There were some half-joking bitter recriminations that I rigged the climatic set-piece encounter to kill them off so I wouldn't have to keep writing the campaign, but they were the ones who decided to take on the full might of Savage Nation and ignore the two escape routes available to them and go down swinging.
Nevertheless, my sleep was ruined by nightmares of gloom, doom, and DM inadequacy.
Well, I could tell you how awesome it was when I had Brother Panjeer in a prison cell and was simultaneously ripping off Darkness at Noon (tap-tap-tap: make a Linguistics check), The Man in the Iron Mask ("I am the King of Galt"), and Lost (The female half-orc turnkey brings you a toasted peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off and a toothpick) at the same time, but what's the point?
The whole party: Pieter Smith, Sheaogorath, Kormackr Odgenson, Dalscata Took, Brother Panjeer and newcomers Ausk Daggertongue and Roseanne Durutti were all killed in a Prison Block Rumble with Savage Nation. They even killed poor Alonzo the Reactionary Teamster and his poor burro, Rociante.
Given that the United States' annual meat consumption is upwards of 83 billion pounds, I think the country would somehow manage to weather that particular loss. That donated, hunted meat barely accounts for three one-thousandths of one percent (0.003%) of what we eat each year.
Given that that article was talking about hunted game that was given away, do you have any idea "how much of the United States' annual meat consumption is derived from animal products shot and killed by hunters"? I admitted I don't, do you?
I already said I doubt much of it was bagged with AR-15s. Do you think that dismissing the concerns of the (mainly white, mainly rural) population that does supplement it's diet with hunting, in the middle of a 5-year-and-counting recession, is really a great gun control tactic?
I mean, I think it's great. I think it will help keep the rural, white folk mad at gun controllers as elitist, petty-bourgeois yuppie douchebags and it'll make it less likely that Congress will ever pass any gun control legislation. Hopefully long enough for us to use our AR-15s to overthrow capitalism.
I do know that after my father was laid off in the nineties, he often supplemented the bounties of our table with game, and I knew his fellow members of the local Fish and Game association to know that other members of my community did so as well.
And while I doubt that many of them were shot AR-15s, in the middle of a many-year recession, do you really want to come off looking like a yuppie douchebag and add class snobbery to your list of gun control arguments?
-this in spite of the fact that Frenchmen marveled how a tiny contingent of British soldiers could control a large mob, so unused were British civilians to the handling of guns."
Say the French? of ALL people...
Poor Frenchies...they need bailing out in two World Wars and everybody forgets that they kicked Eurotrash ass for nigh on a millennium.
As for their 1848, which has gotten short shrift both in this thread and in the "History Is Cool" thread, from Wikipedia:
"Between 23 June and 26 June 1848, this battle between the working class and Cavaignac came to be known as the "June Days Uprising." Cavaignac's forces started out on 23 June 1848 with an army composed of from 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers of the Paris garrison of the French Army.[24] Cavaignac began a systematic assault against the revolutionary Parisian citizenry, targeting the blockaded areas of the city.[25] However, he was not able to break the stiff opposition put up by the armed workers on the barricades on 23 June 1848. Accordingly, Cavaignac's forces were reinforced with another 20,000–25,000 soldiers from the mobile guard, some additional 60,000 to 80,000 from the national guard.[26] Even with this force of 120,000 to 125,000 soldiers, Cavaignac still required two days to complete the suppression of the working-class uprising.
In February 1848, the workers and petite bourgeoisie had fought together, but now, in June 1848, the lines were drawn differently. The working classes had been abandoned by the bourgeois politicians who founded the provisional government. This would prove fatal to the Second Republic, which, without the support of the working classes, could not continue. Although the governmental regime of the Second Republic continued to survive until December 1852, the generous, idealistic Republic to which the February Days had given birth, ended with the suppression of the "June Days."[1]"
The people's flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold/Their heart's blood dyed its every fold
Huh. I didn't realize that James Risen and James Rosen were different people.
I also didn't realize that James Risen was the co-author of an entirely off-topic and quite good book that, I thought, did a lot to explain the rise of the far right in this country.
Completely off-topic, though. Just giving a shout-out to an excellent book, not looking for a derail.
EDIT: Can't help but quote this line from the lone bad review it gets on Good Reads:
"I did not like this book and would not recomend it to anyone that does not like facts for a whole book this book is not a quick read at 380 pages of facts after facts after facts."
"During the days of 1848 England stood apart, unshaken, apparently unshakable. Her reformers were already in power, and though the radical Chartists caused some propertied spines to shiver, no one ventured to forbid their English right to speak their minds. The nearest thing to a national guard in Britain was the appointment of 15,000 special constables (including Louis Napoleon) for the day of April 10, 1848, when the Chartists were to present a huge petition to Parliament. On the same day came the nearest thing to a barricade: the clerks of the foreign office blocked up their windows with bound volumes of The Times. The Chartists were allowed to have a meeting but not a parade, but they accepted this limitation meekly. The Duke of Wellington had soldiers ready in case the petitioners should catch revolutionary fever from across the Channel, but he kept his troops hidden so as not to provoke anger--this in spite of the fact that Frenchmen marveled how a tiny contingent of British soldiers could control a large mob, so unused were British civilians to the handling of guns."
