DShomshak

He. Stay away from Exalted. In that game, the world of Creation is indeed flat, fraying at the edges into primal chaos, anchored by five Elemental Poles. Personally, it's one of my favorite aspects of the game. Dean Shomshak

Factually incorrect. Chinese myth and religion includes many gods, who are worshiped as such, who are mortals ascended to divinity. AFAIK the only figure in Chinese myth that predates the world is the primordial giant Pangu, who grew to become the world. While I think* there are a few temples of Pangu, he's not a major figure in Chinese religion. The main deities of Greek religion are born after the world's creation as well. There are a few primordial figures such as Gaia, but Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Apollo, etc. live in a world they had no hand in making (beyond little things such as creating particular mountains or islands). The Greek creation myths that I know of are of fairly late provenance as well -- literary creations, such as Hesiod's Theogony, or philosophical speculations such as the Orphic myth. (See Robert Graves' The Greek Myths for a survey.) Once you survey the breadth of human myth, religion and supernatural belief, you find that all the categories are blurry and any "rule" you imagine has plenty of exceptions and qualifiers. The most you can say is that some tropes and patterns frequently occur. Dean Shomshak

Factually incorrect. Chinese myth and religion includes many gods, who are worshiped as such, who are mortals ascended to divinity. AFAIK the only figure in Chinese myth that predates the world is the primordial giant Pangu, who grew to become the world. While I think* there are a few temples of Pangu, he's not a major figure in Chinese religion. The main deities of Greek religion are born after the world's creation as well. There are a few primordial figures such as Gaia, but Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Apollo, etc. live in a world they had no hand in making (beyond little things such as creating particular mountains or islands). The Greek creation myths that I know of are of fairly late provenance as well -- literary creations, such as Hesiod's Theogony, or philosophical speculations such as the Orphic myth. (See Robert Graves' The Greek Myths for a survey.) Once you survey the breadth of human myth, religion and supernatural belief, you find that all the categories are blurry and any "rule" you imagine has plenty of exceptions and qualifiers. The most you can say is that some tropes and patterns frequently occur. Dean Shomshak

Many of the tarot cards represent sufficiently universal/archetypal concepts that you can use them as is. You might change some images to gods of the High Faith: Kilbern foir the Emperor, Mordak for the Devil, etc. This probably won't work for every card, but it's a start. Dean Shomshak

Incidentally, I vaguely remember a short story by, I think, L. Sprague deCamp in which a con man decides the big money is in religion, so he invents a god and uses his acting and oratoriacal skills to popularize it. The donations start rolling in! And then the god manifests. Oops. DeCamp, Saberhagen, Leiber and Anderson also wrote a lot of SF as well as Fantasy, and I suspect it shaped their development of the "belief creates gods" trope. As I alluded above, it seems to me like a clever notion for people who like playing ideas but who don't really care much about faith or religion. I have to include myself among that group. When Steve Long assembled the CU, he adopted a lot of the mystic cosmology I invented in The Ultimate Super-Mage. In it, I had belief and story creating spirits, gods and entire dimensions. This seemed like a good justification for the "kitchen sink" nature of the standard superhero universe, in which an angel of the Lord and the mighty Thor can be equally real. Marvel and DC kind of waffled on this, with talk of a Supreme Deity who was strongly suggested to be the Abrahamic Deity while the pagan mythic figures were merely powerful entities living in pocket dimensions. I wasn't willing to privilege one mythology over another, so I made Yahweh as much a creation of human belief as Odin or Zeus. And having the gods all be delusional, believing their own myths, sidestepped the clashing origin myths. At least the gods aren't all consciously lying to their worshipers. TA is part of the CU, so it has to use the same cosmology. This world can't be created by gods, because the contemporary CU's Earth wasn't created by gods. One may not like this approach to Fantasy world design. But it's a consequence of splicing together two different genres. Which, as I have said before, I don't think was a good idea in the first place. So I don't entirely disagree with Phil on this. Dean Shomshak

