archer

The short answer is "no". The long answer, not surprisingly, is more nuanced. 1) A Congressman or Senator takes an oath of office "that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion." So her first duty is to the Constitution even if her constituents might want her to enact policies which would go against that. 2) The politician is also supposed to tell her constituents what she believes and what she wants to do once she's in office so that the voters are presented a clear choice between her and her opponent. Getting elected to office to a certain extent is the voters saying they support that candidate's agenda so it is certainly appropriate for the candidate to pursue that agenda once she gets into office. 3) Now going back to the founding of the nation, commentary on the proposed Constitution which was eventually adopted made it clear that national lawmakers were to be selected to use their own judgement to evaluate the issues of the day and apply that judgement to proposed legislation. Now what the constituents want the lawmakers to do on various issues after she's elected to office is certainly important as part of the process of the lawmaker gathering information on those issues so she can make a wise decision. But she's not there to rubber stamp whatever whims might be foremost in the public's mind at any point in time. If the public feels that her ultimate decision on various issues aren't reflecting their desires closely enough, that's what the next election is for.

Maybe the pilgrims decided to go vegan.

I was specifically talking about the volunteer aid worker doctors compared to their patients in impoverished African countries. A doctor there often lives in poverty without many amenities when measured by Western standards. But they're still usually much better off than the people who come to their clinics.

Oh God no. Keep him out of the MCU. I wouldn't even trust him with the Power Pack movie.

I blame global warming. < ducks >

Thank you for that. I knew most or all of that at one point or another but my memory isn't what it once was.

I notice this a lot when there's a mass shooting then lawmakers in response rush to introduce gun restriction bills which would have had no effect on the shooter's ability to get a gun if the bill had already been law. The goal of the legislation obviously wasn't to stop that kind of shooting from ever happening again because the law would have had zero effect on that kind of shooting. In the words of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former Chief of Staff, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

The not yet made, to the best of my knowledge, next Kelvin timeline Star Trek movie. The planned time travel one with Thor fell apart some time in 2018 because they couldn't get the actor onboard so I took it that this was a search for a replacement plot.

I was slightly more willing to give JJ Abrams the benefit of the doubt before he contacted 50 (IIRC) science fiction writers to ask them which of the Star Trek the original series episodes that he should rewrite for his next movie. How lazy is it for Abrams to contact actual professional science fiction writers, most of whom would be thrilled to work on a Star trek movie, only to waste their talent by polling them about which fifty year old TV episode he should rip off for his next movie?

Out of curiosity, was it an even mix of priests, nuns, and altar boys? I understand that in military engagements that different units usually have different characteristics.

Yes, but did you ever attack a mass with one?

Leonard Nemoy would have been 88 yesterday. Here's an interview of him done back in 2012 talking about his career and influence. http://www.startrek.com/article/leonard-nimoy-interview

The crossovers between different companies have never been canon for either Marvel or DC to the best of my knowledge. Though that may have changed for DC with the characters of the couple of the comic companies they later bought out and integrated into the DC universe.

The CU focuses a lot more on making us aware of the forces of evil than it does with how many superhero groups exist, just how much firepower U.N.T.I.L. can amass, what NATO can toss into the mix, etc. And that's before the various GM and player additions to the Forces of Supposedly Good. There's a Kingdom of Champions sourcebook to tell us the major players in the Great Britain superhero scene. But I haven't seen the Great Big Book of US Superheroes sourcebook. At least not yet.

The plague should also be avoided like the plague but now we're back to the Ebola story where the conversation started....

Thank You! When the 2nd amendment was written, a private citizen could purchase a ship which could match the best the government owned and put as many cannon on it as he wanted and could afford. So the people who wrote the 2nd amendment were well-aware of how open-ended the amendment was. And they would have welcomed that private ship into the militia forces in case of emergency. The difficult process to amend the Constitution is there to make sure that we have a national consensus as much as possible before we make fundamental changes to our governing document. We've never had a national consensus on limiting the right to keep and bear arms but we could probably come to one if we started with an amendment barring private ownership of armed tanks, ICBM's, bazookas, machine guns, RPG's (other than HERO), etc.

