archer

I don't think I answered all of the original questions. My universe plays out like a blend of the Wild Cards universe and the Marvel universe without much DC influence. If the players want to do a solid 4 color campaign, it would play out more idealistic like classic DC. But I rather like the seedy government with secret projects and schemes which Marvel does just so much better than its competition. I own the original Villains and Vigilantes plus a couple of supplements and the original Heroes Unlimited. I use them mostly for inspiration rather than direct conversion of characters. But I've used the "random character generated by dice rolls" thing from V&V a couple of times to come up with the bare bones of what later became campaign villains. I also own Marvel Superheroes with a number of supplements and the Mayfield DC Heroes with several sourcebooks and modules. I have the issues of Adventurer Club which shows how to convert characters from both of those systems into the earlier editions of Champions. The DC heroes books are good for adaptations of characters and I personally find them much more useful than the Marvel material. The movers and shakers varies. I really enjoy using VIPER, GENOCIDE, Mechanon, and Dr. Destroyer. I'm not fond of Menton. I'm not sure why I feel like I do a better job acting as some villains rather than others when they're all three racist snobs.... Bad guys who are written up as being good planners and who lead teams often do things like stealing gold relics and decorations from Catholic churches in Mexico or overthrowing a country in South America rather than committing crimes within convenient driving distance of the heroes headquarters. I try to play the buffoons as buffoons and the brilliant planners as brilliant planners, but I admit that's an area where I struggle sometimes.

