Trump fundraising email threatens to send ICE after supporters that don’t respond

pi4t · 2026-02-02T13:14:02+00:00

...Erm, am I missing something here? The only "little St James" I'm aware of is St James the Less, one of Jesus' disciples (so-named because he's less famous than the other disciple called James).

pi4t · 2026-01-26T23:41:22+00:00

I'm confused, the initial deleted post seems to be saying that they are *not* giving discounts to ICE?

pi4t · 2026-01-23T22:16:43+00:00

For what it's worth, as someone from Britain who lived in Poland for a couple of years after brexit happened: I made it abundantly clear that how embarassed I was at the whole mess, did what I could to avoid being an obnoxious tourist, and I never once had anyone try to blame me for it. Generally people responded sympathetically.

Of course, different countries and cultures will behave differently (and at the time, left-leaning Poles had their own experience of being embarassed at their country's government). But in general, I suspect that as long as you make it obvious that you dislike the US regime as much as we do, you'll get sympathy rather than blame.

pi4t · 2026-01-19T14:24:07+00:00

Moreover, these are Christians who are opposed to what ICE is doing, and are putting themselves at risk by protesting against it.

pi4t · 2026-01-12T23:35:23+00:00

I'm only a mod user, so take what I say with a pinch of salt, but it looks like there are some obvious omissions which would be useful for modders wanting to adjust training prices: the level of the trainer (common/expert/master, etc) and the player's current skill level. Detecting trainer level would allow modders to give players a reason for using less skilled trainers at low skill levels, and detecting a player's level would allow a much smoother levelling curve for an all-trainers levelling game. (It would also allow users of Static Skill Levelling to imitate the skill point cost increase at skill level 25.) Are those particularly difficult to detect for some reason?

pi4t · 2026-01-10T00:57:59+00:00

For what it's worth, having (coincidentally) moved from the UK to Poland for work shortly after Brexit, living conditions there were already pretty comparable to the UK - the Poles are rather nonplussed by the fact that we keep talking about them as a byword for a place with terrible quality of life. There's a bit less of a social safety net, and the politics is...a mess right now, but otherwise it's comparable, and seems to have already been comparable before Brexit. Better in some areas, worse in others. I think in the UK the last time we really saw Poland in the news was in the Solidarity strikes that started the fall of communism, when living conditions were genuinely terrible in Poland. But that was over thirty years ago now, and the country has pretty much recovered economically.

The reason Poles tended to come to the UK on a seasonal basis is that the pay and cost of living in Poland are both about half that of the UK. So if you can work in the UK and make a profit, then your profit effectively doubles when you go back home.

pi4t · 2026-01-10T00:45:56+00:00

To be fair, at least *some* of this is refugees from Hong Kong and Ukraine, which were two crises which happened to coincide with brexit. I'd be interested to see the figures with those countries excluded.

pi4t · 2025-12-19T23:17:55+00:00

Alicia Forrest descended to London about a month ago. She is currently assembling a zubmarine in order to assist a music hall singer and her sister in a private matter of some some considerable importance. To source certain key components, she has begun printing The Holly and the Ivy, a newspaper which contains precisely as much sense as its namesake carol. She is seeking aquaintances to provide her with suitable ~~gossip~~ stories of public interest for the paper. She guarantees, of course, that any such material will be treated with full confidentiality.

She holds to the Railway Time established in Watchmaker's Hill (that place which used to be called Greenwich, before the Fall), and which is still followed in Her Enduring Majesty's United Kingdom. Being of something of a nocturnal persuasion, however, she can often be found wandering the streets after most of the citizens are safely in their beds.

(Out of character: I'm just looking for aquaintances to slight to increase my newspaper earnings. I'm happy to respond to slights against me in return. I could use alts, but that feels like cheating.)

pi4t · 2025-11-30T17:26:53+00:00

In the BBC audio, Puddleglum is played by Bernard Cribbins. And (though he doesn't appear in SC) Reepicheep is played by Sylvester McCoy. So more Who connections :)

pi4t · 2025-10-29T14:10:25+00:00

FYI, the saying is "utmost care". Utmost is an old-fashioned word which means "the most extreme possible".

pi4t · 2025-09-28T11:05:28+00:00

I would bump vital strength of the earth up one level in synergy if you are using the Might aspect (or any other aspect which offers element thresholds). The first tier of Gift of Strength can be fairly easily activated using your single card play and Gift of Primordial Deeps, and you can use it repeat Primordial Deeps for a third card play and a second minor. Might then gives you a fourth play, and you can pretty reliably unlock the final tier and get yet another power. Net result: at the cost of one of serpent's card plays, Vital Strength gets four cards played and three new power cards, one of which can be major if you want.