Comrade Cardozo, you are remarkably well-informed on "our" affairs and I have a task for you if you dare accept:
You often have interesting articles I haven't seen. Get all of the persecuted whistleblowers under Obama on this thread, then, if you have time, maybe all the ones under Bush, too.
I just had to get it out at least once. And seeing Comrade Longears in a politroll thread got me excited. I'll be quiet for the next 24 hours so the thread doesn't devolve into a wrangle between the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals.
Of course the locals have some agency in this. Some of the locals are the gang-raping, murderous agents of blood-drenched secular dictator Bashar al-Assad. Some of the locals are gang-raping, heart-eating Islamic fundamentalists who would love nothing more to purge the Shi'ites, Alawites, Christians, and the Forces-of-Dialectical-Materialism only know how many other religious and ethnic minorities there are in Syria. And some (most from what I'm reading) of the locals just wish both of these teams of murderous thugs would just stop all this shiznit and disappear.
But then there's American imperialism who is the number one force of war, terrorism, and general evilness in the world today. And American imperialism, along with its older Britishiznoid brothers, have rarely encountered a Middle Eastern crisis that they can't take advantage of.
As for the Arab Spring: Western imperialism might have lost influence in Tuisia (and I'm only conceding here because I know little about what's going on there), but they retained their grip on Egypt and Bahrain, took out Qadaffi and installed some pretty compliant stooges (what the al-Qaedists did afterwards wasn't part of the plan, admittedly), and if you're really ready for some tinfoil hat shiznit, some British writers (Dan Glazebrook in the Guardian? Some dude on CeaseFire? I can't recall) speculated that the wave of radicalized Tuaregs that caused such a ruckus in Mali were actually aimed at Algeria.
The civil war in Syria is terrible, and I fervently hope that the workers there will finally come to their senses and overthrow both sides, but I am totally opposed to American intervention into Syria and will hold a picket sign to that effect when I attend our candidate for Boston City Council's election rally tomorrow. And I don't care if the comrades look at me funny and call me an ultraleft.
Obligatory Slogans
Spoiler:
US Hands Off! Smash US Imperialism through Workers Revolution!
Down with the Mullahs, Sheikhs, Colonels, and Zionists! For a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!
Also, I hope that Lord Dice, Ms. Pippi, all the rest of you dudes and dudettes don't mind if I strive daily to strengthen the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
It doesn't sound to me like an ill thought out plan or the product of delusional thinking to me.
I largely agree. There was some disquieting evidence in the one of the articles above (not the Dave Lindorff one, but the other one in the same post) of HK's extradition of Muslim dudes to Libya for Qaddafi to torture, though, so it is a bit of dice-toss.
But what are you going to do? Revealing the secrets of American imperialism is a tricky business no matter how many precautions you take.
When it turned out that I had misremembered Ocalan's case (I thought he got kidnapped in Italy, but it was in Kenya), I dropped the case I was building of CIA abductions in European democracies.
unfortunately, he broke the law to do what he did, so he probably would have gone to jail. but I doubt the super secret black bag over your head brigade would have shown up if he had both complained through channels and gone to the media. He also really shouldn't have gone to Hong Kong as a first stop-extradition or no, it makes it look like he had secrets to sell to the highest bidder. I also would have noted that a lot of the things being complained about have been legal for years and phrased my complaints differently. I don't think he's a super spy or hero or traitor like I said before, but I'm starting to think he may not be a very rational planner.
I have to wonder, if he had secrets to sell, why would he have gone to the press in the first place? I can't think of any spy in the history of espionage who did that.
Okay so I was watching the Daily Show tonight (my only source for US news) and I see the crazy folks over at Faux are dumping on this guy . . . and when you start sounding like the crazies at Faux news it's time to walk away from the argument. So no more questioning the source of this leak for me.
Was that the episode with Mavis Staples?
'Cuz I was pleasantly surprised at what song she covered.
I've been re-reading the Edward Snowden and Benghazi threads, and there are so many rude things that I can't bring myself to say (I know, I know, hard to believe) that I'm sure he wouldn't blink an eye at.
I think I've already posted my McPherson story about Soviet historians visiting Gettysburg during the American bicentennial and the Steve Earle song about fighting with Col. Chamberlain, so...I've got nothing new to say.
I'm totally opposed to felony disenfranchisement laws, btw.
I am, too.
Well, I think we've gotten up to five things that we agree on.
1) Racism is bad
2) Sexism is bad
3) Anti-gay bigotry is bad
4) Kinects are probably not being used to spy on people
5) Felony disenfranchisement laws are bad
I read that Kossuth, while in America, refused to ever condemn slavery.
