Celan

Rebec is still a Nord's Nord even though I added Maggie. Who dispenses the sweet milk of kindness before she sucks your blood. Colonel and I watched The Ritual on Netflix. Pretty cool. Note to self, never vacation in Sweden (even though it was actually shot in Romania). As for TES races: Nords Nords Nords Redguard Dunmer Fuck everyone else.

Well it's capitalized, so.

She did say that Dales had to give up the empire and embrace Oblivion or something. And she's got a lot of power and knowledge to be anything but connected.

In PoE, intimidation is tied to Might which is also the statistic that mages use to widen area of effect. So you've got a lot of mages going around busting skulls in Eora. It's kind of amusing. I hope they change it, personally.

It could be both, an Ayleid spirit in service of some daedric prince.

I have no idea what's going on with Dales but it's definitely interesting.

Not better, but not worse either.

He's not outside the media, but there is Fox and then everyone else. Everyone else parrots the same lines, fed to them from the same sources, and create a loud echo chamber which also never admits bias.

I'm aware that Lott also manipulates data, as in, uses different parameters than the ones our media parrots. The problem is they have a megaphone.

Not to get us back into politics, but have a gander at a site called the Crime Prevention Research Center. It's a conservative site but data comes from public sources. Shows clearly how the data is being manipulated to make random mass violence seem unique to the US when proportionate to our populaton, it's not. We're behind several European countries and only just ahead of Canada. Our media and political establishment is a pit of liars.

Why is that weird? lol Northern Germans and Dutch pretty much the same thing back then- they married each other a lot. I learned a lot on Ancestry.com. Some early ancestors were first cousins who lived across the Hudson River from one another. Their son fought in the Revolutionary War- for the British. He had to flee to fucking Canada. The shame! This apparently wasn't uncommon. His daughter came back to New York and married a Dutch American, my direct ancestors.

I read it, that's what I meant about the milk sipper.

I don't get that. I mean, the neocons were definitely a cabal which is why I said he surrounded himself with yes men. Neoconservatism is a largely academic movement and rooted in the left, not the right. All Obama did was act out academic leftism- socialist domestic policies, the Iranian deal and reflexive anti-Israel sentiment, internationalism, and a lot of the actual policy making he left to others. Both were internationalists. It's only different in emphasis. I think Bush is responsible for Iraq because he felt his father had only half finished the job and he decided to use the presumed goodwill after 9/11 to go back and mop up. (if only) Anyway, we can take this to PM to get the thread off politics. Good discussion though.

In both cases she would see it as being practical. A tool is no good once it's broken, and happy pets are safer and available to be sucked on again at a later date.

Bush adopted a folksy way of talking, that's all. So did Obama, he just used the black preacher voice instead of the hayseed variety. Bush Jr never struck me as unintelligent or "incurious," as the idiot press used to call him. On the contrary, he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do and that's what he did, hell or high water. ( <-- I don't say that as a compliment)

Bush Jr wasn't stupid, either. He was very well read. Our media likes to portray any Republican as stoopid. They're similar because they're both ideologues who insulated themselves with yes men and didn't try to actually solve problems, rather enacted their respective ideologies. Bush was big on social entitlements- the biggest expansion of those before Obamacare was Medicare Part D. Their main difference was in approach to foreign policy but both of them left foreign policy disasters.

Pretty good for a milk sipper.

No, it's not. For one thing, you don't have a "right" to a doctor or nurse's labor, for example. That right there illustrates the difference. Individualism isn't self centered or callous. The only difference is whether concern for your fellow human being should be enforced at the butt end of the government's many, many guns. I don't find any particular virtue or enlightenment in that kind of "compassion." I do agree Bush and Obama are two sides of the same coin. Was just saying that to Colonel today, have always said it. And agreed, there's never an end to it.

Now we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about basic human rights, the sovereignty of the individual, not a broad social egalitarianism. The right to speech, assembly, due process, private property and yes, self defense. And not even that these things must be secured, only that the government can't infringe on them. It's up to the individual to exercise their own rights, the only thing the state must do is get out of the way. I want no part of social egalitarianism. That's totalitarianism that pretends to be benign. It boggles me that the same people who advocate a massive social state also complain about the police and surveillance state, as if those things aren't connected. I liked Bernie for standing up to the Clinton machine, but he doesn't tell the truth about his policies, so he's just like the rest of them.

I don't know about any of you, but I'd rather stand up and die than roll over and live a few extra hours. Not that I'd ever make that choice for anyone else. But neither will someone make it for me. America's founders were responding to a specific threat, one they had experienced in England and which is the same one as the Hitler example which is why it's valid- the notion that only a ruling elite deserves to be able to defend their lives and property.

Would like to add that it's nice to finally have a thoughtful discussion on the subject, instead of the screeching on social media. Changing gears... Oh sheeeeet. Sort of a PoE 1 spoiler...

The limited but very significant moral victory of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw illustrates why it was important. Hitler had declared that Jews and Poles were weak and wanted German rule. The fact that a few of them decided to fight back, with arms from the Polish Home Army (who also were skeptical of the Jews having arms at first), struck a blow to Hitler's notion of Aryan supremacy. Of course this ultimately wasn't successful militarily. In the US, there is an implied classism to calls for stricter gun control. The rich will always be able to afford the license fees and taxes, they'll be able to have armed security, and the poor will go to jail so that the rich can feel some symbolic victory for "doing something about guns." It would be the same thing as the war on drugs. Already it costs quite a lot to get a concealed carry permit in some states. The interesting thing about open carry is that it reveals that gun control still has a racist nature.

And gun control in the US was instituted in response to the Black Panthers. It's always about making sure the elite are the only ones who can protect themselves. edit- And about increasing federal revenues, as I said earlier. Which amounts to the same thing. What people don't get is that private property is the basis of civil freedom, and without being able to protect your property, you might as well not have any. If there's anything that makes this clear in US history, it's the civil rights movement, which contrary to popular belief was not all of the Gandhi variety.

I would be fine with mandatory gun safety training in schools, and a civil defense program with some additional training and service. Like I said earlier, the Israeli model. Most of these random shooters shit their pants as soon as armed opposition shows up, as with the church shooting recently which was stopped by a neighbor with a rifle. Yeah you won't stop all of them, such as hardened terrorists, but we never will anyway. I am not fine with banning semi automatic weapons for civilian use, either outright or by overtaxing and over-regulation. That just ensures the only ones who have access to them are police and criminals.

Agreed on all, except the way to deal with it is to ensure that the perpetrators can't just walk in to a school or movie theater unhindered. The current approach is to declare all public spaces "gun free zones" which ensures plenty of helpless victims. You know why the outlets don't want to react appropriately? Because then they'd have to pay for real security guards instead of the $8/hour rent-a-drunks they currently use, if there's any security at all. The clueless dipshits in our media keep perpetuating the fantasy that we can be like Europe when we really need to be emulating Israel. Gun violence in general has gone down sharply over recent decades. "Gun control" is about pacifying people by making them believe the politicians are doing something, while they get to pocket more of the profit from gun sales in the form of taxes and fees. The biggest gun runner in the US is the federal government, so they'd have to take a sharp cut in revenue to reduce gun sales, and they're not going to do it.