I haven't run anything in a long time. I do a recognizable Earth but often with changed city names like DC does with Gotham, Central City, Metropolis, etc. I don't want to face player comments that I didn't get the details of Cleveland just right...and I also obsess about never, ever getting details wrong so the name changes keep me from going down endless rabbit holes of research. For ancient history rather than just using the Champion Universe explanation of Progenitors, elder gods, and everything else, I pick and choose what I want to blend with my own ideas and with ideas from other fictional sources. Watching the TV show Ancient Aliens is almost a spoiler since the show seems to deliberately be a series of plot points and background ideas for a superhero campaign. Mystery men started showing up in numbers starting in the early 1920's to combat various rogue military veterans who were committing crimes then crossing jurisdictional boundaries to foil pursuit. Keep in mind this was in the era before the aggressive Hoover FBI the country came to know in the 1930's. Counties didn't necessarily cooperate with each other much less states cooperate with each other rapidly on law enforcement matters. There was a lot of Bonnie and Clyde style activity going on, many times with the perps wearing masks and toting military-grade weaponry. The heroes pursuing the criminals across jurisdictional lines (because the police couldn't) also wore masks and eventually costumes to let any police in the area recognize them as friendlies. After Prohibition and the rise of the criminal cartels, there was more need of mystery men than ever but the FBI became uncooperative with and jealous of their competition. Hoover's men uncovered secret identities of heroes, subjected them to blackmail, and in many cases prosecuted them for minor violations of law during their vigilante activities. WWII saw more legitimately superpowered heroes and more actual permanent teams. The war played out much as it did in real life but with heroes foiling Nazi experiments, supervillains, and monsters on every continent as Hitler continued to devote resources to find the one superweapon which would allow him to conquer the world. Heroes worked closely with Allied command but generally not on large battlefields since the heroes with their unique skills often weren't any more bulletproof or artillery-proof than a normal soldier. There wasn't a pressing need to get a precious and versatile resource like a superbeing killed in the chaos of a random battlefield when he could be much better used in other settings. The atomic bombings in Japan led to the eventual rise of several Japanese mutant heroes and villains plus contributed to the rise of kaiju as a continuing threat in the Pacific. Post-war in the US, Hoover and McCarthy joined forces for communist witch hunts and used the HUAC hearings in Congress to persecute and jail heroes who took a stand in favor of civil liberties rather than blindly following the government line. In later decades, government organizations such as PRIMUS and SAT were formed but there's always been a level of tension and distrust between those organizations and the heroes due to the history of the government not being trustworthy partners for the heroes. During the Cold War, the Soviets used captured Nazi scientists to jump start their own experimentation on political captives in an attempt to engineer superbeings. There was mixed results with a few of the political captives being given superpowers and breaking free and with other created supers being brainwashed into serving the state. However, there was no magic formula found to trigger the development of superpowers in any being at will. The Soviets eventually shared some of their research with the other Warsaw Pact nations and performed experiments on volunteers from various communist groups worldwide in attempts to bolster revolutions and communist governments. No direct imports of heroes and villains from Marvel/DC. Lots of direct imports from HERO products and from various HERO fan sources. As for top heroes, Lucky Strike is probably the most widely known since he's close to a hundred years old, was a TV star in the late 50's and early 60's, and was the corporate mascot for Lucky Strike cigarettes for decades. Lucky Strike has a variety of luck-based powers (he warps probability fields around him so truly bizarre things can happen like the supervillan's beloved mother wandering onto the battlefield and striking up a conversation with the mother of one of the heroes, who also happened to wander onto the battlefield). When his ship was destroyed in the South Pacific during WWII, he washed up on the island which had the Fountain of Youth and survived on its water for a couple of months until rescue. He never discovered the nature of the waters and to this day doesn't suspect the reason why he is immortal. Anyway, Lucky Strike picks up skills and martial arts maneuvers as if they were Tic Tacs since learning things is a great way to fill his time (not only the years but also extra time on his hands due to his inability to sleep) and can consult on a variety of subjects. During his adventuring career, he discovered that he was deliberately chosen and created to be an avatar for Tyme, one of the cosmic beings who underpins the nature of reality in his universe much like Eternity and Infinity do in the Marvel comic book universe. God really does play with dice. Crane is a power armor hero who used to be my PC in another campaign. He was formerly known as Kid Crane, a pre-teen budding martial artist, and was best known for going to hero get-togethers with his parents (legendary martial arts hero White Crane and her gadgeteer husband) and playing with the other heroes' children. When his parents disappeared on a mission, Kid Crane eventually gave in to his curiosity and entered his father's basement workshop. There he found a mostly completed set of power armor which he claimed as his own, justifying in his own mind that it was probably going to be his birthday present anyway. He used the armor to conceal his youth and joined the hero world with the idea that he would eventually find out what happened to his parents, even if he had to work his way through every villain in the world to do it. The power armor systems had a lot of long start-up times for many of its abilities like life support against radiation, life support against cold, nightvision, etc. (presumably most of those bugs would have been worked out if the armor had been fully finished). Crane eventually picked up enough technical skills to be able to maintain the armor systems on his own and became old enough that he no longer had to maintain the pretense in his civilian identity that his parents were still alive and well so that he wouldn't be swept into the foster system. Bount'ee Hunt'r is an alien insectoid bounty hunter (his name comes from his first understandable words in English, his real name in his native language is a series of released pheromones combined with some ultrasonic clicks). He's kind of a cross between Boba Fett and Lobo as far as his legend and skills go. When an alien civilization has a problem with someone who is on Earth and they don't want to mount a full-scale invasion, Bount'ee Hunt'r's name always comes up as a potential way to deal with the irritant. (The apostrophes in his name are there to represent the clicks he makes when he speaks.) Captain Kung Fu was a redneck bar-fighter with way too much DEX and SPD for his own good. He used his physical abilities to simulate being skilled in martial arts and was never on the ball enough to understand that having "Kung Fu" in his name might be offensive to the heroes and villains who really were skilled in real martial arts. Captain Kung Fu died in a hail of machine gun bullets when confronting time-travelling WWII German soldiers, which is what happens when you don't have enough resistant defenses. He has in own statue in the city park of his home town and is fondly remember by its residents. If I start up a game again, I plan to add a couple of my creations from the "Supers Image Game" thread in this forum. Lady Unluck would be a good addition as a counterpoint to Lucky Strike. And Topper would make for a good gentleman villain.

"For years, China has systematically looted American trade secrets. Here's the messy inside story of how DC got Beijing to clean up its act...for a while." https://www.wired.com/story/us-china-cybertheft-su-bin/

I'm going to add Insert City to the list of interesting places to visit on my world map. Thanks!

I like to look at it this way. Filming for the original Avengers movie took from April 2011 until December which is slightly longer than a season of major league baseball. The actors had additional time commitments to the film's publicity before its theatrical release but if we ignore that, the time the actors had to block out for work on the film was about the same length as the pre-season, regular season, and post-season of MBL. Looking at the top earners of Major league baseball of the 2017 season, the top earner made $33 million. The guy who was at the bottom of the top 25 most highly paid players made $21 million. https://www.businessinsider.com/mlb-highest-paid-players-2017-6#t24-jayson-werth-210-million-1 If you compare the top actor in a film named for that actor's character and the film is expected to be a blockbuster, paying her $15 million for her entertainment efforts seems like it's coming off cheap compared to major league baseball salaries. To find someone who made as little as $15 million dollars for this season, you'd have to look all the way down to the 70th most highly paid player in major league baseball. https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/ Is your leading actor worth as much as the 70th most highly paid player in major league baseball?