Fantasy RPGs are generally based on Fantasy fiction. Fantasy fiction is generally based on ancient myths and legends, but not taking them at face value. The idea that people invent gods is not new. One of the ancient Greek philosophers, I forget which one, opined that if pigs believed in gods those gods would oink. (Or words to that effect.) William Blake had a more elegant phrasing in Marriage of Heaven and Hell about gods as personifications and metaphors created by poets, that unsophisticated people took as real with help from unscrupulous priests. The Mimamsa school of Hinduism explicitly holds that the gods don't have to be real for the rituals of worship to have power. So Fantasy authors and games aren't completely without precedent in creating worlds in which human belief creates "real" gods. Much of magic draws on symbols and concepts of divine power... but further assumes that gods (or even God) cannot stop mortals from expropriating their power in this way. See Stolen Lightning: A Social Theory of Magic by Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe. So I have no problem with the TA theology, at least in terms of internal consistency. Though some parts are fairly unpleasant, such as the role of faith: worship is the food of the gods, but faith -- belief without evidence, or even in the face of evidence -- is their wine. Which is why they don't just allow, they create religious divisions such as the Hargeshites. If faith is their wine, the gods seem to be alcoholics. And nobody's better than an addict at rationalizing their behavior. In this sense, the TA theology is very much the work of secular people who, how do I put this, don't believe in belief or revere reverence. Dean Shomshak

A bizarre experiment in resurrection may soon bear fruit... literally. Dead sea date palm npr News Dates Like Jesus Ate? Scientists Revive Ancient Trees From 2,000-Year-Old ... NPR11 hours ago The world's most remarkable date palm trees might not exist if Sarah Sallon hadn't gotten sick while working ... "Like the fa mous ... I forget whether it was in this interview or the one she did with the BBC that project leader Sarah Sallon said that when she told archaeologists her plan to grow the lost Judean date palm from ancient seeds, "They said I was mad." Followed by laughter. Or cackling? Perhaps. How growing date palms from 2,000 year old seeds leads to supervillainy, I l;eave as an exercise for the reader. Dean Shomshak

Jan. 2020 Scientific American: "The Galactic Archipelago." An intriguing approach to the Fermi Paradox. As the authors note, how you "solve" the paradox depends greatly on big assumptions of varying degrees of testability. They suggest a comparison with settlement of the Pacific islands: The islands vary widely in how suitable they are for settlement, and in how easily they can be reached from other islands. They also add time as a factor: For instance, Pitcairn Island was inhabited in the 1400s, but empty when the Bounty mutineers settled there centuries later. Similarly, stars suitable for settlement are probably not evenly distriubuted -- and they move, so a cluster of systems that are mutually accessible gradually drift apart. Give civilization in each system a finite lifespan, and settlement across the Galaxy proceeds in spurts and patches, with wide areas where suitable star systems are left fallow for long periods. Earth could very easily be in one such fallow area, and have been so for long enough that any trace of past alien contact or settlement might be hard to find or recognize. Dean Shomshak

My sister would like to add her thanks for this post. When I told her about it, she said, "And here I thought I was just a Luddite." Dean Shomshak

One could easily argue the Virginia Dems are fools if they don't gerrymander and otherwise try to lock in every electoral advantage they can get. Just like Republicans do with voter suppression laws and suchlike. Politics, after all, is merely an exercise in finding who has power over whom. There is no hypocrisy in politics, because there are no principles to betray. (Though the accusation of hypocrisy can be a useful ploy.) And so on. Bleah. I just started reading Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, which argues that morality applies usefully even in this brutal sphere of human activity. I hope he can persuade me, because I'm getting pretty damn disgusted with humanity. Dean Shomshak

Wrapping up: There may still be value in a state-packing scheme: as leverage to force Republicans into abandoning their voter-suppression and gerrymandering schemes, as the price of avoiding some worse loss. It might work like this: Dems somehow manage to pull off the electoral trifecta, however narrowly. They quickly change the Senate's rules to end filibusters, pack the Supreme Court, withdraw the Federal District boundaries, and create 20 or so new micro-states, to be activated right before the next electoral cycle. Then they introduce a package of Constitutional amendments: Abolish the Electoral Collecge, automatic voter registration for all citizens, some provision to prevent gerrymandering, the Senate must confirm or deny judge appointments within a month of the president nominating them, maybe some other reforms (Pick your own.) And also abolishing the micro-states and preventing their future creation, de-packing the court, and otherwise making the state-packing scheme impossible in the future. Set a time limit of the next election. If the House and Senate pass the package and enough states ratify it in time, the micro-states never come into existence. If Republicans agree to the reforms, they likely lose the White House for a decade at least, and they lose state houses controlled through gerrymandered districting, but they are not perpetually locked out from any branch of government. They can try to come back through good policies, pitched persuasively. Dems will gain strong advantages through the wider and more diverse voter base, but they can lose those advantages if they govern badly. The American people win by politicians needing to appeal to them for votes instead of relying on structural advantages. Which is what we all want, right? Dean Shomshak