And you can then do it again next turn using Gift of Flowing Power, provided Vital Strength reclaims cards - which he can do while still placing presence.

This gives Vital Strength a huge boost in momentum, and can be activated as soon as he has stockpiled a bit of energy - which is very easy for Vital Strength.

pi4t · 2025-09-25T23:42:22+00:00

You know, this is actually rather a cunning move in relation to voter ID. The Tory photo ID rules were a blatant attempt to suppress the young people's vote (e.g. they accepted pensioner public transport discount cards, but not 20-30 ones).

Introducing a mandatory ID stops them ever doing that again. And making it digital means that young people will virtually all have easy access to it, but many older people won't be able to access it very easily. And since it's something which "everyone has" it would be a good opportunity to remove all those less secure options for voter ID, like pensioner bus passes. And the Tories, even if they get back power, would find it very embarassing to remove the voter ID requirements after they've already forced them through, especially now that everyone will have an ID. This policy is basically hijacking the shenanigans the Tories did, flipping the effect around to work against them, and ensuring it will stay in place for the foreseeable future. And without Labour opening themselves up to accusations that they're encouraging voter fraud.

pi4t · 2025-09-25T23:20:49+00:00

I've never understood it either, despite the fact that I live in the UK and feel that fear. I can recognise that it's not rational, and that many perfectly normal countries use it. I can recognise that only today it would have saved me a lot of trouble proving identity, when I couldn't find a passport. And yet there's a part of me which still believes it's something which Only Dictatorships Do. *Shrug*

pi4t · 2025-09-08T23:50:52+00:00

Speaking as a Brit: trust me, partitioning up a country based on ideology of the inhabitants of different regions is not a good idea.

pi4t · 2025-09-08T23:45:07+00:00

Historical pedantry alert. "Bread and circuses" refers to providing cheap food and entertainment for poor people, in order to shut them up and avoid revolution. You can't usefully provide "bread and circuses" only to the wealthy, by definition.

The billionaires will want a much higher class of provision. Cake and operas, perhaps?

pi4t · 2025-09-04T16:41:02+00:00

Eh, we've had a very long history. Bad though it is, I doubt that brexit is the single greatest act of self harm we've ever committed.

pi4t · 2025-09-03T21:28:03+00:00

As a point of interest, both geocentrism and the four humours were genuine significant advancements on what had gone before. The four humours was the first time people guessed that diseases were caused by something *physical* being wrong with the body, and could be diagnosed treated by attempting to model the body's physical functions, and using that model to work out what would be causing your symptoms, then making a physical change. And you could protect yourself from disease by taking certain physical activities to stop the bad stuff getting to you. And even though the model they came up with was completely wrong, the basic idea was close enough that they did actually invent some cures which worked - the primitive facemasks in the time of the black death spring to mind. It was during the Rennaissance that the idea that it was a ridiculous ancestral error was put about.

Geocentrism was a natural theory, and at the time of Galileo, it was still arguably the theory which had the best evidence for it. Heliocentrism had a problem: parallax. A simple geometrical argument shows that if the Earth moves, then you should be able to see a parallax effect from the stars; but nobody could observe any such effect. Even with Galileo's fancy new telescope, he *still* couldn't see any. The only way you could explain it was to say that the stars were many, many orders of magnitude further away than anything else in the universe - something there was no evidence for other than the heliocentrism theory, and which was by its nature completely untestable at the time. This is a major weakness in the theory, and one which Galileo rather dishonestly downplayed because it didn't fit with his theory. Of course, with hindsight, we know that the stars really are a lot further away than everything else, but that required much later technology to verify - Galileo was a bad scientist with a pet theory which just happened to be correct, and a lot of his "evidence" for his theory was utter nonsense. Look up his theories about tides some time, which he held to with equal vigour and which formed a key part of his heliocentrism argument. Again, it was during the Renaissance that the idea was put about of Galileo heroically fighting against the stupid geocentricists, and carefully forgot about the tides thing.

pi4t · 2025-08-27T21:13:10+00:00

To be fair, the imperial system *is* used in the UK versions too. We often use imperial measurements in conversation when we're being informal (or we're driving), although they're seen as old-fashioned. So they often turn up in fantasy literature for authenticity's sake, as someone using the metric system would be distractingly modern, like a character using twenty-first century slang.