Quote: "How about a quick hug, baby?"

The rate of superhuman mutation doesn't even have to be greater now. In 1900, the population of the US was 76.2 million. The current population of the US is estimated to be 327.5 million (an increase of 4.29 times over the year 1900 population). Even with no adjustments, there would be 4.29 times as many mutants in the US as there used to be. Life expectancy in 1900 for a man in the US was 46.3 years. In 1998, a man's life expectancy in the US was 73.8 years. (That's a 59% increase.) http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html Male mutants who do live into adulthood are living 59% longer than they did previously (numbers for females show a similar increase). Then take into account: "In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. Infant mortality dropped from approximately 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1915 (the first year for which data to calculate an infant mortality rate were available) to 29.2 deaths per 1,000 births in 1950 and 7.1 per 1,000 in 1999." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220806/ That site goes on to credit the change to better nutrition, better healthcare, and better sanitation which are available to people of every income level today but wasn't in the past. Potential mutants who live in poverty today by-and-large are living into puberty and are having the chance for their powers to manifest while in previous decades they didn't. And that's even more critical to public perception of how many mutants exist than how long they might live. Yeah, living longer means the mutant is around longer to be discovered. But having massively larger numbers of potential mutants living long enough to manifest their powers is where the "mutant problem" makes an real impact on public awareness. (A side note: the various countries which still have high infant mortality rates are, in the comics world, still seem to be showing a lower rate of manifestation of mutants and a lower public perception of "hey, this is a major societal problem which needs to be addressed by the government right now".) The perception by the rich old families that "mutants come from rich old families" probably came about at least in part from the fact that potential mutants from poor families were dying off in large numbers while young and the survivors were often not living very long even after reaching adulthood. And there's also better nationwide and worldwide news coverage today than there was in the past so every time a new mutant manifests in a dramatic fashion, the old families hear about it these days whereas in prior decades they likely didn't. Yeah, the rate of superhuman mutation is probably increasing just because that makes for a more dramatic story. But you could very well have the same things happening even if the rate wasn't increasing at all.

I'm aware of the World Security Council but it isn't defined in the MCU as to what that means. In the comics at the moment, SHIELD stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. However, in the MCU at the moment, SHIELD stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. So the name is deliberately reminiscent of the US's Department of Homeland Security. The use of "Homeland" in the name makes no sense if there's no particular homeland to reference. Also the "World Security Council" has access to nuclear weapons and the launch authorization for them and can apparently launch a nuclear attack on a US city without worrying about the political repercussions of launching a nuclear attack on the United States. In the real world, only nations have access to nuclear weapons and the authorization to use them. In any world, real or fiction, I have a hard time imagining the existence of a non-US organization which would have the right to launch a spur-of-the-moment nuclear attack on New York City. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I choose to think of the World Security Council as a group of people drawn from US-allied countries to oversee a US government-funded intelligence organization, something which is consistent with the way the group has functioned in its appearances. If anyone wishes to think of SHIELD and the World Security Council as an unfunded independent organization or part of the unfunded UN, they're free to do so. They may very well be shown to be correct in future World Security Council appearances. http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/World_Security_Council http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/World_Security_Council_(Earth-199999)

