(Page 965) Magnesium in the human body

I think it's clear that this is making a point about people who are trying to turn an AnCap society back into a bad old statist one. With plenty of humor - magnesium, of course, is not a heavy metal, for example. And it's an important beneficial trace element to boot.

I think it's clear that this is making a point about people who are trying to turn an AnCap society back into a bad old statist one. With plenty of humor - magnesium, of course, is not a heavy metal, for example. And it's an important beneficial trace element to boot.

Courtesy of a predecessor story arc, we already know that Vesta is infested by a government, which is engaging the services of furloughed U.W. bureaucrats like Guy's cousin Pierre LeBoeuf (see page 783 and then again on 799).

From dialogue on page 787 (edited a bit):

<sub>Guy: "Vesta has a council? I thought they were a market-anarchy like Ceres."

Pierre: "They were, but it didn't work. There was some question about water quality or something. A group of newcomers from the Massachusetts sector stepped up and formed an ad hoc committee for water improvement.

"Then they noticed problems with inequitable food distribution. When other problems came to their attention, they didn't have any authority or money to fix things.  So when the radiation crises arose, the Committee asked the Vestians for a vote of confidence – and the authority to control water, food and other necessities until the crisis was over. That's when they became the Vesta Council.

"In order to centrally control everything, they need administrators. I applied for a job and got it!"</sub>

What we're getting right now with Marsha and the Mascons is backstory.

With a start like this, I can't wait for the "radiation crises"... (plural?)
It will be toe-curling, no doubt.

With a start like this, I can't wait for the "radiation crises"... (plural?)
It will be toe-curling, no doubt.

Rahm Emanuel: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

It is perhaps no coincidence that the word "progressive" is used in oncology to characterize a cancer which has been subjected to a full course of treatment - surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, everything possible - and yet continues to grow and spread, resulting in the agonizing death of the patient.

No crisis left unused - As borne out by the Patriot act, eh?

And in terms of the comic, there's no crisis better than the crisis you create, yourself.

No crisis left unused - As borne out by the [USA PATRIOT] act, eh?

And in terms of the comic, there's no crisis better than the crisis you create, yourself.

It's an acronym.  Nobody should ever call it "the Patriot Act."

And yet another apt quotation, emphasis added:

<sup>"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially
under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes;
the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins,
most of them imaginary."

-- H.L. Mencken</sup>

No crisis left unused - As borne out by the [USA PATRIOT] act, eh?

And in terms of the comic, there's no crisis better than the crisis you create, yourself.

It's an acronym.  Nobody should ever call it "the Patriot Act."

And yet another apt quotation, emphasis added:

<sup>"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially
under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes;
the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins,
most of them imaginary."

-- H.L. Mencken</sup>

Wow, when did Fox News  decide to take the advice of "liberal" authors?
Liberal is used in quotes because Fox news considers all authors who do not work for Fox news to be liberal, regardless of their actual views.

Republicans, Democrats, Democans, Republicrats... they constitute a friggin' TWO-party system; anyone thinking that one can be less corrupt than the other is criminally naïve. I am a European, and the Republican NeoCons scare the crap out of me, but even I am not blind to the Takes-Two-To-Tango implications.
The partisan war seems to be mostly window dressing to keep the voters thinking their choices matter.

The partisan war seems to be mostly window dressing to keep the voters thinking their choices matter.

Like the Blues and Greens of medieval Constantinople, and about as meaningful.

"I don't vote any more.  It just encourages them." 

I look forward to the day when no one shows up at the polls because they've caught on to the con.  As long as people do vote, the cons know the game is still on.

Wow, when did Fox News  decide to take the advice of "liberal" authors?
Liberal is used in quotes because Fox news considers all authors who do not work for Fox news to be liberal, regardless of their actual views.

You mean Mencken, you pitiful schmuck? 

Insofar as I've been able to discern, H.L. Mencken started his life as a "Solid Gold" Bourbon Democrat, in that era when the party was typified by Grover Cleveland on the national scene, advocating the elimination of protective tariffs (genuinely free trade), the gold standard implemented strictly (with specie in circulation, strict enforcement of gold reserve clauses, as well as large U.S. Treasury holdings of bullion), and staunch opposition to government "charity." In 1887, Cleveland had written in a message to the U.S. House of Representatives:

<sup>"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan, as proposed by this bill, to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose.

"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people."</sup>

When Ron Paul was asked recently by a vapid lamestream media TV interviewer who his favorite U.S. president is, he answered: "Grover Cleveland."

It was such fun to watch the deer-in-the-headlamps response of that female hairspray-head.  Her supposedly expert analyst vapor-locked completely, too, both of them missing the point altogether. 