I don't care about the abortion issue either. As a member of the party, I supported pro-life language with reasonable exceptions when writing platforms and in floor votes because I was in a political alliance with people for whom that was a major issue. But I wouldn't have walked across the street to take part in an abortion protest. I don't think abortion is a matter which falls under the jurisdiction of the national government. It should be left to state law or in the absence of state law, up to individual choice. If I'd been a member of the US Senate or the House, I would have voted my understanding of the Constitution rather than vote to support my political allies. I've often said that the pro-life people, if they were serious about saving lives, would offer giving up every exception under the sun as part of a deal (rape, incest, life of the mother, unviable fetus, severely deformed fetus, and on and on) except for abortion on demand. That's been where the vast majority of the American public has been on the issue for decades and it would have been politically difficult or impossible for Democrat lawmakers to have turned down that deal (at least until quite recently and perhaps even still today). Whether that's right or not may be up for debate but that's been my longstanding position on the matter. If the deal passed, everyone high fives and goes home with the national abortion rate slashed to a tiny fraction of what it was before. If the deal didn't pass, it would be easy to paint the Democrats as being extremists on the issue and change the national consensus on who should be in office. But the pro-life people were always too much of extremists themselves to settle for slashing the abortion rate to a tiny fraction of what it was and have insisted on allowing a large number of abortions happen for decades until that hoped for mythical day when they will finally get a total victory on the issue.

That's very neat. I don't know how much it will help, but it's very neat. If I had my way, it'd be No-Kill shelter animals rather than just shelter animals but that's a small quibble in a good news story.

To be fair, I have a problem wrapping my head around Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Communist Russia, and Pol Pot as well. Pol Pot had everyone who wore eyeglasses executed because he thought people who wore glasses might be decadent intellectuals.

Cyclops – a wolverine (1) - Everyone does realize that Cyclops would be taking his super pet to work every day and Wolverine would have to look at it? Cyclops might not survive beyond that first day but that first day would be epic. Conan the Barbarian – a rhino (7) - The perfect riding animal for those casual occasions. Dr. Strange – a white rabbit (10) - Not happy about any of the remaining choices but the good doctor could at least handle it with flair. Ice – a polar bear cub (3) - Such a cub wouldn't remain small for long and Ice could use a bodyguard. Black Panther – a black panther (2) - A bit redundant for my tastes.

I can understand to some extent stealing from doctors, who are wealthy compared to the general population, and stealing medicines for themselves or for resale. I have a real problem wrapping my head around shooting undefended doctors and burning down medical facilities which might be otherwise be resupplied with valuable medicines. That just doesn't work well within my personal worldview.

"Reacting poorly to even small lies" is a bit more than "honorable" at least the way I've seen honorable people behave or portrayed. I'd consider that a separate complication.

One thing maybe as important as the rules is whether they've played a RPG before and have some idea what they're supposed to do. I had a Fantasy Hero group once who I started off as escaped slaves on a pirate ship which had been set on fire accidentally during the escape. The ship was just off the coast of an unknown land in one direction, no features visible in any other direction. The ship had no life rafts or boats on it. The three players are trapped on the prow of the ship by the pirate captain and some crewmen. Only three enemies at a time could reach the players. This was an introductory combat to give them a feel for the system while trapping them in place so they wouldn't have to worry about movement, being flanked, excessive equipment, or anything complicated. Every few phases a piece of burning debris would fall from the masts and sails to hit a combatant, causing either physical or energy damage. Obviously from my descriptions and from what I explicitly said, the ship wasn't going to last long. The combat went okay and the players won. Then stayed on the ship. And stayed on the ship. And stayed on the ship despite getting hit by ever-increasing amounts of burning debris. The players couldn't figure out what their characters should do about them being on a burning ship with a grassy shore being a hundred yards away and with them not being weighted down by any significant amount of possessions. Let me note that one of them, the healer/druid, was a former D&D player and all three had WoW experience. None of them thought to check the dead enemies for loot. And they couldn't figure out that they needed to get off of a ship that was fully engulfed in flames until after they'd all taken unnecessary burns. Once they finally swam to "shore", I described that they were actually standing in water amid salt water grasses which stretched endlessly to the north and south. But to the east about a mile, they could see that the grass ended, transitioning into some hills. So the players discussed for 30 minutes, no joke, which direction their characters should go and finally decided to go north. They'd started early in the day and trudged northward all day and coming close to the end of the day, I pointed out to them that since they were wading through endless (explicitly endless) salt marshes with a very few scattered trees that there was no dry place for them to camp, except for the land which continued to be clearly seen about a mile away to the east. So they discussed it and decided to find a tree which they could climb to spend the night. And despite me telling them at intervals that they had BODY damage which wasn't going to heal anytime soon naturally and that the druid had free healing spells, nobody wanted to perform or get any healing spells. Anyway, I ended up having to put them on railroad tracks until they got enough of an idea of what to do that I didn't have to tell them what to do in order to reach the meat of the adventure. I guess if I'd told them that the hills had a bright yellow exclamation mark for a quest marker that they would have moved immediately in the direction I wanted them to go. But I kept thinking that even though the world was a sandbox that they'd instinctively want to do the interesting things rather than all the obviously boring things. TL;DR If they're new players, tell them what to do then let them decide how to do it, if the only other choice is to let them drive you crazy.

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My money is on Loki being the one most responsible for the final takedown of Thanos.