DShomshak

Okay, Old Man, you're on! I will continue on Monday. Oh, and don't assume you come in third. People seem to like purty pitchers, and I'm afraid I'm limited to text/ Dean Shomshak

Is it certain the laptop even exists? Because the NYTimes story said the information, and its supposed chain of custody, comes from Rudy Giuliani. As of that article, we don't know the store, the owner, or anything else, apparently. Dean Shomshak

I gave a martial artist villain a Missile Deflect DS. He had the Wonder Woman bullet deflection thing, but didn't need to use an action to do so -- he could keep attacking or do other things. The dimension lord Skarn, most recently published in CV1, has an EDM Damage Shield. Do not try to grab Skarn. Dean Shomshak

Huh. Only two of us. Okay, I'll make one more post, but if no one else joins the draft before next Monday we should probably just quit. Why to Seek the Lost Tomb of the Galactic Pharaoh: Like most conquering despots through history, Osorkon looted the people he conquered; and in true Egyptian fashion, he filled his tomb with treasures for the Afterlife. It is estimated the tomb holds the contents of several major art museums, as well as conventional treasures of precious metals and gems. (Though the gems are not so valuable as they once were back on Old Earth, since most stones can now be mass produced. Natural stones may retain some value, ironically, for the flaws that indicate they were made by nature instead of a factory.) Most valuable of all, perhaps, are the relics of the Precursor species that traveled the stars millions of years before humanity. Osorkon maintained tight information control over his tomb's construction, and he left a worm program to seek out and destroy any such information after his death. But some shrewd guesses of the tomb's contents can be made by tracking what was looted from his empire, and what never turned up later. Thus, it's reasonable to suppose that the tomb holds hundreds, if not thousands, of treasures comparable to Liang Xi's Nebula of Desire, the Jade Room, or the 88 Aquarii Spork. Dean Shomshak

It's worth going back to John Milton's essay "Areopagitica," which is one of the first (and still one of the best) defenses of intellectual freedom against censorship. Keep in mind that Milton wrote it while the Wars of Religion raged across Europe: Books killed. Milton argued that authorities should allow much that appeared false or dangerous, because there might be a good or true idea of value mixed in, and that truth would out in the crucible of open debate. But he still argued that books published with malice aforethought, that were weapons calculated to cause harm, should be suppressed. It's why for a long time (or so I've been told) Germany would not allow publication of Mein Kampf in Germany, in German. It was a book that, provably, killed. The technology has changed, but the core argument remains. IN India and other countries, people have used lies on Facebook to whip up murderous mobs. It's absurd for Mark Zuckerberg to say, "Oh, it's nothing to do with Facebook, we're just the communication platform." Not when his platform actively helps people with bad intent find the people they most want to deceive and incite. Like it or not, he is a publisher and bears responsibility for what is published. If Facebook is used for criminal ends, and does not make reasonable efforts to prevent this, then Facebook is guilty of some kind of criminal negligence if not active collusion. I'm sure one of the lawyers here can give a more accurate description of the possible criminal culpability. I have also heard claims, on Marketplace and All Things Considered, that far-right sites are some of Facebook's most popular and profitable. The howls from the right about alleged "liberal bias" sound to me like one more grievance of the privileged at having their privilege challenged. Dean Shomshak

The latest from "On the Media": October 9, 2020 The Unlucky Many GOP Senator Mike Lee tweeted this week that "we are not a democracy." On this week's On the Media, why the Republican party's political future may depend upon anti-democratic — small-'d' — ideas. Plus, how the good luck of the so-called "silent" generation has shaped the politics of Joe Biden. And, how the bad luck of the millennial generation might shape our collective future. 1. Nicole Hemmer [@pastpunditry], Columbia University research scholar and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, on the origins and evolution of the "republic, not a democracy" slogan. Listen. 2. Matthew Sitman [@MatthewSitman], associate editor at the Catholic journal Commonweal and co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast, on the anti-democratic state of the Republican party. Listen. 3. Elwood Carlson, sociology professor at Florida State University, on the "silent generation," members of which comprise much of the governing elite. Listen. 4. Anne Helen Petersen [@annehelen], author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, on the downwardly mobile millennial generation. Listen. Listen · 50:12 50:12 Well, now I have a better idea why so many Millennials like Bernie Sanders. Their experience is largely one of "precarity": Your job can vanish any moment, but your student debt load won't; the financial system can take your house or destroy your company without warning; a maniac might start shooting anywhere, anytime; you work your butt off, with no assurance that you will ever attain the promised security and prosperity. You may technically have a middle-class income, but you live as poor people always have. Under such circumstances, talk of "freedom" and "opportunity" is kind of a bad joke, and the possibility of a little Canadian-style "socialism" sounds pretty good. The segments on the roots of Republican anti-democracy are quite interesting as well. Bluntly, what passes for intellectuals on the Right have concluded they can't win a true, democratic debate and persuade a majority of Americans to go along with their dogmas and policies. Their only hope is to lock in their place as a ruling minority, ram their policies down the majority's throat, and hope that being compelled to live righteously teaches people to like it. Dean Shomshak

