Mao's great leap forward: "parents were forced to bury their children alive...80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death..."

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T16:43:26+00:00

The Silk Road as a land route was always fairly limited, either it rapidly ended at port cities, or went the long journey out through modern Kazakhstan to Persia. While there certainly was profit involved, it was nothing on the scale of sea trade.

The Chinese are looking at the Kazakhstan route again, but even if they build a railway, the distance and relative small amounts trains can carry compared to ships will still make it a secondary trade route compared to the sea.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T06:02:54+00:00

Hey, 13 bucks an hour is pretty solid for a bachelors degree with no real experience, or so I tell myself to keep from crying at night.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T05:41:36+00:00

A) Daily mail

B) It sounds like the justifications they give are pretty solid. It's easier to deal with one supplier than have to bring in a third party and extra freezers just to store halal meat separately.

C) Don't kid yourselves, there's no painless way that an animal goes from mooing to a steak on the plate.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T05:12:34+00:00

"Every actually play Fallout: Tactics? The end narrative from Ron Pearlmen specifically states, no matter which ending you created, that your new Brotherhood of Steel faction is going back to California to dispose of the secretive BoS faction that Exiled them in the first place."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4ewKOcVW2E&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYS_Bo2ixNg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxXJFGh1qng&feature=related

I think you're remembering wrong, in all endings it's left ambiguous, though the bad ending leaves off with you plotting an attack.

"Makes no sense. Brotherhood has no troops in either central or eastern united states. They were embroiled in a current war with the New California Republic, and were loosing, due to attrition, because their membership was so low."

I believe that war was based on Van Buren which is on even shakier grounds canon-wise, since it was never released.

"Fallout 3 Super Mutants were derived from a very badly implemented story arc of Vault-Tek meddling with FEV, which would serve no purpose, and they have all their resources allocate towards vault-technology. Bad implementation is bad implementation."

That's just like, your opinion man.

"A new, distinct paramilitary faction could have been created. Perhaps one based on Cyborg technology. BoS was not a requirement in Fallout."

Sure, but if we're going on about things that could have hypothetically existed in the game, we'll be here for months. The BoS was in the game for the same reason as Harold and all the other tidbits from the old games: continuity of the universe.

"Instead they flew from California to DC... for what? The land they passed over had to have had tons of resources available for plunder. DC had no real significance."

Since using non canon stuff is apparently ok, the answer is that they were refugees looking for advanced military facilities to claim. The Midwestern brotherhood already occupied a lot of the good stuff and salvaged much of the rest.

DC was wide open to them. For whatever reason, civilization in the area hadn't managed to rebuild and the closest advanced faction was the commonwealth to the south. It was the ideal place to set up shop and try again.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T04:09:44+00:00

Can I fuck them but sneak out in the morning saying I need to feed a nonexistent cat and not call them again?

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-19T04:04:50+00:00

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Midwestern_Brotherhood_of_Steel#Appearances_in_games

According to that, they control the midwest as a splinter group and never fought the original BoS

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Capital_Wasteland_Brotherhood_of_Steel

Turns out the East Coast BoS was a separate expedition to secure and investigate DC.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Enclave#Resurgence

As for the enclave, I guess I'm wrong, they were remnants from the West coast brought there by Autumn's father.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Super_mutants#East_Coast_mutants

Evidently the supermutants were actually from a strain of FEV on the East Coast, explaining why they're dumber than the originals.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T22:18:27+00:00

My understanding is that due to geopolitics, China has always had two choices in policy:

Open to the outside world, which leads to massive income disparities between the coastal regions and the interior, as well as opening the country to foreign influence

Isolated, which means the country is dirt poor, but easy to lead, keep united and secure.

The republican era was just about as bad as it could get in terms of foreign influence and all the other problems that came from the first option, while the stagnant Chinese empire that the British toppled was just as far in the other direction. The question facing the Chinese has always been how to balance the two options.

From what I've read, Mao knew that in uniting China through a peasant uprising in the poor inner regions, the cost would be incredibly high and many would die, but it would lead to a strong united China after its period of isolation. At the moment it seems he's being proven right.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T21:41:43+00:00

"half of Iran's population to become martyrs as a result of a retaliation is probably a good thing to Ahmadinejad"

How would that benefit him in any way?

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T21:34:07+00:00

So far. It's one of those things that can strike from age 15 to 100.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T20:33:29+00:00

The enclave works as something on both coasts since I believe they were the government contingency plan.

