"So, how could 2020 get worse?" I hear you ask.

We could go into a high-tension phase in one of the most politically-tense places on Earth, that's how.

North Korea threatens to cut communications with South over anti-Pyongyang leaflets

Quote:North Korea said it was cutting off all communication channels with South Korea on Tuesday, a move experts say could signal Pyongyang has grown frustrated that Seoul has failed to revive lucrative inter-Korean economic projects and persuade the United States to ease sanctions.

You may have noticed that the Army is protecting the Lincoln Memorial from Americans, while the whole city of DC is overrun by people who look like some sort of militarized police in generic uniforms.  Who are these men in black who answer only to the Attorney General and the President himself?  And where the hell did thousands of them come from?

The Story Behind Bill Barr’s Unmarked Federal Agents.  This article has everything you need to know about where they come from, how the US government has been adding one ATF worth of assorted police every year since 2001.  I definitely did not know that the National Gallery has a shooting range.

The other implication is that, at least in the federal district, the United States now has a secret police, whose members will not tell the public which agency they work.  They erect checkpoints around the city, attack camera crews, and open fire on protesters so that the president can wave a Bible in a photo op.  All part of the President's plan to "dominate the streets".  Nominally, these police report to a government officer, but the majority of officers are non-permanent acting appointments serving as figureheads; in practice the police collective only answers to the top levels of party leadership.

Quoted from the "drunken author rambling" at the end of ch21 of Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum by Mister Cynical (Note, "tenant" has been corrected to "tenet" near the end because that is one of those little things that drives me right up the wall):

Hey, hey. Stop me if you've heard this one. An asshole walks into a Walmart with an AR-15 less than a week after a Nazi shoots up a different Walmart. Why did he do it? To test his right to walk into a Walmart with a gun after a shooting! Get it? Do you get the joke?

The joke is that everybody I know keeps telling me that this dipshit is on my side because we're both gun owners.

This is the way the Second Amendment ends, not with a bang, but with the whimper of some asshole as he stands at gun point waiting for the cops to arrest him cause he wanted to wave his gun around in public and terrify people because that's his right. Oh, and all the assholes defending him.

You know, I've been a gun owner for a long time. I've never had the urge to march into a public place dressed like a paintballer's idea of a cool guy operator. Maybe because I don't like being the center of attention. Maybe because I've had to wear that kind of shit for real and therefore don't need to make believe. Nothing makes you hate a flak jacket faster than wearing one in a swamp.

Have you ever just sat back and realized that the people who are supposed to be on your side are your biggest opponents and they're too stupid to understand it? And the fact that they're a bunch of weirdos in the gun community that most of us don't like either just rubs salt in the wound.

Try to talk to somebody about historical guns or something and one of these dip shits will immediately run in and start talking about the massive communist conspiracy to take away guns.

Why? I kind of think it's because they don't actually know anything about guns. Guns are just a symbol to them. They don't know history, mechanics or importance and they don't care about having fun shooting. They just know gun are important and will therefore insert themselves into every gun conversation they hear with the intelligence and restraint of a fat kind in a candy shop.

All these people who cannot function as human beings. They can't sit down and talk to people. They can only scream at strawmen, at the other. The mysterious, nameless, formless force that is against them for no reason other than to be. So. . .basically Nemesis. And the camera loves that shit. That's all it shows and then these gun owners wonder why the American people aren't comforted.

Remember, the American people aren't responding adversely to a group of screaming, heavily armed whackos who march around in public with guns and have a little too close ties to white supremacists. They're just being misled by *insert group, probably liberals*

Some people say that isn't fair. Why do gun owners have to be saints while the other side doesn't? It doesn't matter. Why are we pretending the world is fair?

So many gun owners are into the survivalist thing, but when something bad does happen they're caught completely flatfooted. And then they're desperately hunting for someone to blame or immediately falling back on the old playbook of explanations and excuses. Just like the gun grabbers they hate so much. They want apocalypses and emergencies and World Wars and fucking zombies so bad so that they can prove how awesome they are, but they can't deal with the small matter that is real life.

An iota of self-realization would do so much fucking good. Just the slightest pause before blaming the other; to sit back and think about whether you are the same as the other. Cause, you know, we're all humans. We all bleed red. I've seen it, shit I've worn it. When I tried to fix people for a living, I can tell you that a lot of shit doesn't matter. White, black, tan, yellow, red, green. Fuck it. Stop the bleeding, start the breathing. All those colors respond pretty good to that. I never had to sit back and wonder: Huh, I hope versed works on the lighter-shaded variety of the species. I stuck that motherfucker and wished them happy trails and it worked out pretty good every time. They had a fun trip and I didn't have to worry about somebody trying to make my nose bend in a new direction, or an old direction that it doesn't bend in now. Good times for all.

This ain't the stone ages anymore. Why do we desperately need enemies? Is it self-validation? Does having an enemy make us important? Does it make us matter? If we have enemies, we must be doing something important, right? After all, we're all the heroes of our stories and heroes are defined by their villains, right? We all matter, right? Our lives mean something and we'll never be forgotten, right?

Okay, starting to get a little nihilistic there, but you know nihilism isn't necessarily a bad thing. Just don't listen to the teenagers who just found out what nihilism is. For them, nihilism is an excuse to do nothing.

For the rest of us, nihilism is an excuse to do everything. Be a sinner. Be a saint. Be a party god. Be all three. Work for money, money for fun. Save some for more fun later.