I think it's clear who is right. Look at the problems the Avengers dealt with which were pointed to in the movie as justification for the Accords to control the Avengers' actions: 1) The alien invasion of New York 2) The attempt by HYDRA to take over the world using new SHIELD super-helicarriers 3) The attempt by Ultron to destroy the world 4) The successful attempt by Crossbones to steal a biological weapon and the casualties from his suicide 1) The alien invasion of New York: The Avengers were formed and asked to intervene by SHIELD which is the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the MCU. The government asked them to form and intervene in the situation. The government also bungled and attempted to nuke New York City, which wouldn't have ended the invasion, but would have just killed civilians and the heroes who were trying to stop the invasion. So the Avenger's actions were sanctioned, saved millions of lives locally, plus saved the world. There was no justification shown anywhere to display how the Avengers did anything at all which was inappropriate. 2) The attempt by HYDRA to take over the world using new SHIELD super-helicarriers The government's intelligence services were deeply penetrated by a terrorist organization which was using government resources to build superweapons which would assassinate everyone worldwide who might be capable of someday of opposing the terrorists. The couple of heroes who tried to stop that from happening were hounded by the terrorists who were misappropriating government resources but managed to stop events from escalating by crashing some of the superweapons into the ocean and crashing one of them into the government building which the terrorists had been using as their headquarters. During these events, the only thing I could see for the US government to be upset at the Avengers would be making all those SHIELD/HYDRA secrets available to everyone on the internet. But that was done by the director of SHIELD deliberately giving his access codes to make it happen while he was standing next to the SHIELD agent who was typing in the commands. There was no justification shown anywhere to display how the Avengers did anything at all which was inappropriate. Additionally, all the people working in the non-US governments of the world should be thrilled at what happened because they weren't assassinated by the HYDRA superweapon. They should also be thrilled at getting all the free intelligence information. 3) The attempt by Ultron to destroy the world Once Ultron existed, he had to be stopped because he wanted to kill the vast majority of the people on Earth. In Sokovia, the Avengers took great pains to evacuate the threatened city before the crisis started. And after the crisis started, they took great pains to continue protecting and evacuating civilians. If the Avengers had been slowed down by as much as five minutes while asking for UN permission to save the world from destruction, the world would have been destroyed. You could argue that this series of events was started by the Avengers. But when you get down to it, Tony Stark was doing questionable scientific research behind the backs of the other Avengers which prevented them from making sure he had proper safeguards in place and which prevented anyone from being there to monitor things when it visibly started going wrong. The actions that the Avengers made were entirely appropriate. The actions of Tony Stark which were made behind the backs of the Avengers were probably inappropriate. You could justify UN restrictions and monitoring on dangerous scientific research, but not the response of the Avengers. (I could also argue that the invasion of New York started in Project Pegasus because the government was doing dangerous scientific research in secret without proper oversight.) You could also argue that the Hulk being mind controlled into going on a rampage was somehow the Avengers fault. But honestly, the president of the USA could have been mind-warped by the same villain and could have been persuaded into starting a global thermonuclear war. The leader of any country, company, or organization could have been just as mind-twisted as the Hulk was and would have been just as powerless to stop it. That's not the fault of the Avengers, that's just the state of affairs when a wide array of superpowers become available to random individuals who might choose to abuse them. 4) The successful attempt by Crossbones to steal a biological weapon and the casualties from his suicide First of all, the theft of the biological weapon happened even with the Avengers being right there. That suggests that the theft would have been fully successful without the Avengers being there and a WMD would have been in the hands of a terrorist. The chase of people trying to escape with the biological weapon was conducted with what appeared to be a high degree of professionalism and skill. All the bad guys were caught and the WMD was recovered despite competent planning on the part of the bad guys. It's unknown how much time the Avengers might have had to contact the proper authorities in the nation where the events happened. But we also don't know whether the local authorities were trustworthy or competent. It is also unknown why the facility had a WMD on the premises without enough armed security and safeguards to withstand a terrorist attack. Or why the facility was located in a densely populated urban area without roads of adequate size to allow a police response to an emergency. In the US, a facility like that couldn't get a high enough clearance from the CDC to do WMD research. Maybe the facility had the WMD because of an ongoing local medical emergency like an Ebola outbreak. But if it wasn't something like that (and that wasn't indicated at all in the movie), the UN should look into imposing regulations on who has access to biological WMD's, the safety of research facilities, and sanctions on any nation or facility which breaks the rules. Back to the movie...the problem most of the public and governments appeared to have with the series of events was when Crossbones set off his (inobvious inaccessible focus) suicide bomb in the middle of a dense crowd of people. The purpose of an IIF is that people don't notice it. Professional hand-to-hand combatants who were familiar with Crossbones himself and who were also familiar with explosives weren't able to spot the bomb despite being in his presence for several minutes. I don't think it could be argued that if the Avengers had let the local police handle the situation that they would have spotted the bomb and have had the time to evacuate the area. After it became clear that the bomb was going to go off inside of a crowd of people, the Avengers had the choice of letting the bomb go off inside a crowd of people or trying to move the bomb up and away from the crowd of people. There was no way to know how powerful the bomb might be. There was no way to know how soon the bomb would go off. There was no way to know whether there was a significant number of people in the multi-story building nearby or whether that building would be in the bomb's blast radius. The best available option to preserve lives was to move the bomb up above both the crowd and the building. Fortunately, the crowd was saved but the bomb exploded before getting high enough to spare the building. I really don't at all understand world leaders, particularly Wakanda, getting into a hissy fit about this. If the Wakandan nationals had been in the crowd walking toward the building (rather than already inside) and had been saved, I would presume by his juvenile reaction to the event that the leader of Wakanda would have been perfectly fine with that and would be praising the Avengers' brilliant reaction to the crisis. Sorry, most world leaders in a terrorist event don't blame the first responders because their citizens were 40 yards closer rather than 40 yards further away from the terrorist when he sets off his suicide bomb. Anyway, I don't see anything at all there to blame the Avengers for. "Let the terrorist have the WMD because if he were to have a suicide bomb which no one can see, then he might set it off" isn't really a valid plan for dealing with emergencies. ======= So from my perspective, there's no justification for the Accords to exist (and no justification for them to have been either proposed or ratified but let's set that aside for the sake of conversation). Should the Avengers have signed on to it? Tony Stark is mentally unstable. When he was confronted by the mother whose son was killed by Ultron, Tony lost his ability to reason just as he did during various comic book story arcs like his Armor Wars and Civil War. That was true to the comics but doesn't make him, at all, right in his position. In the HYDRA incident and the Ultron incident, the delay of just a couple of minutes would have meant the world as we know it would have been destroyed along with millions of lives. There's not going to be a UN committee already gathered together 24 hours a day waiting to render decisions on whether to send in the Avengers. Just getting the committee up to speed on the information they would need to have in order to make a decision would take longer than a couple of minutes. By the time the committee had time to discuss and debate whether to send in the Avengers, the world would have been destroyed for sure at least twice and probably a third time already that we know of. So I don't see any way at all for that committee plan to work. (Now if they wanted to make the Avengers do a UN committee after-action report so that better pre-planning and responses for future missions could be done, I could see something like that being useful. But that isn't part of the Accords.) If I were in the Avengers, I'd have made an intellectual case to the Secretary of State, an imbecile who can't think things through on his own, and to Stark, who is mentally unstable, and try to jolt either of them into seeing that the Avengers' actions were appropriate and necessary. I'd also do the media circuit and explain to the press and public exactly why they'd already be dead many times over if the Accords were in place. If that didn't work to stop the Accords from being signed, I'd advocate the Avengers not sign, stay together, and respond to any future world-threatening crisis as if the Accords didn't exist (while continuing the media appearances). Eventually, the Avengers would either save the world again and wouldn't be jailed for it due to the political backlash. Or some country which signed the Accords would experience a big enough crisis to invite the Avengers in even though they aren't UN sanctioned and that country would also become an advocate to repeal the Accords.