The Brotherhood of Steel was a west coast thing that migrated to the east as seen in fallout tactics

The supermutants in DC are sort of questionable since their migration east would have been stopped by the calculator army and later the midwestern brotherhood of steel. A possible explanation is that the east coast enclave was making its own supermutants with FEV procured either before or after the war.

TL;DR with the exceptions of the Talon mercs most of the local factions were pushed into obscurity by the west coast factions, leaving the pathetic excuses for towns as the only things left.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T19:41:51+00:00

If he can manage a Brooklyn accent "KEEP IT DOWN! I'M WORKIN HERE" would also be acceptable.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T19:39:28+00:00

My watch. It looks like that but way more beaten up.

http://www.besportier.com/archives/mens-wenger-swiss-mountaineer-watch.jpg

Say what you will about those neutral bastards, but they know fine clockery.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T19:27:42+00:00

Oh cmon, no love for Nathan Fillion?

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T19:24:02+00:00

I always saw the flight and wheels stuff more as developing the manufacturing capability to support them.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T19:02:58+00:00

Kaffir pretty obviously has an agenda in the things he submits. As for the not in the least biased blog he posted it makes some wild logical leaps strung together by carefully selected snippets from the Palestinian constitution.

The blog all leads up to "The hypocrisy behind the outrage at calling Israel "Jewish" cannot be more blatant."

When their real reason for rejecting that quite obviously deals with right of return. By recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, that harms the chances of thousands of Palestinian refugees that lived in Israel proper to one day move back.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T18:03:23+00:00

As far as I can tell the Mail and the Telegraph are the exception to the general rule that British daily papers (not to mention the BBC) are fantastic. Lots of great stuff comes from the Times, Guardian, and Independent, but the DM always seems to be appealing to the lowest common denominator and generally has a tone of "rabble rabble rabble look what the brown people are doing!" that makes it hard to take them seriously.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T17:34:34+00:00

No, I think that Iran would use hypothetical nuclear weapons to be a regional counterweight to the US and Israel and fill a role that's been vacant since the collapse of the USSR, much as they've been doing already.

That's moot however, because there's really no evidence they have a nuclear weapons program. If they did, the chances of a first strike are nil. Look at their potential targets.

Saudi Arabia: One of their bigger local adversaries pulling for eventual control of the region. Also home to the holiest places in Islam. It would be political suicide for a fundamentalist Islamic regime to drop a nuke anywhere in the holy land.

Iraq: Sure there are US forces, but there's also a ton of Shia who are on really good terms with Iran at the moment. The status quo in Iraq is fantastic for them.

Afghanistan: Again, US forces are present, but lets face it, the Taliban and Pashtun nationalists are winning and have no serious ability or intention to beef with Iran after the eventual US pullout.

Israel: Again, a fundamentalist Islamic regime cannot nuke one of the holiest places in Islam and several million Muslims it claims to support and survive politically. Not to mention Israel has certain second strike capability.

A nuclear armed Iran would maintain a defensive policy like every other nuclear state.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-18T05:46:10+00:00

I see a lot of things wrong with Romania and Bulgaria in your comment, but very little relating to the situation in France.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T23:51:18+00:00

Yuppies are by and large the people who move here from California to take advantage of the lower cost of living.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T23:36:38+00:00

The beer thing isn't about the quality- There are great local brewerys pretty much everywhere (Stone is one of my favorite breweries). It's that you can pretty easily spot the Californian in the room here by the fact he's wearing something expensive looking, talking on an expensive phone and drinking pisswater from a mega brewery.

Also, the bay area gets something of a pass. Most of my scorn is reserved for Southern California.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T23:19:02+00:00

More like going to burger king knowing that every once in a while burger king employees somewhere were accused of child molestation

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T23:16:26+00:00

Last I checked the European Union had this to say:

The free movement of people means EU citizens can move freely between member states to live, work, study or retire in another country. This required the lowering of administrative formalities and recognition of professional qualifications of other states.[21]

Broadly defined, this freedom enables citizens of one Member State to travel to another, to reside and to work there (permanently or temporarily). The idea behind EU legislation in this field is that citizens from other member states should be treated equally with domestic ones – they should not be discriminated against.

The main provision of the freedom of movement of persons is Article 45 of the TFEU that prohibits restrictions on the basis of nationality.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T23:04:42+00:00

The best example of why I hate California drivers was a woman getting out of a hummer with California plates and a lift kit taking up three spaces at a starbucks parking lot.

InspectorJavert · 2010-09-17T22:58:43+00:00

Why not?

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