“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home ( Read more... )

Sorry, political post, but this has been jostling around in my brainmeats for the last few weeks and I’m finally tossing it up on my blog. It started with the Bill Simmons interview with Barack Obama on sports fandom and why it pushed certain buttons in my brain and percolated into this itch.

I like my leaders to be sports fans.  I don’t know why ( Read more... )

Note: I am slowly converting Nephilim, an old Chaosium game, over to Dresden Files FATE. I am just flopping all the posts on my blog because I can tag and collect them all later. This stuff is in no particular order. You can buy Nephilim in PDF from DriveThruRPG for ~$17. You should also buy Dresden Files RPG.
How to Summon 101

1. Determine the ( Read more... )

I, for one, celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. He was a pox, a barnacle, a cancer dragging the national psyche into a continuous cycle of fear and hatred. He was a face of national failure. He hit us, he lead us into two wars, and he was still out there, somewhere, lurking. Now we, as an entire people, get closure.

Closure is for everyone ( Read more... )

I have been ignoring politics for the last several weeks to focus on learning Objective-C and knit and read giant security tomes and generally doing other things.  Tonight I made the mistake of reading the blogs.  So let me get this right:

1. Republicans hate ObamaCare because of the universal mandate to buy health insurance.  Fair enough.

2. ( Read more... )

I am having difficulty forming a coherent and useful opinion on what the US is doing with the UK and France in Libya. I have purposefully kept myself confined to facts and stayed away from opinion but I still can’t really get my mind around it.

On the one hand, enormous massacres of civilian populations by heavily armed militaries defending ( Read more... )

Pension plan management is traditionally a very dull job.  A huge group of people in a big corporation or a union contribute a chunk of their* monthly paychecks into the collected pension fund where a normally 3rd party company manages the contributes and tries to make them grow more than the rate of current inflation to ensure a fund is viable ( Read more... )

I have seen on the Internets: “The Iraq War cost $3 trillion. We could have saved $2.99 trillion and given the rest to Al Jazeera to get the same net result.” I am not positive it’s a misplaced sentiment. Free and unfettered political speech combined with political corruption is a terribly powerful force for change.

What Happened in Egypt?
Food ( Read more... )

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Egypt is melting down and it is an exceedingly big deal. The causes are complex, the people are angry, and as the Arab world’s most populous nation, it is a major strategic US and Israel ally. Not only that but somehow the entire country fell off the Online Map this morning - a fairly breathtaking technological feat.

Meanwhile protests continue ( Read more... )