It was when the "progressives" (we call 'em "Liberals" today) took over the Democratic Party by way of William Jennings Bryan and then "St. Woodrow" Wilson, Mencken went into full opposition to that faction, choosing instead to support the old-line conservatives, working with men like Maryland's Governor Albert Ritchie (an anti-Prohibition "wet," naturally) in opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

The word "Liberals" today - as with Woodrow Wilson and FDR - means nothing more than (as wargames designer Greg Costikyan once put it) "milk-and-water socialists." Mencken was staunchly anti-socialist; one of his earliest published books was, in fact, Men versus the Man: a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910).

To count Mencken as a "Liberal" (used in quotes because socialists are emphatically not defenders of individual human rights) is friggin' ridiculous.

As in "You are friggin' ridiculous, ContraryGuy."

One of the few surviving recordings of Mencken's many radio interviews has him describing himself in political philosophy, in fact, as "an extreme libertarian."

When it comes to what you suppose "Fox news" to push, you inflamed pucker, Mencken was a lifelong opponent of the (you should pardon the expression) Grand Old Party, merrily crotch-kicking their prominenten from McKinley forward throughout his career as journalist and essayist.

One of Mencken's better quotes, in fact, runs like so:

^{"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for.
As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."}

So, ContraryGuy, we all understand that you're malicious and rotten to the core.  Now you're proving that you're willfully ignorant and dazzlingly stupid. 

What comes next?  Exposure of your physical inadequacies in public?

After a succession of maneuvers in which he capers, gibbers, leaps, gimbals, and follows a colonoscopic course all the way up his tochus, we have:

After reading the rest of the thread, it appears I was wrong about Tucci.

Jeez, ya think?

I never confused computer games with the print-on-paper roleplaying systems (some few of which had been designed to treat with military and science fiction gaming situations, too; see SPI's Commando and GDW's Traveler) that first began to hit the market after a "magic" combat mechanism was added by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to TSR's Chainmail hand-to-hand medieval melee resolution rules to create Dungeons & Dragons for the Tolkien-wannabe fans.

And I put down "mere moderators" for the simple reason that by comparison with the publishers they have - literally - no "skin in the game." 

For almost all of us in the industry back in the '70s and '80s, it was at best a side job, where we sought revenue for not much more purpose than recouping our own monetary investments and getting enough to keep the machinery going.  I loved it when SPI moved out of Manhattan into a loft over the warehouse in North Jersey.  Who in hell wants to pay New York City taxes and other costs?

I never knew all that many full-time games designers and developers who actually made anything close to a living out of their work on conflict simulations.  Jim Dunnigan is the only one of my old acquaintances who comes to mind, and he seems to have lost his market appeal among the lamestream media as a military affairs analyst recently because he's been dismally correct in his appreciations of international affairs as they manifest themselves in the fang-and-claw destruction of lives, liberty, and property in our present era of the Hopenchangey Hubshi.

The obamaphiles of our "fair and balanced" dying legacy news organs really, really hate the sound of Dunnigan's New York accent when he's pronouncing the catastrophic failure of their Occupier-in-Chief's foreign policy malfeasances.

And - damn! - Dunnigan's a Democrat.

The liberals wont put dunnigan on because he's correct; and they hate people who have always been correct, because it makes their other experts look bad.

The conservatives wont put dunnigan on because he is fair and balanced and doesnt shy away from telling it like it is. 
Also, they hate that he's a democrat, thats another strike against him, plus he hasnt authored a book that Fox or Rush can push the sales of.
Three strikes and you're out.

I never knew all that many full-time games designers and developers who actually made anything close to a living out of their work on conflict simulations.  Jim Dunnigan is the only one of my old acquaintances who comes to mind, and he seems to have lost his market appeal among the lamestream media as a military affairs analyst recently because he's been dismally correct in his appreciations of international affairs as they manifest themselves in the fang-and-claw destruction of lives, liberty, and property in our present era of the Hopenchangey Hubshi.

The obamaphiles of our "fair and balanced" dying legacy news organs really, really hate the sound of Dunnigan's New York accent when he's pronouncing the catastrophic failure of their Occupier-in-Chief's foreign policy malfeasances.

And - damn! - Dunnigan's a Democrat.

The liberals wont put dunnigan on because he's correct; and they hate people who have always been correct, because it makes their other experts look bad.

The conservatives wont put dunnigan on because he is fair and balanced and doesnt shy away from telling it like it is. 

Also, they hate that he's a democrat, thats another strike against him, plus he hasnt authored a book that Fox or Rush can push the sales of.

Three strikes and you're out.

All of that may well be true.  Dunnigan and his associates have been running a Web site* for a number of years, and beginning during Gulf War II (1990-91) it became one of the most heavily favored uncredited information resources for the hairspray-headed historically illiterate dorks of the lamestream media. 

While he and his contributors are far from infallible (who is?), they tend with good reliability to get things right.  When it comes to international affairs, that never fails to piss off both the neocon "We're the Cops of the World!" imperialists and the transnational progressive (tranzi) "Liberals."

===================
_{* For the aggregating news-and-views Web log these guys have been operating (where Dunnigan is Editor-in-Chief), see http://www.strategypage.com/}