Joe Walsh

From NYT, lead paragraph:
 
 
This is the end game I've been figuring for a good year.

It’s not lost on them at all, or at least not their lawyers. That’s why it’s technically Fox News “Commentary”. 

Of course. But they won’t. 

Hubby tested negative...for now.

having the compilation CD havaiable has been a really good thing, but not everybody likes PDF, thankfully it didnt take much convincing to get Marc to put the PDF collection on CD
 

I'm sorry, but I can't let remarks like that slide any more. You're looking at the situation as though it will continue to be politics as usual. I respectfully submit that it will not. The Republican Party, at the national and state level, are instituting policies designed to secure the numbers for them despite the will of the people. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Placing their loyalists in key election-deciding offices. If this process isn't halted and reversed, they will have a lock on power regardless of what the real vote is.
 
I also used to think Mitch and other Republicans were just "chumming the waters." I no longer believe that. Books are being banned in schools, books with the actual history of America's past sins, books addressing issues around race and gender, books describing the rise of fascist states. The GOP want Americans ignorant, and thereby manipulable and controllable.
 
There's no surprise in remarks by the likes of Matt Gaetz that "over-educated women" are problematic, or by Mike Pence that American society has to return to "traditional Christian family values." But that's not fringe any more, it's become mainstream Republican talking points. Are we supposed to believe it's all just talk, that there's no intent behind it by the privileged white men doing it? We have legislation up for debate in more than one state right now, that would classify abortion as murder. The mask is morality, but the true face is control of women's lives.
 
Most alarming to me is recent statements from SCOTUS, like this leaked draft ruling that calls the very concept of right to privacy into question, from which many progressive rulings have stemmed: gay marriage, homosexual sex, access to contraception. We also have recent remarks from Justice Clarence Thomas blaming demonstrations by people on the political/social left -- expressions of free speech -- for the growing disillusionment of the American people for their governmental institutions. The classic fascist tactic of "othering" a group without actual power, blaming them for what goes wrong so people won't notice the hand in their pocket and knife at their throat.
 
There's an agenda at work here. There's a goal the Right is working toward, and it isn't the America we all grew up with. It's a fascist, racist, classist semi-theocracy in which a minority of people with the "right" attitudes, background and appearance make decisions for the rest of us, and the rest of us do what we're told or suffer. We've seen country after country go down this same road for a hundred years. The past six years have seen results we all thought "possible but unlikely" actually come to pass, and each has been worse than the last.
 
These people have to be voted out, now. It doesn't matter that Democrats aren't perfect and have fallen short of their promises and potential. They aren't the ones actively trying to subvert democracy and cast the United States back to the 19th Century. They can at least hold the line. If Americans don't vote Democrat, Republicans will do everything they can to hold onto power forever, and every person in one of the vulnerable groups they'll victimize will suffer for it. If the Republican Party is destroyed, another opposition party will arise, just as the Republicans under Lincoln replaced the Whigs. Probably a much healthier one. But not voting because no choice is good, is giving the keys to the one that's actively evil.

Well, as the author of the letter said, "Still worse is the fact that you have executive power at your fingertips that could, at the bare minimum, preserve abortion rights on federal property in every state, and yet you refuse to use it. You could save our lives with the stroke of a pen, but instead you are signing off on exorbitant supplies of weaponry for a war half a world away."
 
Besides, isn't there always a rotating villain? It was Joe Lieberman for a long time. Now it's Joe Manchin. Dems offer endless excuses and then say "Vote for us."
 
50 years of voting "blue no matter who" has gotten us to this point, where we're on the verge of theocratic fascism.
 
Yet Biden does nothing at all. Despite all the pre-election talk of his years in the senate giving him a unique ability to get his agenda passed, he claims helplessness in the face of a party member's intransigence.  Heck, he nominated Manchin's wife for a cushy job.
 
Every opportunity to tie his agenda to must-pass legislation, he's split it off and left it for dead.
 
But even outside of the legislature, Biden could take steps to make things better and improve Dem's chances in the fall. In addition to the steps on abortion mentioned in the quote above, he could forgive at least some student loan debt, as promised during the campaign. But he's refused to do that.
 
People waited in line for hours to give Dems the power they now enjoy. But all the Dems have given in return is an endless stream of excuses.
 
That will surely result in a Republican landslide this fall, and then it's just one more election before we lose everything.

Well, as the author of the letter said, "Still worse is the fact that you have executive power at your fingertips that could, at the bare minimum, preserve abortion rights on federal property in every state, and yet you refuse to use it. You could save our lives with the stroke of a pen, but instead you are signing off on exorbitant supplies of weaponry for a war half a world away."
 
Besides, isn't there always a rotating villain? It was Joe Lieberman for a long time. Now it's Joe Manchin. Dems offer endless excuses and then say "Vote for us."
 
50 years of voting "blue no matter who" has gotten us to this point, where we're on the verge of theocratic fascism.
 
Yet Biden does nothing at all. Despite all the pre-election talk of his years in the senate giving him a unique ability to get his agenda passed, he claims helplessness in the face of a party member's intransigence.  Heck, he nominated Manchin's wife for a cushy job.
 
Every opportunity to tie his agenda to must-pass legislation, he's split it off and left it for dead.
 
But even outside of the legislature, Biden could take steps to make things better and improve Dem's chances in the fall. In addition to the steps on abortion mentioned in the quote above, he could forgive at least some student loan debt, as promised during the campaign. But he's refused to do that.
 
