When you mention the word ‘Prohibition’ in a political context most people’s thought fly to the 1920’s, Rum Runners, Al Capone, and the failed great experiment, but that is so much more to legal prohibition that simply alcohol. Continue reading
I’ve been playing role-paying games for quite a few years. My best friend in boot-camp introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons back in 1979. (To be precise it was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.) I was hooked from the first game, and I still play to this day.
The game has changed a lot over the years, AD&D, gave way to 2nd Edition AD&D, then 3rd edition D&D, then that got patched by 3.5 D&D (What I currently play), that got superseded for some by 4th edition D&D, setting of the nuclear war of edition wars, and soon we’ll see yet another iteration.
For sometime I have been pondering how the changes in the rules have change how we, or at least how I play the game. I’m not speaking of the mechanics, what dice you roll and how you determine success or failure in the game, but rather how the worlds and adventures are constructed and from that what the feel of the games become. Continue reading
Last week I praised conservative/libertarian Senator Rand Paul for his filibuster over this administrations stand on the use of armed drones on American soil. Today I am praising liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren for her stand on the HSBC scandal. (Mega-Bank HSBC has admitted to laundering nearly a billion dollars for Mexican Drug lords, and helping American enemies such as Iran and Cuba evade international sanctions.)
Senator Warren is outranged that not one person involved has been charged with a criminal action, or been personally sanctioned for this blatant law breaking. HSBC itself was fined 1.9 billion, but works out to about a month’s profits, a hit but hardly something that really smarts.
It undermines out system of government with being rich and powerful means you can flaunt the law. A person buying a personal amount of those illegal drugs would faces years, many years, in prison but the men who helped our enemies evade our sanctions are left untouched. It is a travesty, ‘laws must bind high and low alike or they are not laws at all’.This cozy relationship between regulators, and officials must be end.
It is easy to be partisan. You cheer your party when they are right, you denounce the other party when they are wrong, and you stay silent on the inverse.
Let publicly state a admiration on Senator Rand Paul’s old-style filibuster this week. Now there are lots of areas where I part ways with Senator Paul, but here he is a lot more right than he is wrong.
The administrations dodgy answers retaining the option for military drone strike on US soil is flat out wrong. American citizens on American soil get full Constitutional protections and rights. (I know that there are those who extend that world wide, but I do accept the frame work we are at war with Al Qaeda and that people who in effect ‘take up the enemy’s’ uniform can’t complain when they are fired upon on the battlefield. However, here at home, we more than have the resources to capture them without using Hellfire missiles fired from drones. Any US Citizen get full access to courts and full protections. (It is one of my chief bitches about the Bush 43 that he violated that and why he ranks for me as the worst US president.)
Some may ask, ‘So do you now regret voting for Obama?’
No. The use of drone on US soil is still a hypothetical, albeit a very troubling one, where the Republicans have yet to renounced Bush 43’s torture program and abuse of US Citizens, which are matters of record, not maybe of future abuses.
What Paul did was a true filibuster, not that travesty that gets used so much today of quiet paper filings against things you do not like.
For that Senator I salute you.
Last night after I got home from the Mysterious Galaxy Writers Support Group meeting, my side was blazing with pain. On Saturday i injured one of the incision site from my surgery and it is letting me know, daily, that I should not do that.
So I had a late night meal to go with my prescription pain killers, and I watched bonus material from the film ZULU while I waited for the drugs to begin working. Twenty-five minutes later I went to bed, my head fuzzy, my pain dulled, and desperately tired. (I had slept poorly the night before.)
Sadly I was unable to fall asleep. Instead I laid there my mind rushing like a swollen river, the banks flooded with images and ideas for new stories. The one that haunts me today is sort of a retelling of the battle of Roark’s Drift (On which ZULU was based) but set in the same fantasy universe as my experimental prose piece, The Haunted Wood. The idea keeps deepening and widening, but it doesn’t have any characters yet, so it is far from being a story. However I can’t rule out that I might attempt a fantasy novel — shocking.
the election of 2012 should have been one favorable to the GOP. The US was still coming out fo a bad economic period, something that usually hurts thee incumbent, and yet no only did they lose the presidency, the Democratic party held the Senate and even gathered more popular votes than the GOP in the house. Only the fact that it’s district by district allowed the GOP to hold onto their majority there.
So here my question – since I do not have a Sunday Night Movie to discuss.
What one or two policy changes would you, if you are a conservative or a Republican, endorse or accept to gather in more votes in the next cycle?
For the liberals and Democratic party members reading, what one or two policy changes could the GOP do that would cause you to reconsider and possibly vote GOP?
With the recent tragedies there has been a lot of talk of gun control laws and in particular reviving the Assault Weapon ban from 1990s. I am going to assume the best motives for those people who favor a ban on assault weapons, but in doing so at best I can say is that they are misguided.
Before I get started let me state that I’m working from a couple of premises.
One – That a desire to ban any class of firearms is advanced with an objective of a reduction in firearms deaths.
Two – The whenever anyone proposes a restriction of rights, the burden of proof is on those advocating the restriction. When in doubt I err on the side of granting rights rather than restricting them. Continue reading
So, continuing my spate of documentary reviews this month, I have now viewed the film Chow Down. Chow Down works as a 
perfect complement to the film Forks over Knives, exploring the idea that a plant based diet is a healthier diet than the one many Americans follow. Continue reading
After the huge box office success of the original film The Planet of the Apes, 20th Century fix rushed into production a number of sequels. The second film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was a dreary affair, with a convoluted plot that was composed of more plot holes that plot. Charlton Heston didn’t want to return but was 
persuaded to be in film with a promise that his character Taylor would get killed off. The next sequel, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, while have a dark third act and an emotionally charged ending, was played more for humor, with apes from the future traveling backwards in time to the present day setting of the film. This film too made money, and while not as abysmally insulting as the previous film, still fell short of being a decent movie. Continue reading
I have been doing a thinking lately about the nature of a person personalty and just how much it can change over time. This has been prompted by a short story I will start soon, and one that more ambitious that nearly every other one I have attempted. The changes that a person evolves through over the their lifespan is at the heart of the conflict of the story, and that has made me look at the changes I have experienced.
I not even talking about the changes that can come about due to sudden and powerful trauma. I know that my personality changed due tot he loss of my father when I was quite young. My shyness is an outgrowth of that trauma, I have no recollection of shyness before that terrible event.
No, I am speaking about the slow, truly evolutionary changes that occur as we live, meet people and change due to those interactions.
Consider a single point, musical tastes. In 1978 I never listen to rock and roll music, my radio station of choice was a country western station, and when that didn’t suit my mood I would listen to pop music. The rock music of the period held no attraction for me, yet while I write this post I am listening to rock music from 1977. Even stranger is just before I sat down I was listening to Bossa Nova jazz, and that is something else that used to have absolutely no interest for me. Yet, Country and Western has nearly disappeared from my pallet, with what little I listen too being those songs of my youth, with all the powerful emotions of adolescence holding it fast to my tastes.
You could not have convinced my younger self he would be listening to this music. He simply would not have believed it. That doesn’t even begin to touch on a whole host of things, politics, religion, sexual attitudes, all these things have changed greatly over the years.
It seems that we are not contiguous individuals, but an ever changing collection of traits and attitudes. What if anything is at the core?