Getting back to Babylon 5: I had the honor of hearing J. Michael Straczinski talk at Norwescon, and one of the things he talked about was how he makes stories. B5 fans may find some of it familiar. You start with characters. As you create each character, come up with answers to these questions: Who is the character? What does the character want? What impedes the character from getting/doing what he/she/it wants? What does the character do to try overcoming those impediments? And that's your story. Good advice for GMs and players as well as TV writers or novelists. Dean Shomshak

(Not saying the TEAM system isn't a reasonable idea -- just that people would try to manipulate it for their political ends. Because people will try to manipulate any system for political ends. Which generates stories, so that's a good thing.) I expect that many groups would receive a collective assumption of personhood: "We have tested enough Perseids to say that all Perseids are assumed to be persons, unless evidence is produced to suggest otherwise." Or elves, or clones. Things would get complicated with one-offs (is the hive-mind pf robot beetles a sentient person, even though the individual robots are nearly mindless?) or there's a spectrum (in stories, ghosts range from mindless video loops to fully intelligent and free-willed people). Then there'd need to be individual testing. Dean Shomshak

Well, I can see a supervillain arguing that why should baseline, born-of-unskilled-labor humans be grandfathered in? Under his wise rule (he is of course one of those arrogant genius types), people will receive a place in society commensurate to their personhood rating (all very Brave New World). Or governments might try using TEAM scores to shape the electorate, or get out of various obligations. For instance, my understanding is that US Federal law enjoins states to educate all children as best they can, but teaching children with mental handicaps or other special needs is expensive. Won't the taxpayers be happy when you declare that children scoring at the lower end of the TEAM scale aren't actually persons, and so are no longer a drain on the public till! (Except for the parents of such children, of course.) And the tests can be manipulated to give desired results. Dean Shomshak

OTOH, I read in my morning paper that in Florida, Wisconsin and some other battleground states, Dems are pretty far ahead of Republicans in mail-in/absentee early voting, to an extent that worries GOP strategists. The bigger the early lead, the harder it is to catch up on Election Day. Dean Shomshak

Sadly, I heard on All Things Considered yesterday that a three-judge appelate panel overturned the judge's order and restored the one-box-per-county rule. All three judges are Trump appointees. There's not even a pretense of judicial independence here, so I no longer see any reason not to pack the courts if Dems can manage the trifecta. Or start legislatively firing and replacing judges as was done in Poland. Then make micro-states out of the District of Columbia to pack the Senate, so Republicans will never be in a position to do the same, and say, "We win." Dean Shomshak

Every Friday, the Marketplace radio program asks a few business reporters to comment on the news of the week. Today, one of them said, "Donald Trump is acting crazier than a bag of scorpions on meth." Dean Shomshak

I'll refer again to the episode of On the Media I linked to a couple pages back. Christianity does have a longstanding persecution complex. (Though many Christians resist it; and one might argue that to see Jesus as persecuted is a deep misunderstanding of the Sacrifice of Christ.) Now, Christians *are* persecuted in some parts of the world, but the USA is not one of those places. For comparison, I heard "Islamism" explained like this: A Muslim is a person who believes in and practices Islam. An Islamist is a person who believes Islam should hold institutional dominance over the rest of society. You can be a Muslim without being an Islamist (and many Muslims are). The sort of Evangelicals who rage at a supposed "war on Christianity" may or may not be Christians; that is between them and God. But they sure seem to be "Christianists," more interested in institutional power than the saving of souls. Which from my outsider's perspective seems doctrinally dubious, given Jesus' repeated scorn for worldly power. Dean Shomshak