And don't forget, science has proven that the vast majority of humans are hardwired for good from birth, this damn species wouldn't have survived otherwise. So. . .do something good. Fuck it. Why not? You might make a friend and friends make fun better. Or you might not. Who's to say unless you try. Why try? Why not try? None of us are getting any younger. We're all careening towards death.

What about after that? Who knows? Nobody does. That's why religion is called belief not fact. If only those assholes could remember that.

And, oh, what about the spooky bad people? Fuck them. They're gonna find out that maybe there is no god, but there is a whole bunch of folks in the legal system and outside it who are gonna teach them that it doesn't matter what your God thinks. Man will fix your shit up properly.

If God exists, God'll get the bad people in the afterlife, maybe. Until then, their asses belong to man and man has a history of rectifying shit, right or wrong. In America, the kindest thing you can hope for is being locked in a cell by yourself so you can have Jesus time with no one but yourself there to beat you up for having a dumb face. Hope you're on speaking terms with your god, because you will end up being pretty lonely otherwise.

And for any of my gun owners out there, hear me out. Asking someone to go to the shooting range with you so they can try out shooting for themselves is more fun, more rewarding and only slightly harder than calling them a liberal fag and then running off to do a victory lap about how you're smarter and morally superior. Just, given it a try. Please? More flies. Honey, vinegar. You know the drill. I hope. We haven't fallen that far in our abilities at basic human interaction yet, right? Right? Somebody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? Cameron's imaginary friend?

Please tell me that we're better than cavemen at everything except smacking each other with chunks of wood. Don't say that the internet has somehow made us worse at communication, the basic tenet of civilization that separates us from the fucking animals.

Please. Please?

Love,


Your Uncle Jack

I was updating HAL's TNB wiki page and realized that one of the things that he probably does to integrate with the other displacees is to play chess with them. Tessa and Ami play chess at a level that would give HAL a challenge (at least to begin with).

And that sent my mind wandering down a path that lead to hobbies.

As mentioned, HAL, Tessa and Ami play chess. Ami also reads.

As per their canon, Soun and Genma play shogi - and cheat.

As per his canon, Sosuke fishes. (Somewhere near Corpus Christi, maybe?)

What do other characters do when they're not working or having adventures?

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Quote:On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state's voter registration system.

The accusation, presented without evidence, was greeted skeptically at the time as it came two days before Kemp, then Secretary of State of Georgia, faced voters in a close race with Democrat Stacey Abrams to become the state's next governor.

It was a hard-fought contest, with claims of voter suppression and other irregularities that saw Kemp winning by barely one per cent of votes cast.

On Friday, ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) found "no evidence of damage to (the Secretary of State’s office) network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data."

That assessment came from a senior assistant attorney general who recommended in March that the GBI's investigation of the claimed incident be closed.

I'm fairly sure we had the DWMB logo image up there from the old boards, didn't we? It's not a major thing, and perhaps the opportunity could be taken to make a new one with a matching green and non-jaggy lettering, but I figured it was worth noting at least.

... and it's San Felix, not San Dimas. That was the town in the Bill & Ted movies

Over the past decade-plus, Peg and I have been buying anime and not watching it, or watching the first couple episodes and then never following up.  The last couple months have given us opportunity and reason to pull all these out and finish them off.  We started with Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar some weeks ago, followed by Madlax (and when I told Peg about it and Noir being part of an unofficial "Girls with Guns" trilogy, we ended up ordering and watching El Cazador del Bruja).  

And last night we finished up Princess Tutu, which we've had in our collection since we bought it after discovering this AMV some fifteen or more years ago.  (We bought Kaleido*Star for much the same reason, also years ago.)

And the entire reason I'm starting this thread is because, even though there's a Tutu nanoStep already over in DW/General, I now have the desire to write something that ends up with Doug facing off against Drosselmeyer and intoning, in a low, threatening voice, "I'm the natural enemy of the writer.  I'm an editor."

From CNNs Twitter

My 'favorite' part was how they arrest the black reporter, on camera, head off... then realize they should probably arrest the camera crew.

non-embedded

I think it would be just like the more puckish aspects of Doug's power to take the entire effect of this song from the very last line

Namely, if he has ingredients and a heat source at hand, he can prepare any form of fried food from start to finish within the 4:20 duration of the song, and if he's specifically making fried poultry and takes the full duration can produce up to 100x the servings that the available materials would normally yield. This is admittedly a very situational ability and one that you would probably shortly become glad only works once per day if the circumstances did become regular, but very handy when it does apply, to quickly get a meal together on a busy day or when there's a hungry (or just unsettled, people are calmer with food in their belly after all -- and just imagine the sedative power of chicken fried turkey) crowd to handle.

While working he never exactly seems to be moving faster than normal, nor does any one step in the process seem to take an unusually short amount of time, but between one breath and the next he'll have moved on to another stage without a perceptible transition until it's complete and being dished up, with utensils and dishware being summoned as needed and fading away in a similar fashion when no longer needed for the purpose. Trying to cheese the power to get a supply of metal/ceramic/etc. from dishes and cutlery for some other purpose fails as they will vanish as soon as they're no longer needed for serving or consuming the meal, leaving behind a pile of wasted food if the purpose was not to actually feed anyone with it. Even with the honest intent of eating it later, dishware that still has food waiting on it will vanish when his internal uses-per-day clock resets, though the actual food is as real and permanent as normal and will keep or spoil at normal rates, etc. The effect does comply with HPverse rules for transfiguring or conjuring vs. expanding the quantity of edible food, BTW.

Two days after Twitter applied Fact Check links to his insane ranting about mail-in election fraud, Trump has signed an executive order intended to strip online media companies of their liability protections for daring to apply evidence. The man has his priorities.