Christopher

Every day you spend in this "paid leave" is a day you retire later.
That is not paid family leave. That is forcing people to hurt themself to spend time with their kid. So it is right up the Republican way of thinking!

Do not shave. Because it is already on teh very stubby side
So, does that count as 3 for you, Death Tribble?

The Ice Queen
 
In a past age, Elves were a very common sight on earth. They had numerous tribes or subspecies. One of them were teh "Frostheart Clan". They had adapted their magic and body entirely to thriving at the poles. So complete was their transformation, that really strong feelings of love can literally thaw their heart - wich can be deadly over long time. As such they tended towards being emotionally stunted. Eventually they just turned their back on the world quite literally - they shifted their entire Kingdom/City out of normal spacetime.
 
A year ago they reappeared, much to the worlds and their own dislike. Apparently they needed the "present and future cold" of the north to maintain their shifting spell. And as can be expected, humans accelerating Climate Change disrupted their ability to just "stay outside". While the presence of the City in normal space has a cooling effect, at present rate it oculd take centuries to resore enough cold and ice to the north. It would go a lot faster if humanity just stopped poluting.
Only few have thus far left the Frostheart Clan encalve, and most of them have been villians trying to end humanity - without official sanction by the King and Queen. The Ice Queen is a exception to that in more then one way:
 
Back when the shifting spell began weakening, the then Queen made a few "excursions" onto earth, fell in love and got pregnant. Unforunately the love for the childs father and the child melted her heart, killing her shortly after she had given birth.
While that gave her de-jure the strongest claim to the throne, a lot of people did not like the prospect of being ruled by a "halfblood". So her halfbrother - sired by the previous king - tried to kill her. She escaped into the world.
 
Powers and Personality:
While she does not have the weakness of Forstheart elves regarding strong emotions, she is not exactly the most outgoing personality. This is not a unexpected result from being raised among the Frostheart elves.
One of the few emotions she is clear on is her hatred for her father: In her mind it was him that killed her mother, both directly and indirectly through her.
While she could be the ideal "bridge between the worlds" Arthur Curry style, she is currently more intersted in getting back on her throne.
 
She inehrited her mothers strong ice magic skills. While she lacks the full resistance to cold of a trueblood - forcing her to wear full body thermal clothing - she is none the less a powerfull user of the frozen way. Aside from the usual Elemental Blaster abilities, she has some odder ability: The abiltiy to put people into a perfect statis,s similar to freezing time.
Her skin emits a level of cold that is painfull for all normal humans. While she claims she can not control it, some theories are that it is her way of keeping "distance" between herself and the humans. As truebloods are nearly immune to cold, it is unclear if she always had this ability. Or it is only a psychological defense to keep humans away.
She never has to use blunt force agaisnt barriers, as she has a reare skill - true negation. This ability can negate all forms of energy. And once it ran out of energy to be negated, it will convert mater into energy to convert it as well. It is a cold that can eat any energy and even mater.

The Ice Queen
 
In a past age, Elves were a very common sight on earth. They had numerous tribes or subspecies. One of them were teh "Frostheart Clan". They had adapted their magic and body entirely to thriving at the poles. So complete was their transformation, that really strong feelings of love can literally thaw their heart - wich can be deadly over long time. As such they tended towards being emotionally stunted. Eventually they just turned their back on the world quite literally - they shifted their entire Kingdom/City out of normal spacetime.
 
A year ago they reappeared, much to the worlds and their own dislike. Apparently they needed the "present and future cold" of the north to maintain their shifting spell. And as can be expected, humans accelerating Climate Change disrupted their ability to just "stay outside". While the presence of the City in normal space has a cooling effect, at present rate it oculd take centuries to resore enough cold and ice to the north. It would go a lot faster if humanity just stopped poluting.
Only few have thus far left the Frostheart Clan encalve, and most of them have been villians trying to end humanity - without official sanction by the King and Queen. The Ice Queen is a exception to that in more then one way:
 
Back when the shifting spell began weakening, the then Queen made a few "excursions" onto earth, fell in love and got pregnant. Unforunately the love for the childs father and the child melted her heart, killing her shortly after she had given birth.
While that gave her de-jure the strongest claim to the throne, a lot of people did not like the prospect of being ruled by a "halfblood". So her halfbrother - sired by the previous king - tried to kill her. She escaped into the world.
 