Going deeper, I also don't agree with the article's premise that democracy -- everyone's vote counting the same, in all cases -- is a desirable end in itself. The Framers took care that strict majority rule would not apply. That is, indeed, one of the reasons for having a Constitution: To prevent majorities of the moment from making self-interested or emotional choices that are damaging in the long run. (In a way, by preventing pure democracy, constitutions give the past and future a vote.) So I don't find the Senate intrinsically unfair. I see democracy as a means to various ends, such as civil rights. If democracy becomes a threat to those goals, block democracy. Dean Shomshak

If Dems pulled off a state-packing scheme sufficient to obtain permanent Senate control and make taking the White House difficult (if not impossible), how do Republicans react? Option 1: Civil war. At this point, politics become so poisonous that it's a rational choice. Option 2: Make the best of a bad situation. Use every trick of voter suppression, gerrymandering and propaganda at their disposal to try taking the House or White House as a way to block Dems. But with a permanently Democratic Supreme Court, they may find these tools being taken away too. Go back to Option 1, or settle for political control of a fraction of the states. Option 3: Abandon their white supremacist and corporate feudalist dogmas to appeal to wider segments of the American public. Probably more difficult even than Option 2. Dean Shomshak

EDIT FOR DOUBLE-POST: And if Dems find a Win Button in the Constitution, why use it to reform that Constitution and, incidentally, remove the Win Button? Why not just... win? Well, as I said, because they don't want to make a new master. That can be avoided by making fewer micro-states out of DC territory. Ten states would be too few: The scheme would certainly offenc enough Americans that Republicans could pick up enough senate seats and electoral votes to counterbalance the new states, and the House is so swingy that 10 locked-in representatives aren't worth squat. Twenty micro-states would be enough, though, to assure Dems permanent control of the Senate. Republicans could reasonably expect to pick up enough formerly-swing states to counter the 60 guaranteed electoral college votes from the micro-states, but there's no way they can flip 20 Senate seats from the other 50 states. The current 100-member Senate hasn't seen either party gain even a 10-seat majority since the 95th Senate (1977-79). It's not quite a Win Button, but Dems might find permanent Senate control a sufficnet hedge against any Republican agends. Including blocking Republicans from attempting their own state-packing scheme. Dean Shomshak

But there's a deeper difficulty. Assume Dems have made the 127 micro-states, all solidly Democratic, out of Washington, DC neighborhoods. The new micro-states hold 48% of the electoral votes (or thereabouts); they have total control of the Senate; thier single representatives form 29% of the House; their legislatures are sufficient to ratify constitutional amendments with little need for cooperation from any other state. So if they act as a bloc (and why wouldn't they), why do they still need the rest of the Democratic Party? It's a way to make Republicans lose, conclusively. But Dems could find it a Pyrrhic victory as pleasing this new bloc becomes the sum of all policy, and America gains a truly imperial capital.

A fun thought exercise, but I do see some practical and theoretical problems with it. I'll break this up into chunks for easier writing and reading. First practical problem: Constitutionality. Someone once said, "The Constitution says what the Supreme Court says it says." (Or words to that effect.) Like, Jim Crow laws were constitutional for decades... until they weren't. The Constitution didn't change; the membership of the Court did. And I don't see the current five Republican justices saying, "Well, darn, they've got us here." So the scheme doesn't become constitutional until there's a Democratic majority on the court as well. So if Dems can capture the House, Senate and White House, they need to pack the Supreme Court before they withdraw the Federal District boundaries and use the District of Columbia territory to make micro-states. But that seems doable. Dean Shomshak

Once again, I'll recommend Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, her sociological study of a Tea Party-voting, Trump-loving parish in Louisiana. She found people who love their country fiercely and fervently... as it was, or as they imagine it was. And they see that country dying around them, or already dead, replaced by a United States of America they find horribly alien. Oddly, she found a strong environmental streak, or at least a strong love of the natural world. But they associate the environmental movement with an urban liberal elite that they believe treats them with contempt. Potential environmental activism also clashes with a love of industrial capitalsim, the traditional source of blue-collar jobs. (Though I would call their attitude less capitalist than industrial feudalist -- the big company that owns the factory taking the role, and receiving the deference, even reverence, of the Lord of the Manor. But that's my interpretation, not Hochschild's.) There's also strong white supremacy, though Hochschild's subjects deny racism. They feel that hard-working (and white) people like them are getting left behind, while people not like them (many of them, incidentally, not white) are cheating -- given undeserved rewards by the urban coastal liberal elite as political patronage. "Cutting in line" is the metaphor Hocschild tried an her subjects, to which they agreed expressed their view. Hochschild evinces considerable sympathy for her subjects, even though she shows they also believe many things that provably are not true. After three years of their hero Donald Trump, I can't quite stretch my sympathies that far. But then, I am one of the over-educated urban coastal "elites" who are destroying their America. Dean Shomshak