Btw, what's the time frame on this draft? When would you like us to complete our entries? Dean Shomshak

Well, stress and despair have well established negative effects on personal health, so a positive outlook isn't useless... for individuals, in some cases. But believing that you won't get sick if you believe you won't is magical thinking -- and terribly dangerous if you try to apply it as a public health policy. Dean Shomshak

Specifically, his tweet says, "after I win." Just Trump's usual power-of-positive-thinking bluster, or am I the only one who reads that as a ransom note: If he doesn't win, there will be no stimulus? (Oh, yes: The weekend's All Things Considered and On the Media talked about how Fred Trump was a huge believer in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, and passed this to Donald. If you are confident that you will succeed, you will succeed. And for Fred Trump, getting sick was a sign of weak will. It raises the possibility that Donald Trump genuinely believed that if he just kept up the happy talk and had everyone believing Covid-19 would go away, it really would. Because magic. I am not sure which thought frightens me more: That his denials were cynically done to protect business interests, or that he's sunk that deep in magical thinking. Though I suppose both are possible.) Dean Shomshak

Yes: Israel is the prime example, in which the major parties (Labor and Likud) must grovel to ultra-orthodox micro-parties to get those one or two more delegates they need for a majority coalition. It makes some rational policies (such as letting Palestinians have a functioning state) impossible. But that may be a peculiarity of Israeli culture and politics. Coalition government can also be unstable: Over the years, I've heard many news stories about "Italy's governing coalition collapses again." But that too may be a matter of political culture more than an intrinsic feature of the constitutional structure. Though I gather the details of how one sets up such a system can influence the final results a lot. Like, what percentage of voters need to support a party before it gets representation in the parliament? If you set the bar too low, you get fringe or fanatical one-issue micro-parties. Back in high school, my civics teacher noted these issues. He suggested that the US electoral system was actually useful in that while it reduced politics to two parties, those parties had to be internal coalitions of people with varied interests. This in turn made it possible to work across parties -- Rep. Joe Blow (D) might agree with fellow Democrats on most issues, but he might vote with Republicans on a few others, while Rep Richard Row (R) might occasionally be lured into a deal with the Dems. But that was 40 years ago. The system has broken down because, as columnist David Brooks said in a recent column, the Republicans are no longer a political party. They're a culture war identity movement. But then, Americans used to have multiple, intersecting interests and identities pulling them in different directions as well. They had political policies, economic interests, religious identities, regional interests, and others, creating cross-linkages. We were all coalitions. For a significant fraction of the electorate, however, all the interests have now collapsed into the one grievance of realizing that the country is no longer going to be a straight, white, Christian, pro-capitalist, rural-identifying nation that grudgingly lets "those other people" live here (so long as they mind their place). And they no longer perceive cross-linkages to tirn "those other people" into "us." The irony is that by curdling into this one grievance-based identity, Republicans are making everyone else Democratic by default. And whatever differences American Muslims may feel with American Hindus (say), or Blacks with Koreans, or any other pairing you might name, Republicans have given them one issue on which they must all agree: They are not going to be pushed to the side any longer as second-class citizens. Dean Shomshak

I found the roster from the 2019 Dungeon Draft, and observe that not only is there no common setting assumed, there is no common genre. This gives me several options, though I will preemptively rule out The Hot Zone, from my superhero setting, as I already posted a bit about it in my "Millennium Universe" thread a few years back. (Though there's a lot more to say.) So, here's a dungeon for a Space Opera campaign. During the chaotic centuries of the last Interregnum, a number of pocket interstellar empires rose and fell. One such was the empire of Osorkon II, ruler of the planet Rigisamos. This world was settled by Neo-Egyptians, a group that believed that ancient Egypt had the most stable society in human history and wanted to recreate that stability. It didn't work out that way, of course, but their culture, politics and religion stayed Egyptian-influenced. Osorkon II first secured dictatorial rule over Rigisamos, then conquered several nearby star systems. Instead of consolidating his empire, though, he spent the last 10 years of his life fighting cancer and building a tomb worthy of himself. The tomb was dug into a small asteroid, which was then propelled into the deeps of space. The tomb has been lost in the void for centuries. Attempts to calculate its trajectory failed, since Osorkon did his best to prevent his tomb from being found and looted. New information has come to light, though, suggesting the tomb was sent on a very long orbit rather than out of the star system completely. It should be approaching the Kuiper Belt of the Rigisaman system, and pass through the inner system in another 10 years or so. Do you dare to seek The Lost Tomb of the Galactic Pharaoh? Dean Shomshak