Powers and Personality:
While she does not have the weakness of Forstheart elves regarding strong emotions, she is not exactly the most outgoing personality. This is not a unexpected result from being raised among the Frostheart elves.
One of the few emotions she is clear on is her hatred for her father: In her mind it was him that killed her mother, both directly and indirectly through her.
While she could be the ideal "bridge between the worlds" Arthur Curry style, she is currently more intersted in getting back on her throne.
 
She inehrited her mothers strong ice magic skills. While she lacks the full resistance to cold of a trueblood - forcing her to wear full body thermal clothing - she is none the less a powerfull user of the frozen way. Aside from the usual Elemental Blaster abilities, she has some odder ability: The abiltiy to put people into a perfect statis,s similar to freezing time.
Her skin emits a level of cold that is painfull for all normal humans. While she claims she can not control it, some theories are that it is her way of keeping "distance" between herself and the humans. As truebloods are nearly immune to cold, it is unclear if she always had this ability. Or it is only a psychological defense to keep humans away.
She never has to use blunt force agaisnt barriers, as she has a reare skill - true negation. This ability can negate all forms of energy. And once it ran out of energy to be negated, it will convert mater into energy to convert it as well. It is a cold that can eat any energy and even mater.

Yes, but you see, like public masturbation, it is gross either way but we prefer our congressmen conduct their business under the table rather than atop the linguini.

Superb Owls!
 

"Trump has his own money" they said.
"He does not need to follow the dictates of his donors" they said.
*Bleep*ing morons they were.

Feline Bureau of Investigation ?

The Minos V drones actually provide a good example why not: Those people were literally wiped out by their own autonomous drones because some moron set them loose on their planet. It was too effective, too autonomous for their own good.
 
In TOS they tried their hand at having a computer run a Constituion class ship. It was nearly unbeatable allright. As it started klling federation ships.

Those tax cuts are not fundable without drastic cuts to defense or confiscating the money we've all paid into Social Security.  In fact, the deficit is now so massive that the debt ceiling will have to be raised again in March, months ahead of schedule.  Expect a lot of discussion about Social Security and Medicare around then.
 
Remember, this has been the plan all along: Massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations, use the resulting fiscal crisis to justify cuts to SS and Medicare, and defund the government so that it can no longer interfere with the rich and corporations.  We are on step two.

Seriosuly, there is a Wikipedia article on the mater. Just read up aleady:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Russia_dossier#History
 
And I suddenly wonder: Why would a Conservative Website hire a Democratic Opposition Reserach (Fusion GPS) agency?
Unless of coruse the whole "partisan" claims are just the usual BS with no proof.
 
Of course even the Website that INITIATED THAT DOSSIER has memory problems with those facts:
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/fbi-used-dossier-funded-clinton-election-campaign-spy-trump-adviser/

1. A lot of people wanted. That does not make it a conspiracy.
2. Wait, so the Information was first hand? I always thought it was 3rd hand? When was it upgraded that massively in credibility?
3. Last I heard they tried to claim "Fusion GPS is partisan" with 0 effect.
4. Source please
5. Okay. So it was based on 1st Hand information. Isn't that how it should always work?
6. Concealed from who? When was he demoted?
7. Who is Bruce Ohr anyway? "Official" includes a lot of jobs.

May or may not be true. But DJT has demonstrated repeatedly that he doesn't grasp how a republican democracy works, nor why it works that way. He's attempting to apply the approaches he learned and employs in business to politics, not recognizing they're different games with different rules. His pattern when he perceives himself being attacked is to vigorously retaliate, but when the President of the United States does that he can't help but come across as the ultimate bully. He's accustomed to people in inferior positions answering to him, but their loyalty is supposed to be to the Constitution above the President. I also don't think Trump's used to being accountable to anyone, let alone three hundred and fifty million American citizens.

It reminded me of this scene from Star Trek: Enterprise.
 

Can't argue with that.
 
Towards the end of the article it lists "Best Country for Women: Denmark".  I really could use some more context before I spend money on a plane ticket.

(from the In Other News thread)
 
 
I personally lay much of the blame with Bush 43, who singlehandedly got the North Koreans to withdraw from the NPT with his stunning Axis of Evil™ speech.  But most of the people here are not amused by the guy who's doing his level best to goad Jong Un into perfecting an ICBM program that is guaranteed to target Pearl Harbor.
 