I wonder how one would measure this? Even if true (however one defines "legislation that Americans want"), it isn't necessarily an outrage. First, many laws passed may deal with technical issues that most people don't know or care about. (Frex, I am certainly not qualified to hold an opinion about the arcana of tax policy.) OTOH, I can imagine Congress receiving petitons for laws that would be silly or loopy, such as the legendary 19th-century legislator (though I think this was state, not federal) who tried to get "pi" legally defined as exactly 3, because a Bible passage implied this. One reason to have a legislature, after all, instead of relying on direct democracy, is to pass the laws people need rather than the ones they want at the moment. Even if that means ladling sugar to special interests, that may be the price of keeping the system running -- as long as it doesn't get too extreme, or powerful groups feel they are barred forever from sucking at the teat of public money. Dean Shomshak

Followup! Today's ATC reports that Pompeo reacted to Mary-Louise Kelly's interview, and report on his subsequent meltdown, by accusing her of lying: That she hadn't really told his staff she'd ask about Ukraine, and that she had actually agreed to talk with him, alone, off the record. (He did not dispute her account of his profanity-laced rant, though.) And of course he said it was just one more case of the media's psychotic hatred of the Trump administration. So the ATC newsroom invited NPR's CEO, John Lansing, to respond to Pompeo. Mr. Lansing expressed full confidence in Ms. Kelly as one of the country's most respected and professional journalists, Oh, and that she has the email chain with Pompeo's staff, setting up the interview, in which she says and they agree that she will ask about Ukraine. This is all a bit familiar to me from my late father's stories about his work as an investigative reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune. More than once, he offended locally prominent people who threatened to sue him and the paper for libel. His response was always the same: "Go ahead." They never did, or at least they never won. The threats never stopped him, or the TNT, from running a story. So if Mr. Pompeo believes Mary-Louise Kelly lied, twice, on air, about him and his office... he should sue. Proving in court that a major news organization lied through its teeth would certainly be feather in the Trump administration's cap. But he won't, just like the Trump administration has never sued for libel despite all their proclamations that the news media are lying. Because they know they will lose. Dean Shomshak

I am sorry I cannot post a link: My dial-up AOHell is more than usually balky today. So I'd be grateful if someone could post a link to Mary-Louise Kelly's interview with Mike Pompeo that just aired on All Things Considered. ATC was careful to specify that they aired the interview without any editing or interruptions. Pompeo bragged about how successful the Trump administration was at pushing Iran to the brink of capitulation, in contrast to the Obama administration's appeasement -- though he wouldn't say how the US now could actually make good on its vow that Iran would never get nuclear weapons. When Ms. Kelly changed the subject to Ukraine, he said he'd only agreed to talk about Iran, despite Ms. Kelly saying his staff had agreed to that subject as well. Again, he puffed about Trump vs. Obama. Then Ms. Kelly asked about how Pompeo's State Department treated Ambassador Yovanovitch. Pompeo insisted he has always stood up for all his diplomatic staff. Ms. Kelly called him on it: Point to your public statement, she asked, where you defended her. After the second time she asked Pompeo to back up his claim, he walked out. But there's a coda. Ms. Kelly recounted how Pompeo's assistant then took her to an off-air talk with Pompeo -- off the air, but no one asked her to keep it off the record. Pompeo spent several minutes shouting angrily at her, using the F-word. He also asked if she thought the American people cared about Ukraine, and dared her to find Ukraine on a map. She could. Sounds like Trump has found a true soulmate here. Dean Shomshak