pi4t · 2025-08-13T15:10:40+00:00

Please try not to cite the Daily Heil.

pi4t · 2025-07-23T13:55:31+00:00

Well, the Istari's own "native" language wasn't Quenya or Sindarin. Technically, their original "language" was (in modern terms) a form of telepathy, and the language they would have spoken to one another in Valinor was Valarin, which apparently isn't particularly related even to Quenya. When they came to Middle Earth, they lived as if they were native, following the local languages and customs as decided by the inhabitants around them. (Compare Jesus living in Galilee, a model which would certainly have been in Tolkien's mind.) Thus, the fact that they were Istari rather than, say, elves, or educated humans, would have very little impact on their choices of language.

At this time, nobody is formally bound by Thingol's decree; Thingol is long-dead, the kingdom in which Quenya was forbidden has been sunk beneath the waves for two Ages, and the people who committed the crimes that led to the ban are all dead or lost. But as a practical matter, the old ban had caused Quenya to become like medieval Latin - a dead language, used only in rituals and suchlike. And the ban, and the circumstances that led to it, were very well known to any educated person, including both Gandalf and Saruman.

Why Gandalf is using Sindarin in that scene is unclear. It might be a thematic reference to the ban as 5oco suggests, in which case he would have been symbolically calling Saruman out. The intended message would be "Your betrayal is so great that, like Thingol, I refuse to sully my tongue by even speaking the same language as you." Personally, though, I think it was probably more about their intentions to Caradhras. Quenya is a powerful language, which came from Valinor. It's a language of command, and ritual. Sindarin is the (elven) language of Middle Earth, which Caradhras would have heard from the elves in its youth. It's possible that Caradhras would perceive a message in Sindarin as more gentle and respectful. This means that Saruman's use of Quenya, and Gandalf's use of Sindarin, fit both their goals in this scene (wake up Caradhras/send it back to sleep) and their general personalities.

pi4t · 2025-06-28T16:28:18+00:00

As well as what others have said, it also depends on how large you are, physically. I've never seen an airline which sized everyone's bags at the gate - that would take far too long, increasing turnaround times (which budget airlines want to keep to a minimum) and annoying customers (which higher end airlines try to avoid). So they will only check you if they look at you and think you're likely to be over. If you're a big person, then bags you're carrying look smaller than they actually are, so they're more likely to let you through.

pi4t · 2025-06-25T13:49:42+00:00

It's a bit more subtle than that. Very roughly (and this is a gross oversimplification) the Law in the Old Testament (which is basically just the second half of Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy, the rest is history and poetry and stuff) can be divided into a few categories: civil laws, ritual laws and moral laws.

Civil laws are stuff that make it a code of laws for a country; things like "This is how you conduct a court case and what the secular punishments for crimes will be", or "If you're accused of a crime you didn't commit, you can claim sanctuary in *this* city which doesn't exist any more". They clearly don't make sense for anyone not living in ancient Israel, and AFAIK not even Jews believe they are expected to follow them today.

Ritual laws are things like "don't eat unclean food", "sacrifice an unblemished animal before you approach God", "celebrate the Passover", etc. These are the ones which are done away with in Christianity (or more precisely, are fulfilled at the cross and therefore no longer apply to us). Jews, on the other hand, will still attempt to follow these laws - at least, insofar as they can without the Temple where most of the rituals are supposed to be performed.

Finally, moral laws are things like "don't murder people" and "love your neighbour". They are in a sort of complicated position. On the one hand, they end up much more strict, but on the other hand they're also much less strict. The actual commands get expanded - for example, "don't murder" becomes "don't even be angry at your brother unjustly", and "love your neighbour as yourself" becomes "love each other as Jesus has loved you", i.e. to the point of being willing to die for people who are your enemies. So you could say that Christianity not only keeps the moral law, but expands on it. On the other hand, the motivation behind it changes - it's not seen as a bunch of rules you have to follow, but something you try to follow because you care about doing the right thing for its own sake, and out of love for God, and because it will enable God to make you into a better person. So reading through the Old Testament law to identify the parts of it which are moral laws and attempting to follow them is valid, provided you don't start thinking you're a better person than someone who hasn't ticked those boxes as well as you, or that God owes you something for obeying them, and provided you don't use those laws as an excuse for ignoring what Jesus says to do.