 
 
We have these things called primaries; you may have heard of them.  Also, think really hard about why Hawaii might lean Democratic when we had a Republican governor only eight years ago.
 
 
 
We're much more interested in solving the problem and making sure it doesn't happen again.  Make no mistake, my neighbors are rightfully pissed off and it may well come to firing someone in order to send a message.  But we're not dumb enough to can the guy who made a mouse typo and expect that to solve anything.  That's what happens in the private sector when the CEO needs a scapegoat to deflect criticism.  This is clearly a project management and software development failure, that we will learn more about in the coming days.

Golden Age Champions
 
Zoltan the Magnificent: I didn't know there were rules to car bowling.

Pathfinder : Streets of Magnimar - Tea and Biscuits and Organised Crime
Gillert: So we're sending the lawyer, the murderer and the straight guy.
GM: I'm sorry, I didn't realise we were playing Will and Grace - Magnimar.
Ys: When you live as long as an elf, you have to assume most of them are bi, sooner or later.
GM: Most elf parents just assume their kid is bi as soon as soon as they reach puberty.
Gillert: They get 'artistic leanings'

After getting plague masks, cloaks, and extra lamp oil, we re-enter the sewers to hunt down and exterminate the remaining were-rats. Somebody has set up an Alarm spell at the entrance we used last time. Gillert gets to work disabling the trap.

Ys: Zin might be the trapsmith, but Gillert is a useful back-up, and he's useful in other circumstances as well.
Harshal: Zin is useful in other circumstances as well. Such as if we need someone to crawl under the table and find something we dropped.
Gillert: Or for getting past traps set at human-standard neck height.
Harshal: 'The Penitent Man And Kobolds Will Pass'

We sneak up to where we fought Moonbreaker and Silversniffer before - Ys spots a faint light source ahead, since she has low-light vision and the rest of us need a candle-lamp to see where we're going. Whoever is down here with us is doing an inch-by-inch search of the chamber. And she's got five orange-and-white floofy tails. And her lightsource is a diminutive figure with mothwings and long thin ears.

Ys: I gesture back to the others to stay where they are, completely forgetting they can't see me.

The Flying Fox and her sprite turn invisible the moment Ys gets within 40 feet.

Ys: Hey, you're pretty good.

Harshal: So, who was it?
Ys: Our friendly neighborhood vigilante.
Gillert: .... Spiderman?

Gillert: What was she looking for?
Ys: No idea.
Harshal: Perhaps she and the were-rats are in cahoots.
Ys: Could be - where's Cahoots?
Harshal: Well, I was hoping I'd hear a small gasp of indignation at that point.
GM: Sorry, small thing called Unshakeable.
Ys: Well, let's find the lair - check the room for secret doors.
The Invisible Flying Fox: I didn't think of that.
Ys: Hello. It's easier to talk to somebody if everybody is visible.
Invisible Flying Fox: Easier, yes.
Gillert: Maybe I should throw some white powder around...
Invisible Flying Fox: You could - how would you like to be forcefed Shardgel?

The Flying Fox reappears, and grins intimidatingly at Gillert, showing all her sharp teeth.

The Flying Fox: A little bird told me the rats got hit.
Harshal: We heard the same thing.
The Flying Fox: What's you're interest in them?
Ys: Making sure they're all dealt with.
The Flying Fox: So it was you that did the hit.
Ys: That would be a safe assumption.
The Flying Fox: I heard Moonbreaker got taken down.
Ys: Would that be the big one?
The Flying Fox: Aw. And I'd already bought one of these. *tosses a grenade from hand to hand*
Ys: Wish I'd thought of that.
Gillert: I did.
Ys: YOU did.

The Flying Fox: They were searching for something. Pretty desperately, by the looks of things.
Harshal OoC: I bet it's the journal.
GM: Was that in-character?
Harshal OoC: No.
Gillert: Don't give the bad guys information.
GM: You ARE the bad guys!
Gillert: You can be evil and a good guy. It's called being an anti-hero.
GM: That's not how this works!

The Flying Fox: So why are you interested in the were-rats anyway?
Ys: Purely mercenary.
The Flying Fox: Someone paid you? Interesting.... and disappointing.
Harshal: People have to eat.
The Flying Fox: I guess that makes this a race *throws the grenade to the floor, where it explodes into entangling Shardgel foam, and runs off back the way we came*
Ys: I'm not even sure what we're racing after.
The Flying Fox: Gives me the advantage then!