Yeah, there is a reason that I'm not listing these guys as "Heroes of Revolutionary Socialism."
If people recall the "South Slavs are going to burn in the revolutionary holocaust" quotes from the "Concerned About Cultural Marxism" thread, this is where they come from: the Croatian uprising against the Hungarian uprising against the Austrian Empire.
Engels was wrong (both empirically and theoretically), but his impulse was understandable: Baron Jellacic and his Croats were stooges of the Hapsburgs.
Not that subtle. Considering the number of cyber attacks against the US that originate in China and considering this is someone with supposed insider information on the US security I'd say his choice of vacation city is curious at best. Less eyebrows would be raised if he were in Singapore, Korea, or Japan. Better yet, why not Iceland or Ecuador? Places championing freedom of speech and supporting whistle blowers?
Are we supposed to think that he's not there to make some sort of sale of information?
Likely because of the way extradition agreements are worded. It's entirely possible that Iceland and Ecuador are able to extradite to the US anybody for any reason, while Hong Kong doesn't deport people accused of crimes of political nature.
According to the Dave Lindorff article above, Hong Kong provides asylum to Chinese dissidents; don't see why they can't provide asylum to American whistleblowers.
"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
PRISM is hardly the first of these things. Or has everyone already forgotten the uproar over ECHELON at the turn of the century?
It's a quote from The Washington Post. If you will look up six posts from the one quoted, you will see that I made the exact same point.
And I will stress again: PRISM--seen it before; seizing everybody's phone records, a la Verizon--previously unknown to everybody except the dudes on Dixie Diane's Senate Committee (maybe some other gov't dudes).
Yes there are people that do follow the law as best they can and those that do as they damn well please
That's never been my experience, in which there's a very fine line between a "law-abiding citizen" who gets too drunk one night, and a "criminal." I also notice that, again in my experience, the majority of self-labelled "law-abiding citizens" are also generally people who flagrantly speed on the highways and cheat on their taxes, so evidently "the law" isn't as neat a category as people like to present it to be.
Then we all should have no freedoms then by your logic. After all any man is one drink short of a rapist or of choking someone to death and you need a weapon for neither. You might be one drink short of a killer, I prefer to stay clear head and armed.
I'm still interested in hearing a clearly stated answer on this question:
Do you think criminals should have free and clear access to guns?
Citizen Betts, it would appear that it isn't only right-wing conservatives who divide people into "criminals" and "law-abiding citizens." Care to comment?
"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: 'Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.'"
I don't pretend to be a surveillance or technology expert, but from what I've been reading there were two leaks: the PRISM leak (which, indeed, we've known they can do for years) and the Verizon-seize-everybody's-phone-records leak.
Which, I've been reading, is an interpretation of Section 215 (or something) of the FISA Act that nobody in the public and only certain members of the Congress knew about until his leak.
More than 48 million people are currently uninsured. A new study in Health Affairs estimates that even after full ACA implementation up to 31 million of those will still be without coverage.
That starts with the 14 states and counting who have rejected the expansion of Medicaid, the single most important provision in the ACA for expanding healthcare access, (with the help of the Supreme Court ruling gutting the federal sanction for opting out). Others will lose their employer-sponsored coverage due to the ACA taxes on employers, the provision excluding dependent coverage for small businesses that enter the health exchanges, and all of those who will still find insurance far too costly to buy, especially in a recession that has never ended for millions of people.
Political posturing by those on the right opposed to any reform of our broken healthcare system and the bunker mentality of liberal allies of the Obama administration who for their own partisan reasons tend to gloss over serious flaws in the “legacy” law of the Obama years have obscured the reality that our healthcare crisis is far from over and in desperate need of more systemic overhaul.
Studies this year alone show the U.S. ranks last among 17 major industrial nations in life expectancy, but is ahead of the others in first-day infant mortality rates. That will not end with the ACA.
Nurses will continue to make the case for joining the community of nations with a genuinely universal national or single payer healthcare system based on individual patient need, not corporate profits.
"The first thought in Manin's busy mind during that day and the next was that Venice must have a civic guard. An armed people, in Venice as in Vienna, would have a guarantee that they could keep their rights. Part of Manin's alarm came from fear that the proletariat would get out of hand. He expected frankly that they would have to be kept down, and he thought it would better be by Italian arms than by Austrian."
I'm assuming you're speaking of the FISA order, which is concerning. It's unclear how that would apply if translated to Microsoft, since Verizon's order was limited to call metadata (the actual contents of the phone calls were not covered). Email metadata, perhaps? Either way, it's certainly not the sort of thing that would give them access to everything your Kinect has ever seen.
Oh, I agree, the Kinect thing seems kind of silly. It was your claims about Microsoft in general that I was interested in.
To be honest, I'm not even sure what a Kinect is. I still play a PS2 and upgrading my video game system is pretty low on my list of priorities.
