DShomshak

From my frontpage newsfeed. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the sheer number of state legislators, that one would suggest flat-out ignoring initiative results they don't like. Direct democracy, boo! ...As long as it gives the wrong result. So, eyeroll. Republican Pushes to Overturn Ohio Election Result (msn.com) Dean Shomshak

Yesterday's episode of "The Daily" reported on Donald Trump, Don Jr. and Eric Trump testifying in the NY fraud case. Reporter's takeaway: The prosecutors in Trump's criminal trials will try their darndest to get Trump himself on the stand. On trial for lying, he repeats the lies, under oath. Plus raving at the jusge, which for some reason judges do not take well to. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/podcasts/the-daily/trump-trial.html As one recent op-ed put it, Trump finally faces people he can't bully, bribe, or bury in lawyers. And it's driving him crazy. (or revealing the crazy that was always there.) Don Jr, by comparison, merely displays the same blithe conviction that laws and facts are for other people. Dean Shomshak

Oh -- speaking of Earth history, the science program NOVA just finished a four-part series called "Ancinet Earth" that follow the Earth's development from coalescing from cosmic dust to the present. Earth has been very different planets throughout its history, which would make excellent models for alien worlds. Dean Shomshak

My newsfeed says Democrat Andy Bashear won re-election as governor of Kentucky. Dean Shomshak

Oh, I don't doubt the moral panic is completely sincere. The rules are changing quickly; people like them feel, correctly, that they no longer have the social privileges they once enjoyed. Of course they're lashing out at anything that offends their sensibilities. It's Fundamentalism 101. When you're about to lose everything, you can't give an inch on anything. Double down, even. I am told this is how American Christian fundamentalism came about. (Warning: I recount what I read; I am not myself an expert.) The late 19th century was another time of rapid changes that some Christians thought threatened the underpinnings of their faith and their notions of social hierarchy. So, they doubled down. One result was a redefinition of the Bible: no longer a complex text whose truths might be obscure and subject to re-interpretation, but *inerrant* in every word and *self-evident* in its truth. This created problems because the Bible manifestly holds heaping helpings of poetry, metaphor, parable, dubious history, and outright contradiction. So fundamentalists qualified their claim: The absolute truth of the Bible becomes self-evident to anyone who reads it if they have the Holy Spirit in their heart. Anyone who points out problems like Genesis giving multiple versions of the Creation merely prove they lack the Holy Spirit. In fact, that they are deceived by the Devil. Only this makes further problems, because people will still read this complex and difficult text and reach different conclusions. So who has the Holy Spirit and who is deceived by the Devil? Reason and historical and linguistic study having been ruled out, such contests become political. And this is how the Baptists, who began with the libertarian premise of each believer reading the Bible for himself, ended up with completely authoritarian dogma. It also follows that reading the Bible also no longer becomes necessary. The text is no longer a text: It is a talisman for evoking the Holy Spirit. I suspect the people who mock Speaker Mike Johnson for his Biblical/political claims miss the point. He doesn't need to cite a verse to explain his stance about, say, tariffs or aid to Ukraine. He's guided by his idea of the Bible, which he knows is true because the Holy Spirit tells him so. And I suspect the Moms for Liberty don't need to read the books they want banned, let alone read them critically, because those texts are also seen as talismans -- but for invoking the Devil. But that's just my own guess. Dean Shomshak

My brother-in-law says, "I want one!" Not paranoid AFAIK, but he likes fedoras. Has 2 from the 1940s. Dean Shomshak

Four-Eyes updated. Here's a bit of new text that incidentally addresses one of my pet peeves with the Champions Villains trilogy: A tendency to present all characters as experienced and in a sense "finished," with little uncertainty (or freedom) in what way they'll go. Sometimes I think characters should specifically be *new* villains, giving the PCs a chance to shape their destinies. Dean Shomshak

The Economist has of course run editorials urging Israel, Middle Eastern leaders, and American government to be reasonable and seek a long-term, peaceful solution that will make the Middle East better for everyone. Unfortunately, none of those parties are prone to be reasonable. I could go on to discuss Israel's foundation, history, and exaltation of 3,000-year-old mythology at the expense of real, present people, but many people cannot distinguish between criticism of Zionism (a political program) and anti-Semitism (hatred of a people and religion). So I'll stop now\, and merely say that modern Israel's history has been a graphic demonstration that two wrongs still don't make a right. Dean Shomshak

Thank you, I knew I'd heard it before on a comedy-song program but had no context. So I made up one as silly as the song. (Though now I wish someone would do a Southern parody of Tosca.) Dean Shomshak

Ah, Vinnie's aria from Act III of "Bubba" Puccini's operatic masterpiece Toscaloosa! I Will never forget tyhe first time I heard Pavarotti's magnificent rendition. (Though some people say Ray Stevens' is better. I grant you, it's a tough choice.) Dean Shomshak