We find no sign of where the were-rats have fled to. It might well be there, we're just crap at finding it. So we return to the surface to hunt down rumours instead, which we are MUCH better at. And even better, we know that firebrand-cum-investigative journalist at Parvo Crispin's newspaper, who takes shorthand notes of every bit of gossip she overhears.

Harshal also gets word that a relative from the Spire Clan is coming to Magnimar. This is probably going to be an issue.

Ys: Who is this person and why should I let him live?
Harshal: A relative. And the Clan already know he'll be staying with me.
Ys: That's not a reason to let him live.
GM: The last time Harshal had any relatives in town you killed them.
Gillert: YS killed them.
GM: And you were an accessory.
Gillert: I'm still trying to convince myself I had nothing to do with the actual stabbing.
GM: There's a reason it's called an adventuring party - it's because you're party to all the murder-hobo shenanigans.

Anyway, the rumours suggest the were-rats have had some kind of ideological split, and are involved in a three-way internal feud. Time to let the Nightscales know. And have another go at decoding that journal.

Harshal: Maybe we should keep killing were-rats until we find one that looks important and torture them for information about the journal. But if we kill them all the were-rat problem goes away anyway.

Gillert: You want to come, Ys?
Ys: No.
Harshal: I, however, am of a profession used to negotiations. And Gillert looks like a gullible idiot and will put them off their guard.
Gillert: I AM a gullible idiot - I keep hanging around with you lot.
Harshal: Exactly.

Harshal: Refreshments? You'll be pleased to know that after the removal of certain key individuals, our vermin problem has fractured into internal feuding.
Mr White: I'm sure that there are people within my organisation that will be concerned that you could engineer this. I am not one of those people. I care only about results.
Harshal: Good to know. However, there is additional information I thought you should be aware of. That vigilante has taking an interest.
Mr White: I see. That IS unfortunate.
Harshal: Apparently something about the situation appeals to her competitive spirit. I have no idea what that's about.
Mr White: Hmm. Still, since you have fulfilled your part of the bargain, it's time for us to fulfill ours.

Mr White's silent associate Mr Black reaches into a bag of holding and pulls out a sack.

Harshal: Naturally I won't insult our guests by checking the contents now. We're professionals, after all. If they stiffed us everybody will find out later anyway. More tea?
Mr White: Thankyou.
Gillert: Did you bring the pink biscuits?.... Ys hasn't been near these, has she?

The payment is fireproof cloth armour and an alchemical flamethrower.

Harshal: Combine that with that magical doorknocker we bought earlier and we can run the best arson scam in Magnimar.
 

Meanwhile, Trump asked for the power to purge the government of non-loyalists.
 
 
 

(I can not tell if that Symbol is a B or a R. I will go with B).
 
It was the 1980's and two large Empires were at war. Both professionals and normal citizens were taking a side. It was the Videotape format war!
 
Betram Muscul was a ardent supporter of the Betamax side. And then he found a magical bottle. Unfortunately his knowledge of Genies was from the show "I Dream of Jeanie" and he had missed the Episode where she was asked to act "exactly like the Genies in the stories 1001 Nights" due to the short recording time of the Betamax tapes. Otherwise he might have known better then to utter a wish.
When he asked jokingly to become "the Hero of Betamax", he was not speaking clearly to the genie. Wich gave the genie more then enough room for a ... creative interpretation.
 
And thus Beta Mouse was born. His powers include:
The size of a Betamax Videocasette. Wich is pretty small.
Photographic recall of events, but only as far back as a Betamax Recoring can go. As different tapes with different Speeds and lenghts could last different times, he can memorize things father back with with decreasingly poor image/memory quality.
The ability to stretch as far as a Betamax tape could (half of 254 meters or 127 meters)
Immuntiy to damage from being streched forcefully or being teared in any way.
 
His greatest weakness are of course the dread of every magnetic tape owner:
Strong Magnetic fields.
And being pulled to a long and knotted into a tangle.
 
Despite this less then stellar Origin, he was still a decent hero of his time. And of our time. Because in a element of cruelty, Beta Mouse was given immuntiy to the ravages of time and most forms of death. So he is sitll active, 40 years after the Videotape Format War was a thing. And most people do not even know what a Betamax or VHS Videotape is.

