In the comments below, longtime community member LittleRed1 offers access to stories. LR1 writes:
The series titles are tabs from the home page. History-based fantasy includes the Merchant series, which has been called "blue collar fantasy." The Familiars books are urban fantasy, Colplatschki is military sci-fi, and the Shikari series is "Kipling in space." ..."Blackbird" in the Colplatschki series, and "The Lone Hunter" (Familiar Generations 1) are about heroic gentlemen (or "eventually become gentlemen") who are not perfect, but do their best.
In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.
People in several states are cleaning up the voter rolls. In Georgia, fake names get added back in almost as soon as they're cleared out the first time.
After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.
She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature.
The DOJ says such states had better be careful, and stop well before the election.
The Justice Department issued a warning to states Monday to tread lightly in trying to clean up their election systems of bogus names and ineligible voters, firing a shot across the bow of GOP-led states that have been trying to erase noncitizens from their rolls.... the department said federal law allows states to clean their rolls, but it must be done within strict guidelines and only for approved reasons such as a voter has moved out of the jurisdiction, has died or has requested removal.
Someone who has been inactive can be removed only after being notified and failing to show up for two more federal elections.
Changes cannot be made too close to an election.
All the way at the end of the article, you get an appreciation of the scale.
Voting rights groups argue that noncitizen voting is rare.
Republican state officials, though, say they’re finding plenty of evidence noncitizens have signed up.
Virginia said it removed 6,303 names of noncitizens from its rolls.
Texas, meanwhile, says it has culled 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from its rolls since 2021. That’s part of a broader purge of 1.1 million names, including 457,000 dead people, 463,000 inactive people, 65,000 who didn’t respond to notices and 134,000 who said they had moved.
Of the noncitizens, Texas said 1,930 had voted in elections before.
Two thousand in an election of millions is not a big deal, probably; but half a million dead people and half a million inactive names is a big deal when it's now standard practice to send out tons of mail-in ballots, and accept them without signature matching when they return.
Jones married the actor Celia Hart in 1982, the same year he starred opposite budding action star Arnold Schwarzenegger as an evil sorcerer in “Conan the Barbarian.”
Thank you for everything.
UPDATE:
Waynesville Police Chief David Adams had all of his law enforcement instructor certifications suspended by the North Carolina Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission.... Adams was an instructor at Blue Ridge Community College’s Basic Law Enforcement program in Henderson County, where he’s originally from and where he cut his teeth as a young police officer. That program came under fire earlier this year when an investigation that began last year determined that “physical and verbal abuse” was inflicted on trainees by instructors, and some trainees even suffered injuries.
A video obtained by the television news station WLOS depicts a session where trainees are learning how to apprehend a combative suspect using a variety of blocks and strikes, including with a simulation baton. The video shows instructors who are role playing as belligerent suspects striking trainees. When one trainee’s helmet is knocked off, an instructor hits the trainee as he turns around with what is described in the corresponding article as “basically a sucker punch.”
Fortunately, even the most roguish of our local citizens would certainly never take advantage of a police officer whose personal protection equipment became disabled in such a manner. Even during a spirited exchange of ideas, their robust commitment to fair play is well known by all. No wonder this sort of training seemed unacceptable to the commissioners!
I can't guarantee that the same spirit of sportsmanship will hold for the cartels who have moved into some of the local areas with the mass immigration of late, however. There's just a chance that, if your helmet were to be knocked off in a clash, you might benefit from being trained to watch out for a 'sucker punch.'
Surely as the great American melting pot takes hold of these newcomers, they too will come to understand that a friendly neighborhood brawl is no place for such things! In the meantime, however, would-be policemen might benefit from the instruction.
Modern entertainment is creatively bankrupted, uninspired, or even just plain morally skewed. What that says about the minds behind these shows, movies, and books, I’ll leave for you to decide. What I want to speak on is a simple topic: orcs.Yes, you read that right, I want to talk about orcs. Specifically, orcs who are just trying to provide for their families. Recently, The Rings of Power has once again been making headlines, this time for testing the waters with sympathetic orcs. To any hardcore and/or longtime Tolkien fans, this notion sounds ludicrous, but it is about what we can expect from modern Hollywood.
“Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game — orcs and drow (dark elves) being two of the prime examples — have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,” Wizards said in a statement. “That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”The company says the current version of the RPG, known as 5th Edition, was designed to include a wide range of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations and beliefs.
Oh, it does do that. Rather than looking like the Fellowship of the Ring, already diverse with a maia, humans, an elf, a dwarf, and several hobbits, a modern D&D party is going to be a collection of sea monsters, vampires, half-devils, half-dragons, half-gods, genies, hobgoblins, minotaurs, and yes, orcs. And many more!
None of them are evil, though. Not by nature. Not even the ones born of devils in Hell itself, nor the vampires that subsist on blood alone.
Defenders would doubtless say that this is a more morally sophisticated universe, and perhaps note that even Darth Vader proved redeemable. So many shades of grey, so few Gandalfs.
Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood tried in 2017 to measure the relationship between Americans' presidential votes and how they scored on the "symbolic racism" or "racial resentment" scale, which Wood described as a way to uncover "racial attitudes among respondents who know that it's socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced."This scale is controversial, because some of the statements it asks people to evaluate—such as "Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve"—could elicit the "wrong" answer for reasons unrelated to prejudice or resentment. The underlying problem was highlighted when surveys found substantial numbers of African Americans endorsing the purportedly racist positions, leading some social scientists to call for giving the measurement a less loaded label. At best, the scale measures whether people attribute racial disparities to structural barriers or individual failings.But whether or not the people who score higher on the scale are racists, it seems fair to say that the people who score lower on the scale are racial liberals. So what did Wood find?For Wood, the big takeaway was that "we've never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions" in three decades of these surveys: The higher you landed in the scale, the more likely you were to vote Republican. But as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in a critique of Wood's work for The American Sociologist, this ignored the direction those Republicans were moving in. According to Wood's own data, al-Gharbi noted, whites who backed Trump over Hillary Clinton were "less racist than those who voted for [Mitt] Romney. The same holds among whites who voted for Clinton as compared to those who voted for [Barack] Obama." Again, voters in both parties were getting more racially liberal; it's just that Democrats went further.
Trump voters were also more tolerant than earlier Republican voters of gays, lesbians, and pretty much all the social liberal things. America has just been moving in that direction, they suggest. Reason writers and editors are libertarian, of course, so for them that's an almost unmitigated good thing. "Time and again, once-vivid fights have receded, as with same-sex unions, or disappeared almost entirely, as with interracial marriage."
Interesting debate question: ‘Are you less racist than you were four years ago?’