No legal eagle here, but it occurs to me that lawsuits do not have to target actual persons, nor be brought on behalf of actual persons. Corporations have only a legal fiction of quasi-personhood, but they get sued all the time. And environmental laws have resulted in lawyers bringing suits on behalf of rivers, forests, and other natural phenomena on the grounds that human activities have damaged them. So even if undead (or nature spirits, or whatever) are not legal persons, they still might be subject to civil law and use it themselves. -Just to add another layer of complication. In the litigation-prone US, at least, judges and legislators might not want to open the cans of worms implied by super-powers and nonhuman intelligences, but lawyers will probably force them to do so. If for no other reasons, lawyers with a hunger for publicity would probably try bringing test cases to see if some existing law or precedent could be contorted to fit the situation. Dean Shomshak

I just checked, and Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt 9 times since its independence in 1816, 3 times in the last two decades alone. Nigh-suicidal economic mismanagement isn't an aberration, it's tradition. Making it even more difficult for a sci/tech sector to develop, moving away from the boom-and-bust economy based on commodity export, seems quite in character. They've been eating the seed corn for *decades.* But the IMF keeps supplying more seed corn in the form of debt restructuring and making more loans. As the third largest economy in Latin America (after Brazil and Mexico), I suppose Argentina is "too big to fail." The same sources say that 100 years ago, Argentina was in the top 10 countries for per capita GDP. Which shows that any country can ruin itself with sufficiantly bad leadership, maintained long enough. Dean Shomshak

If you want a guide to Earth's past geography, the man to consult is geologist Christopher Scotese. Even more so if you want a guide to Earth's future geography -- AFAIK he's the first to try running plate tectonics forward, though after about 50 million years the continents might follow different courses. If you want to send characters back to the Permian (c'mon, everybody does Age of Dinosaurs, stretch yourself) or forward 100 million years, Scotese has made maps for you. Here's his website's Earth History section: http://scotese.com/earth.htm And here's that map of the Permian: Scotese also has a Youtube channel with plate tectonic animations. And here's a PDF atlas of the future, with maps at 25-million year increments, with brief explanations of what the continents are doing and what the climate is probably like. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323511465_Atlas_of_Future_Plate_Tectonic_Reconstructions_Modern_World_to_Pangea_Proxima_250_Ma Dean Shomshak

The reasoning I've heard is that while Republicans from districts Biden won might have less fear of being primaried out, they must expect they'd replace any support from the national party with active hostility. Certainly lose any financial backing, increasing the chance of losing in the general. I still think it gutless. If they worked really hard for their constituents, they might still have a decent chance of winning, forst against whatever hard-right loon the national party propped up against them and then in the general. If necessary, declare themselves independent -- IIRC the House and Senate have a few who caucus with one party or another without claiming membership. The analyst on ATC said that Johnson has, somehow, avoided making any real enemies in any of the GOP factions. Beyond that, his success may have been the result of sheer exhaustion. At leaast he spoke one nice sentence about looking forward to working with Hakeem Jeffries, which is more grace than I would expect from, say, Jordan, Gaetz or Boebert. And more basic political and media sense. We shall see how much real cooperation actually develops. Dean Shomshak

No no, if there's better information, I want to hear of it. I posted because this was the first I'd heard of any acoustic analysis (or that there was any acoustic evidence at all). Thank you for the link. Dean Shomshak

All Things Considered: Hamas blames the explosion at the Gaza hospital on an Israeli airstrike. Israel blames it on a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad. Some outside analysts study the publicly-available evidence and find both claims dubious. https://www-cf.npr.org/2023/10/23/1208061552/what-new-analysis-shows-about-the-gaza-hospital-explosion Dean Shomshak

This one of Mr Arthur's could be more coherent, but it's an introduction to one of the less familiar SF tropes: That humans are not the first intelligences to live on Earth. (Best known from Lovecraft, but other writers have used it too.) Could we now detect the presence of such a past civilization? Or conversely, would traces of our civilization be detectable millions of years from now? As Arthur explains, the title comes from a paper by two actual scientists. I've appended a link to that paper: It's not too technical for someone with basic science literacy. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6 Dean Shomshak

There was a good Jason homage in an issue of Adventurer's Club back in the day. I'm not sure I could produce anything different enough that plagiarism could not be suspevted. So, not Jason. A Freddy Krueger homage, OTOH... I already have one murderous ghost, but the Haunt has significant differences from Freddy. Will consider. (Core idea for the supplement, though, *is* updating previously published characters.) Dean Shomshak

I don't recall if I mentioned this before... When watching Sailor Moon, I realized that in anime one can haymaker magic. Sailor Moon doesn't actually seem to do this with the activation sequence for her smash-the-daemon Heart Staff attack -- it could just be that it takes Extra Time to activate -- but it reminded me of Lina Inverse in some episodes of the Slayers that I saw many years ago. When Lina casts her Dragon Slave spell, she can sometimes do an extra-long "I pledge myself to the darkness" incantation to upgrade it to an extra-super-kaboomy Giga Slave blast! So Moonray's enemy Princess Shadira will have this. When she needs to make her Dark Sorcery extra powerful, she intones something like, "Eternal Night, who was here before all things and shall endure after their end, I have given myself to you! Now give yourself to me!! Baleful Black Bolt!!!" And since it sucks to go through all this and miss 'cause the delayed segment gives opponents a chance to Dodge, she has Skill Levels just with Haymakered spells. And maybe a special Presence Attack while Darkness boils around her and an updraft of magic lifts and waves her hair, so everybody stands and gapes like idiots instead of sucker punching her before she can cast the spell... Dean Shomshak