I am sorry I cannot post a link: My dial-up AOHell is more than usually balky today. So I'd be grateful if someone could post a link to Mary-Louise Kelly's interview with Mike Pompeo that just aired on All Things Considered. ATC was careful to specify that they aired the interview without any editing or interruptions. Pompeo bragged about how successful the Trump administration was at pushing Iran to the brink of capitulation, in contrast to the Obama administration's appeasement -- though he wouldn't say how the US now could actually make good on its vow that Iran would never get nuclear weapons. When Ms. Kelly changed the subject to Ukraine, he said he'd only agreed to talk about Iran, despite Ms. Kelly saying his staff had agreed to that subject as well. Again, he puffed about Trump vs. Obama. Then Ms. Kelly asked about how Pompeo's State Department treated Ambassador Yovanovitch. Pompeo insisted he has always stood up for all his diplomatic staff. Ms. Kelly called him on it: Point to your public statement, she asked, where you defended her. After the second time she asked Pompeo to back up his claim, he walked out. But there's a coda. Ms. Kelly recounted how Pompeo's assistant then took her to an off-air talk with Pompeo -- off the air, but no one asked her to keep it off the record. Pompeo spent several minutes shouting angrily at her, using the F-word. He also asked if she thought the American people cared about Ukraine, and dared her to find Ukraine on a map. She could. Sounds like Trump has found a true soulmate here. Dean Shomshak

Ah. So Turkey is turning into Pakistan. (IIRC from BBC reports, this is... not rare in Pakistan. But instead of being formalized in law, it's tribal custom the government refuses to touch. But I can't cite a specific news story, so take this with a grain of salt.) This is one of the reasons I am not against every form of Western cultural imperialism, and do not actually consider myself a liberal. Dean Shomshak

Ah. So Turkey is turning into Pakistan. (IIRC from BBC reports, this is... not rare in Pakistan. But instead of being formalized in law, it's tribal custom the government refuses to touch. But I can't cite a specific news story, so take this with a grain of salt.) This is one of the reasons I am not against every form of Western cultural imperialism, and do not actually consider myself a liberal. Dean Shomshak

Well, the Valician Hills and Drakine Mountains sure look like one geological feature on the large-scale map. Then there's the Glimwash River that cuts across a corner of the mountains of Skeld (p. 50) and an unlabeled portion of the Ordring-Tarnwater-Loskell river complex cuts across a spur of the Nagyrian Mountains (p. 60). The Tarnwater also has a rather unusual course, flowing right up to the end of Hangclaw Mountains and Mount Melgar (ibid.) Now, there are RL rivers that cut through mountain ranges. The Columbia and the Danube do this twice. But these rivers also have no alternate paths, and there are fairly simple geological processes that account for them. (The Columbia's case is especially clear. As the Cascade Mts rose, the preexisting Columbia cut through them; then again with the even younger Coastal Ranges. The Danube's case is probably more complicated.) It seems especially unlikely to me that the minimum-energy path for the Tarnwater would happen to be right at the base of a mountain range. Erosion and uplift usually result in the land near a mountain range being higher than the land further away. But then, Ambrethel is a world still shaped by the Godwars. It is possible that Earth at this time doesn't have plate tectonics. (It might even not be 4.5 billion years old: That history and geology is the retroactive result of the magical cataclysms thant ended the Turakian and/or Atlantean Ages.) For instance, the Glimwater's mouth might occupy the spot where Kilbern's sword struck the ground after cleaving Krim's arm. (Or some similar legend.) Turn it from a bug to a feature. Dean Shomshak

Well, the Valician Hills and Drakine Mountains sure look like one geological feature on the large-scale map. Then there's the Glimwash River that cuts across a corner of the mountains of Skeld (p. 50) and an unlabeled portion of the Ordring-Tarnwater-Loskell river complex cuts across a spur of the Nagyrian Mountains (p. 60). The Tarnwater also has a rather unusual course, flowing right up to the end of Hangclaw Mountains and Mount Melgar (ibid.) Now, there are RL rivers that cut through mountain ranges. The Columbia and the Danube do this twice. But these rivers also have no alternate paths, and there are fairly simple geological processes that account for them. (The Columbia's case is especially clear. As the Cascade Mts rose, the preexisting Columbia cut through them; then again with the even younger Coastal Ranges. The Danube's case is probably more complicated.) It seems especially unlikely to me that the minimum-energy path for the Tarnwater would happen to be right at the base of a mountain range. Erosion and uplift usually result in the land near a mountain range being higher than the land further away. But then, Ambrethel is a world still shaped by the Godwars. It is possible that Earth at this time doesn't have plate tectonics. (It might even not be 4.5 billion years old: That history and geology is the retroactive result of the magical cataclysms thant ended the Turakian and/or Atlantean Ages.) For instance, the Glimwater's mouth might occupy the spot where Kilbern's sword struck the ground after cleaving Krim's arm. (Or some similar legend.) Turn it from a bug to a feature. Dean Shomshak