People waited in line for hours to give Dems the power they now enjoy. But all the Dems have given in return is an endless stream of excuses.
 
That will surely result in a Republican landslide this fall, and then it's just one more election before we lose everything.

I wish Biden and the Dem leadership would read and heed this "Dear Joe" open letter to the President:
https://newsletterwithecm.substack.com/p/dear-joe?r=56osa&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
 
An excerpt:

I wish Biden and the Dem leadership would read and heed this "Dear Joe" open letter to the President:
https://newsletterwithecm.substack.com/p/dear-joe?r=56osa&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
 
An excerpt:

I wish Biden and the Dem leadership would read and heed this "Dear Joe" open letter to the President:
https://newsletterwithecm.substack.com/p/dear-joe?r=56osa&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
 
An excerpt:

My mother-in-law has been diagnosed with COVID...
 
...
 
...
 
...
 
...we were just around her during the baptism of my husband's grand-nephew.
 
[BLEEP]
 
(I wore a mask.  No one else in the family did.)

An an index at least as good as the one Stanley A. Mitchell produced in the early 90s!

My order's in, too, and I'm so happy -- I never thought I'd be able to own this melding of my two favorite RPGs, since the Traveller HERO books go for so much on the secondary market!

there was a goof... I had the wrong e-mail address for people to order the books, this was entirely my fault... DO NOT Blame Polaris for this
e-mail him at uspolaris@gmail.com
I had give his old comcast e-mail instead
 

I haven't heard anything new about this in a month or so. Did I miss out?

An an index at least as good as the one Stanley A. Mitchell produced in the early 90s!

So I've started a campaign with my home group that takes players from low-powered near normal Victorian heroes through the Golden Age and on to the Iron age. Power levels increase each time and they can create characters with connections to what has come before or something entirely new. It is something of an exercise in collaborative world-building. To start they created 225/50 heroes with normal characteristic maxima. The setting is London in the late 1880s/early 1890s.
 
Victorian Heroes Everyman Skills - I used the list out of 6e Skills with just a couple of changes.
Home City Knowledge 8-
Native Language Idiomatic w/Literacy
Profession or Trade 11-
Acting 8-
Climbing 8-
Concealment 8-
Conversation 8-
Deduction 8-
Paramedic 8-
Persuasion 8-
Shadowing 8-
Stealth 8-
 
I'll add stat blocks and HL files for the PCs and for NPCs as I create them.

I would love to see a 4th ed reprint with modern design sensibilities. Nice color pages, beautiful colored illustrations, well organized headers and chapters, etc.

So you guys understand, I'm actively supporting and comforting female friends of mine, probably going to have to be more than one, because of the devastation this is causing them.  It's terrifying them.  I know friends who've had friends commit suicide over stuff like this, being trapped in a state that wants them to suffer.
 
Louisiana has over 2 million people... so over 1 million women.  Roughly 25% of women have an abortion, and almost half of those are pro-life or highly religious.
 
So are they going to attack 100000s of women?  Or just 'the uppity ones'?  What happens when the police sues for an app's geographic tracking data to find 'murderers'?  Wholesale lawsuit, wholesale prosecution, of thousands of women?
 
The Louisiana government has said they are justifying acting outside of the Supreme Court as "well the other states ignored the Fed to legalize marijuana, so we feel this is fine".  Fighting to destroy hundreds of thousands of women is apparently the same as fighting to give people more rights. 
 
Even though our laws are structured specifically to prevent the argument of 'you are treating those people too nice, you should treat them worse'.  That argument literally cannot exist, legally.  The only argument you can have is 'you treat them nice, so you should treat me nice too'.
 
The Constitution was written to guarantee people's rights regardless of what the Federal Government could declare.  To grant the states limited rights, as well, while deferring to the Fed's rule of law for everything else.  It was the agreement that we shouldn't enter a period of constant inter-state warfare that could last a hundred years.
 
It was not written to guarantee the right of the states to abuse its people.  It's a document to grant these minimum rights, guaranteed no matter where you live within the Union.  Not an abstract set of rules to say 'each state should have control over what rights its people have'.
 
Had I written this earlier today, I would have probably cursed so much I'd have been banned for good.

Probably none. I would have continued with Bushido, and Traveller, and played other non Class, non D20 based systems.  The attraction was because Champions was a well designed "Game", which to me was far more attractive than Superheroes.

More importantly, without Champions, point buy systems would be a lot rarer, and/or stunted.  D&D would have had less competition. I may have picked up some of the Tri-Tac games a little sooner.  Cyberpunk, as written, would have been very different. 

Champions 2e was our entry point, but it was the whole HERO System that kept us coming back instead of growing tired of the game and moving on like we did with so many others.
 
Without Champions, I doubt we would have played any supers RPG for very long.
 
FASERIP was fun for a while.
 
These days, it'd be Supers! RED for occasional one-offs, I suspect.
 

Spoilers for Dr Strange 2 are on the Internet, so be warned. Stay away from Wikipedia if you want a spoiler-free film experience

Moon Knight: Last episode dropped today. Overall, I enjoyed it, though I may have to watch it through again to catch stuff that I missed. (Disney+)
 
Network: Excellent satire about the 1970s TV industry, that unfortunately also looks like it was used as a roadmap for certain cable channels. Several TCM pieces about it were included in the extras, which were also well worth watching. (HBOmax)

The one thing on which Republicans and Democrats unerringly agree is that no third Party can ever be allowed to obtain real political power. For such a thing to happen would be an existential threat to the gravy train they've both ridden for decades.