Just as a further point of confusion, about the same time Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies came out, Steve Jackson Games published GURPS Creatures of the Night, a collection of horror beasties for that game. A lot of them were darn good horror, too <grumble grumble, not sure that makes it more or less annoying...> If LL wants to learn more about the grimoire demons I've adapted, the source is A. E. Waite's The Book of Ceremonial Magic. The descriptions are bald, terse, and near quotes from the original sources. Actual grimoires like the Lemegeton and Grimorium Verum are very dull reads. No Necronomicon here: Your problem won't be staying sane, it's staying awake. Consequently, turning the demons into something interesting (let alone gameable) takes a lot of one's own imagination. Dean Shomshak

The article was in today's newspaper, so the gag order should be fairly new. OTOH the article mentioned this is the second narrow gag order placed on Trump, so judges may be using a standard phrasing. I'm not looking back to check, either. Dean Shomshak

Has anyone posted notice of this yet? There's so much news, I lose track but it matters. https://www.pressherald.com/2023/10/16/judge-pushes-back-against-trumps-claims-that-gag-order-in-election-case-is-unfair/ I was amused that Judge Chutkan used almost the exact words UncleVlad did, that "no other criminal defendant would be allowed" to smear and attack prosecutors and court personnel as Trump has, "And I'm not going to allow it in this case.". I can only speculate, but I would imagine that to Mr Trump, being told flat-out he isn't special must scald like acid. Assuming his ego even lets him hear the statement. Dean Shomshak So, same as usual. <eyeroll> "I belong to no organized political party; I am a Democrat." -- Will Rogers Dean Shomshak

If there is one bit of news in the Gaza situation that gives me hope it won't spiral into maximum possible bad, it's what the BBC reporter in Israel (I think it was Tim Franks) said yesterday: In his interviews, Mr Franks finds that many Israelis do not hold all Palestinians, or even all Gazans, complicit in the attack by Hamas. They do not want to see collective punishment. Some commentary I have seen seems to forget that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are hive minds, and I try to resist slipping into this myself. Dean Shomshak

In the US, at least, SF was developed by a fairly peculiar fraction of society that didn't have much patience for religion. (Heavy on scientists and engineers.) (Though John W. Campbell, who probably did more to shape American SF than anyone else, became an early booster of Scientology, the religion invented by second-rate SF writer L. Ron Hubbard.) Religion sometimes entered obliquely, though. E.g., the benign Arisians and malevolent Eddorians give a God vs Satan cast to E. E. Smith's Lensman series, with a schmear of transcendence/ascension to godhood at the end. But no, I see no evidence that humanity as a whole has become much less prone to believe in gods with the increase in scientific technology and technological power. Religious fashions have changed over the millennia; the religious impulse has not. For both Traveller locations and my Star Hero campaign focusing on Sard, Planet of Adventure (Planetary Romance, fun!) I've assumed that humans would carry major contemporary religions out with them to space and new faiths would develop, ranging from seriously philosophical or mystical, to completely nuts. One of my Traveller characters came from a planet where Neo-Egyptians heavily influenced the founding culture. After centuries of cultural drift, the result was -- among other things -- a tradition of masked vigilantes which he carried off-planet as the jackal-masked vigilante Bloodhound, devotee of Anubis. Another character came from an iceworld orbiting a red dwarf star, a place where literally *everything* people need to stay alive must be manufactured and carefully maintained. The inhabitants invented the joke religion of Kludgianity, which portrays God as a harried engineer beset by substandard impossible demands, substandard materials and an incompetent labor force. Though there was a point to the joke: Don't expect God to save you from your own carelessness, He can work miracles but even He can't fix stupid. Sard, Planet of Adventure, had a large contingent of settlers from India so three new strains of Hinduism developed. The country of Vajranagar was dominated by a tiny caste of Avatars who used advanced technology such as holography and bionics to counterfeit divine powers. Religion as pure show biz flim-flam, but contemporary India sees this. The country of Tamilore is caught in civil war between two rival neo-Hindu sects that use technology to induce psi powers in the few people with the natural aptitude, the Rishis who control their powers through ascetic discipline and ritual and the Rakshasas who channel their powers through the induced delusion of being possessed by a demon. There are a few more, including one or two of (I hope) more philosophical or mystical depth, but this will do fornow. Dean Shomshak

I feel like I ought to make a joke about the Roman Catholic Church here, but I can't think of anything actually funny. Dean Shomshak