Thank you for the clarification.

I liked the episode when the evangelical Christian preacher came to the station and held revival services. The couple of Minbari who showed up to the services tried to clap and be appropriately enthusiastic during the praise music but couldn't quite get the musical timing right. Just the look on their faces of how lost they were in trying to figure out what was going on was a priceless moment in TV history.

As we've seen, if you don't give him a shield, he will take it.

Geez, I hope not. There's too many speedsters running around the show already without throwing yet another back into the mix. I did like the "we don't have the crime-fighting resources we used to have due to events in last season" angle that the season premier showed and hope they play up that in upcoming episodes. One of the best ways to deal with a speedster is to hit him with the unknown and all of the high tech surveillance added to instantaneous travel for the entire team was a bit much to hit the Flash effectively with normal villains.

Can you elaborate on what the Originalist "claim" is? To the best of my knowledge, both branches of Originalism are a philosophical viewpoints of how judges and justices should approach cases involving constitutional matters. What "claim" has been made?

Maybe Ethiopians are just weird. "Ending world hunger" was one of my personal causes a few decades back so I followed news of the various Ethiopian famines. And I was excited when an Ethiopian lady was hired at work because I could talk to her about her experiences (she looked like a poster child for anorexia even a few years after getting to the US). So after I got to know her, I gently broached the subject (trying to be sensitive since her experiences might have been horrific). She flat out said that there'd never been any famine anywhere during Ethiopia, at least during her lifetime (and she had to have lived through at least three of them that I knew about, considering her age). She claimed that the repeated "famines" were completely an invention of her government's propaganda machine so that they could steal relief money and supplies as they poured into the country. Oookay....