God Bless | On the Media | WNYC Studios www.wnycstudios.org/.../on-the-media-god-bless Contending with Christianity in America. Topics discussed: Christian Nationalism Holds the Religious Right Together The Historic Roots of the Christian Persecution Complex What is the Religious Left? Where Did 'White Jesus' Come From? Important reminder that the Religious Right does *not* represent all American Christians, let alone all American religious believers. Dean Shomshak

Pariah beat me to it. Yes, "orange dwarf" is a real star type. Dean Shomshak

Also in the Oct 2 NYTimes, center-right columnist David Brooks has some things to say about the debate and what it showed about Donald Trump -- nothing that wasn't obvious to anyone who paid attention before, but maybe this time it'll penetrate to some people who were blind to it before. Opinion | At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist - The New York ... www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opinion/trump-ethics... But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty,... "Duroing Tuesday night's debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump's vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible. Debate watchers were confronted with a core truth: What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he'll do to America in a second term." "With his conduct, Trump assaults this core conservative instinct. He is separating the nationalists from some temperamental conservatives. The nationalists relish Trump's savagery. Some everyday conservatives -- homeowners, parents, shopkeepers -- feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot." (Here Brooks cites polling that some of the groups that preferred Trump in 2016 are slipping away.) "Some Republicans see Trump's immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is a widening gyre that threatens the stability of civic life." Dean Shomshak

In his column for yesterday's New York Times, economist Paul Krugman said that Moody's Analytics and Goldman sachs -- not exactly a crew of flaming socialists, he notes -- believe that Joe Biden's economic plans, far from destroying the economu as Trump claims, would in fact boost the economy much more and better than anything Trump or Republicans propose. So I looked it up and found a page of similar stories. Here's the one from Forbes -- also not exactly a liberal rag. Biden, Democratic Victories Would Be Best Outcome For The ... www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/09/25/... A victory for Joe Biden over Donald Trump and a Democratic ... according to a recent analysis of both candidates’ economic proposals by Moody’s Analytics. ... with the unemployment rate ... But as Krugman points out, this is in no way surprising to students of economic history. Demoncratic administrations and policies rather consistently create greater growth and higher employment than Republican ones, while Republican tax cuts consistently fail to deliver the promised benefits. (/At least to the American people at large.) Dean Shomshak

This reminds me of the ambiguity in the phrase, "essential worker." The work of the head of government is essential -- but in a constitutional and democratic republic the person who fills that role is a temp worker, meant to be replaced every few years. As such, quite expendable. Dean Shomshak

My wednesday paper had a pair of AP analysis articles on this. One headline said, "Trump can handle $300 million debt, experts say." "According to Forbes' latest valuation, even pandemic-reduced prices leave Trump with $2.5 billion worth of proerties and other assets, and that s after subtracting his $1.2 billion in deby." He can sell his interest in a couple properties and get $500 million, easy-peasy. As for his low taxes and claimed losses, that's just high-end real estate SOP. The laws are so generous and riddled with loopholes that an investor can manufacture losses and expenses virtually at will. OTOH, the second article's headline goes, "Ethics experts see national security concern in Trump's debt." And some of these people cannot be dismissed as frothing liberal crackpots or Democratic partisans. "Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics attorney in Republican George W. Bush's White House, also noted that Trump-owned companies have declared bankruptcy sis times, raising the question: Why have lenders been willing to keep risking loans of such enormous amounts. "'Why would banks assume the risks of these loans?' Pinter said. 'Or did someone else quietoy assume risk of that loan for the bank to make it happen?'" So it's not tinfoil hat territory to wonder who Trump really owes, and what they hope to gain that's worth more than a few hundred million dollars. Though, vide Old Man's post above, I can't help wondering if Trump might lie about his Covid test to distract people from his finances. Probably not; but only because he has other outrages to use as distractions. Dean Shomshak

Interesting. I shall have to think on this and see if I can come up with anything good. Even if I can't, I shall certainly follow the thread to steal ideas (assuming my D&D campaign can ever be re-started post-Covid.) Dean Shomshak