend. 

What if one side is winning.  The way to guarantee that both loose is to make sure that neither wins. At the moment the Rebels are loosing so we need to prop them up. If you want to be really cold about it our goal can be to keep Syria in civil war until all its civilian population is dead or in refugee camps in Turkey or Jordan. Then we can carpet bomb the rest knowing we are only hitting fighters. 

I just don't see how we don't respond to the Crossing of our Red Line? I also don't see how letting Assad win this war really helps us any more than getting involved. 

The military must always be answerable in all it does to the civilian government. The military is not a branch of the government it does not deserve anymore autonomy than the Postal Service or NASA. It is bad form and policy for the civilian government to try to micromanage any institution, but it isn't doing anything extraordinary with the military here. 

Excellent! 

And so concludes another successful Ricochet conversation. 

Oh I don't doubt that Trayvon could act aggressively, or that he beat Zimmerman up. The two scenarios I see for what happened are... they started a fight, Trayvon won and then he either was going to continue it or he thought Zimmerman had enough and ended it. In option one Zimmerman can be said to have have really been in danger in the second option Zimmerman is a coward that shot a kid who beat him up in revenge.

I think the prosecution has a hard case to make without other witnesses, or some really good physical evidence. 

I also think there is common ground between us on the fact that the media was salivating about reporting a hate crime that they were tripping over themselves to make Zimmerman in to a Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK. So I won't argue that the media isn't a bunch of low life jackals.  Or, that the racemongers aren't primed to capitalize on a innocent verdict.

I just think we shouldn't let our antipathy to both those groups build up sympathy for Mr. Zimmerman with respect to this trial.  

Ok they may not be orders, but his failure to follow them clearly led to a terrible situation. What I am saying is Mr. Zimmerman was ultimately in the wrong in my opinion. The question is just how in the wrong he was.

I mean for goodness sake this situation should not have ended up with someone dead. Zimmerman was the adult in all of this it was his responsibility not to let things get out of hand. 

What I want to know is just how the fight between the two started. I know we have Zimmerman's version but considering the circumstances I would take his testimony with a huge grain of salt, because he has every reason to skew the telling in his favor. 

And all the talk about how shifty Trayvon might have looked or acted  that day again seems irrelevant to me. His shiftiness merited Zimmerman calling the police, but not directly confronting him. 

ctlaw: Well I haven't followed the story that closely. My what ifs were brought up to point out the idea that just because Zimmerman was injured and trayvon was shot is not sufficient to rule one way or the other in this case. What we need to know is all the details of when and how this whole thing went down. Which will come out in the trial I presume.  It feels to me like the prosecution has a hard case to make given that there are no eye witnesses other than Zimmerman himself. 

Do we know any details about the distance and angle of the shot? Was it only one shot? 

However the murder charge goes to me it still seems like Zimmerman should be held responsible for manslaughter. He was specifically told by the police not to confront Trayvon after he phoned in his report, but clearly the idiot didn't follow directions, and if he had a person wouldn't be dead. That is why I can't really sympathize with Zimmerman here. He shouldn't have been playing supper cop.