Draining a defense only gets you half the value of whatever you roll on the dice. Having any kind of sizable drain go off at the same time as a blast effect is going to make for an ungodly large active point attack. If you don't have it go off at the same time as the blast, the character is going to have to blow a phase to do the drain...and that's not going to be worth doing in the vast majority of fights. Transform is what first came to mind but it has much the same problems as doing a drain effect. On the other hand, you could just link a few extra dice of effect onto whatever ice attack is being used and only have the extra dice go off if the target is already wet. That's the lowest active point option I can think of and is less bookkeeping than either a drain or transform. For example, a 10d6 ice blast plus 3d6 blast (limitation only on the 3d6 of -0 only if target is already wet). The limitation isn't worth any points, in my opinion, because the character can make targets wet. But some GM's might allow a -1/4 limitation since the extra dice in the power isn't available during her first attack against any target.

I liked Nora well enough but it was odd that she mentioned Lightning Lad, given the backstory the writers gave for her character in the show. But I would totally love it if the show were to go in that direction (or spin-off in that direction). But as for the direction it seems the writers are hinting that the storyline will go, meh. There's only so many times you can do training montages before the audience wants to see something else.

You could Mind Control an area with one command "don't use extra-dimensional movement" and come up with it being cheaper than 300 AP.

I didn't fully realize until you mentioned it that this is why I play characters who don't have living/available family members: everyone in my life turns out to be an unpaid DNPC if I show the slightest interest in whether they live or die.

Offhand, I would think a grizzly bear would fit perfectly if you gave it a bonus to perception checks and described its bite as a "beak attack". There's been several people, notably Killer Shrike and Michael Surbrook, who've done a lot of conversion work between the two systems but I've not specifically seen an owlbear. I know Killer Shrike hangs out on the forums here sometimes but not sure about Surbrook. http://killershrike.com http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationscreatures/games/games.html I would also recommend bookmarking this site which has a list of links of how to convert to HERO from a number of different systems. (Note that many of the links are old enough that you might have to look them up in the WaybackMachine website.) http://www.curufea.com/doku.php?id=roleplaying:hero:conversions:fantasy_hero

So it was better than the original Godzilla vs Mothra but not nearly as good as Galaxy Quest?

You are not correct about that: It might be politically disastrous. But Congress could pass a law to remove anything at all from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction except for the few cases specifically mentioned in other parts of Article III. It could for example, remove marriage issues from the court's jurisdiction or guns or virtually any of the various things which are political issues these days.

The main problem I have with Trump and him bringing the Alt Right into the mainstream of American politics is that we had finally put a stake through the heart of ethnic fascism as a valid political movement in the late 1940's when the KKK lost its political power. Even if you agreed with Trump on various political issues, or just absolutely detested the Democrats, was winning the 2016 presidential election worth bringing ethnic fascism back to be a major player in American politics for the next ten decades? ==== A short backgrounder for those not familiar with American politics: Richard Spencer, a self-described white nationalist, coined the term "Alt Right" to describe his ethno-nationalism political philosophy which he hoped would become an Alternative to the existing american political Right (aka Alt Right). Steve Bannon became chief executive of Trump's presidential campaign and later became Trump's Chief Strategist after Trump was elected. But during the 2016 before he accepted a post in the Trump campaign, Bannon used the rather large news site where he was an editor to raise the profile of Alt Right thought and to explain why it was a legitimate political philosophy rather than fringe kookiness. While that was going on, Richard Spencer's website, which he used to explain his political philosophy, was posting various articles, such as the one which I liked to use as an example, which explained not only why the author was anti-Semitic (his words) but why everyone should be anti-Semitic. Late in the campaign, Hillary described those Alt Right people who were being legitimized by the Trump campaign, a "basket of deplorables". That was not only accurate but a more catchy description than what I was using at the time. So in short, now we have public ethnic fascism back as a major force in US politics for the first time in a number of decades. And I don't see that genie going back into the bottle any time soon unless Trump goes down in a very humiliating manner. ====

There usually has to be some kind of suit before the Court looks at it. And while the Court can choose to look at any suit at all, they almost never look at any which haven't worked their way through the lower courts. Just "having the votes" doesn't mean that the justices, on either side, are willing to completely ignore how the Court works on a day-to-day basis in order to impose their own will on the country. Even in the most activist Court eras, we haven't seen Justices doing that. And the Justices currently on the Court in recent years haven't been trying to drag in wild and crazy things repeatedly for the Court to look at even though both sides thought they had a decent shot at convincing Kennedy over to their side. You'll probably see a lot of nasty tweets from Trump telling the Court that they ought to do something about such-and-such (like making it illegal for the media to criticize a president, something he's brought up repeatedly). But I don't see the Court actually caving to the president to do all the crap which floats through his imagination.

If it's not Baroque, don't fix it.