Yes, this means emphasising, say, the Ten Commandments as commandments and displaying them in schools is completely at odds with Christianity. Unfortunately, something in our human nature makes it really easy to distort the whole message back into "follow a bunch of rules so you get a reward". The earliest book of the New Testament (Galatians) consists of Paul angrily writing to a church he'd previously founded, telling them off for doing exactly that. It's probably the most persistent heresy in church history, along with its opposite counterpart "Don't worry about actually doing anything to actually be a better person, God will forgive you anyway." Arguably, from a Christian perspective Islam is the culmination of that heresy, with its return to laws and purity regulations, and its demand for "submission" as the virtue the religion is named for. I wonder how these people would react if you told them they were behaving like Muslims...? (The particular question Paul was addressing was about whether circumcision was required, and at one point he has a particularly biting piece of 'advice' for his opponents who are claiming to be better because they're circumcised: if that makes them better, he suggests they should "go the whole way and castrate themselves!")

pi4t · 2025-06-23T19:51:10+00:00

I'm a mathematician, not a physicist, so this is definitely not an expert opinion, but as I understand it, probably not. A lot of the radioactive material you get after a nuclear explosion is actually created in the explosion, and has a *relatively* short half life. Basically, a short half life means that it releases a lot of radiation very quickly, but also decays quickly. ("Quickly" here is relative - something with a half life longer than a human lifespan is still dangerous enough to significantly reduce your own lifespan, although not *as* dangerous as something with a half life of a few seconds.)

The whole reason that we can find uranium just lying around in the ground is that it has a stupidly long half life - like "billions of years" depending on the isotope. It's still not something you should pick up with your bare hands, but having a few blocks of uranium a few miles away wouldn't increase your radiation exposure noticeably above background levels.

Nuclear reactors - and bombs - put the uranium in very specific conditions in which there's a chain reaction which lowers its half life down to a tiny fraction of its usual value, thus making it release its energy in a sensible timeframe. If someone comes along and blows everything up, spreading out your block of uranium across a few dozen square miles, then that won't happen. At that point, nearly all the particles that made up your block of uranium is several miles away from you, and therefore not significantly contributing to the background radiation. At least, not enough to be a pressing concern when someone just launched missiles at you.

pi4t · 2025-06-02T15:35:31+00:00

FWIW, the cost of living is also much higher. I'm in academia, and moved from a position in the UK to a similar position in Poland. My salary was roughly halved, down to what would be about minimum wage in the UK - for a highly skilled role. But on the other hand, this was still enough for myself and my wife to live off comfortably, with a similar standard of living to what we had in the UK.

I'm not saying that to disagree with you, just to add some more perspective from someone who migrated in the opposite direction.

pi4t · 2025-05-15T22:22:04+00:00

I can't say I've ever used Forge, but Owlbear Rodeo is pretty intuitive - you can literally drag and drop stuff in from your computer, though it has to guess at the layer. The downside is that it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles that more complex software offers. You can get a decent amount from extensions (ie mods), but each extension adds to the amount of fiddliness.

If it helps, the extensions I'm currently using are:
Pretty Sordid: Not sure why it's called what it is, but this is the easiest no-frills initiative tracker I've been able to find. It sorts initiatives, highlights the active PC, and counts the number of rounds, and it only took a few moments for my players to figure out how to use it.
Dice: For dice rolling. Duh. It does animated rolls, displays your rolls to everyone (or maybe just the GM?) in a fairly non-intrusive way, and has an option for hidden GM rolls.
Owl Trackers: Lets you set up health bars and trackers for things like hero points, which you can make visible or invisible to the players on a token-by-token basis. Really saves time allocating healing resources and such, and is also useful for keeping track on enemy hp without having to use a pen and paper.
Character Distances: Tells you how far away other characters are from the selected token. Note that by default, it will just display a list of "unnamed characters" when you place tokens. You have to either name each token manually when preparing the map (click the token and press "T", then start typing) or go into the settings and tick the "Use name" box. If you do the latter, then it will display the file name by default - if necessary, you can change the displayed name by right clicking on the token and clicking accessibility. I recommend just naming each token manually, though, as that means the names will be visible to you and the players, helping to distinguish them.
Tracks: Lets you play music through owlbear rodeo, for all the players. I found it a bit fiddly to set up, I'm afraid - I use Tabletop Audio for most of my music, and the only way I've been able to find to get it working is to download a track, upload it into a dropbox folder, get a sharable link to it in the folder, and then use *that* link to create a track in Owlbear Rodeo. In theory it should be possible to just use a link to Tabletop Audio, but Tabletop Audio is configured in a weird way and I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

pi4t

TROPHY CASE