You know, I could never understand that part. I remember all the critics of Hillary Clinton claiming she was in the pocket of big business, and that Donald Trump was immune to that because he has his own money. How do you not recognize that Donald Trump has all that money because he's one of the pockets?  All they did by voting him in was eliminate the middle man.

I had thought I'd weighed in about Pluto before, but I can't find it, so here it goes again.
 
This whole sequence, of finding a new body and calling it a planet, then sheepishly rescinding that label, has happened before.
 
In 1801 the first asteroid was discovered, Ceres, in what we now call the main asteroid belt.  Three more were found over the next ten years in sort of the same part of the Solar System.  Because there were several of them, and they all seemed undersized, they got kicked collectively into a new ghetto bin, "asteroids" or "minor planets".  Definitely judgmental and a bit scandalous, people forgot about this episode.  We now know thousands of asteroids, of course; the relabeling was the correct thing to do.
 
Advance the calendar to about 1930, and replay the tape.  The first object, Pluto, was found by Clyde Tombaugh and hailed as a new planet, though it was rather undersized and in a definitely funny place.  But, because Tombaugh was a truly great astronomer, it was sixty years rather than less than ten before the next examples were found.  Sixty years is close enough to a human lifetime that cultural inertia sets in and people get emotionally invested in lore that they picked up in their youth.
 
A bit of confusing excitement happened in the very late 1970s when Pluto was found to have a satellite (Charon), and there was a series of eclipses in the 1980s which let us get good numbers for the size of Pluto, and damn, it's small.
 
Eventually in the 1990s, improvements in telescope and detector technology meant we started finding lots of these things, these "trans-Neptunian objects", and Pluto isn't even the biggest of them (which Ceres, the first known asteroid, was); it's just the closest one to us, sort of.  Computational techniques and broader study of celestial mechanics gained us some insight about what this sort of object must be, and the ones we have left are a tiny remnant of what was a much larger population of icy bodies sort of the same size as the bigger moons orbiting the (real) planets.  (A few more satellites of Pluto were found with Hubble Space Telescope, upping the ante in the whole affair.)  We probably got our first good look at one of these trans-Neptunian objects in the late 1980s when Voyager passed through the Neptune system and returned images of Triton, which is almost certainly also a Pluto-class body that got captured into orbit rather than being accreted (eaten) or ejected (kicked out of the Solar System entirely) over the last 4.5 billion years or so, which is what happened to the overwhelming majority of that population. The amazing achievement of the New Horizons spacecraft passing through the Pluto system a couple years back got us a good, if limited, look at the one that started the whole hoo-rah.
 
But ... Pluto is just one member of a class of objects too small to qualify as a planet, for the same kind of reasons that Ceres and Vesta and Juno and Pallas are members of a different class of objects too small to qualify as a planet.  There is more to the list of qualifications than just size, but people hung up on this issue tend not to care about that, and not care quite loudly.

Look, we will not get back to 9 Planets:
You eitehr kick out Pluto.
Or you let in 4+ others.
 
You either get 8 or 13+ Planets. 9 Simply does not hold up to current observational Ability any more then the Earth-Centric Solar System did.

It's impossible to keep up.
 
The White House has effectively refused to impose sanctions on Russia in accordance with a law overwhelming passed by Congress last year.  This is literally a Constitutional crisis.  Rep. Nunes and his GOP teammates on the House Intelligence Committee have voted to release a heavily redacted memo that will show that the FBI sought a FISA warrant against members of the Trump campaign, but will conveniently omit the evidence that explains why the FBI sought the warrant. Andrew McCabe was forced out of the FBI for reasons. The GOP, which when presented with evidence of an extramarital affair by a U.S. president, launched a multi-year investigation with a special prosecutor that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, did nothing when it heard about an alleged affair between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, or the front company that was set up for the express purpose of paying her off. Trump has turned the State of the Union address into a fundraiser; donors can pay $35 and up for the privilege of seeing their names on the screen during the speech.  To be clear: Trump is openly using his office for the direct enrichment of his political party. Trump has played three times more golf than any other president at this point in his term. It was revealed that Trump literally ordered the firing of Mueller last year (which, again, constitutes obstruction of justice); Trump's counsel only managed to override this by threatening to quit. Negotiations to stave off the next government shutdown are going nowhere.  
I'm forgetting a whole bunch of stuff, but any one of these by itself is a serious crisis in government.  If I were cynical, I'd suspect that the GOP is counting on a constant drumbeat of outrage to wear out any opposition to its abuses of power.