It’s out of their hands.

Uh, yeah, it literally was. Unless you’re saying that you want the president to be able to do whatever they want, even when a majority of congress and courts say no.

This might give you some better idea of what happened.

It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?

Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?

Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???

The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.

It is, honestly, not nearly as bad as you’d think. The weight should be pretty well distributed, armor doesn’t have to be all that heavy to stop a sword, and the gambeson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for piercing weapons. Blunt weapons, well, those are going to be unpleasant pretty much no matter what. You get really hot though; there’s a reason that the Saracens did such a number on the crusaders when they were able to get them outside of cities.

Wearing a plate carrier is, IMO, worse than wearing a gambeson and chain maille.

Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they’re sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It’s self defeating of course, on both sides.

What’s crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it’s still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)

Blackhawk Down gets things very right.

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords.

Just watch Olympic fencing; you get a very fast exchange that you can’t follow, and then someone has a point. In a real sword fight, without armor, that’s about what would happen. OTOH, when everyone is wearing armor, it gets a lot messier.

And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.

That is surprisingly common. Most people are really bad shots when they’re stressed out. It’s physiological; when your body dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, you lose fine motor control. So unless you’ve trained extensively under stressful conditions, you’re gonna have a hard time doing shit.

This is absolutely the case. The black that is usually printed by ink jet printers on paper is about 75% cyan, 70% magenta, 70% yellow, and 90% black. Those percentages are in relation to the maximum output per head. If you are running all your printing through some form of RIP software where you can directly control ink volume, you’ll very quickly see that using only black ink gives you very poor color.

And, fun fact, this is true with black and white photos as well. If you force your printer to use only black ink, you’ll get washed out images with poor contrast. I found this out because the printer and RIP that I operate will default to black ink only when an image is specified as greyscale, and I was getting terrible images. Saving the images in RGB (note: RGB ends up printing with a slightly wider gamut than CMYK) completely solved the issue.

Republicans need young men to turn out; from what I can see, they are trending conservative. They don’t want young women to turn out, because they are trending overwhelmingly liberal.

What exactly are the “material conditions leading to gun crime”?

Largely economic and educational, yeah, but also systemic racism and ingrained misogyny. While it’s facile–and accurate–to say that Republicans block efforts that would help these problems, the fact is that Democrats often do as well, opting to ban firearms and features rather than addressing root causes. I recall one particular violence intervention program that got cancelled in Chicago by–IIRC–Rahm Emmanuel. And unfortunately, many of the centrist Dems don’t really believe in programs that work, like enrolling inmates in college to reduce recidivism.

Why do other countries thar have lots of guns have less gun crime?

Other countries with a relatively high number of firearms also tend to have significantly better social welfare systems, more focus on rehabilitation than punishment in their criminal justice systems, and a lower rate of income inequality overall. If the US had, for instance, the social conditions of Finland, while still having the same number of firearms, I expect that you would see a sharply lower rate of firearm homicides. (Interestingly, Finland has very similar rates of suicide as we have in the US overall. I’m not sure what to make of that. But I also note that all of the Nordic countries seem to have fairly high suicide rates, and all of the Mediterranean countries tend to have quite low suicide rates. Climate and amount of sunlight, maybe?)

Aside from the, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual civil right. IMO, attempts to restrict that right should be subject to strict scrutiny. NYSPRA v. Bruen helped with that, but it hasn’t gone far enough. Think of it this way: voting is supposed to be a right. Republicans want to limit the ability to vote in ways that favor them. I would say that this is wrong, and that Republicans need to change the way that they govern or message so that they can attract more voters, rather than trying to make it harder to exercise a civil right.

or the gas station clerk to get a gun pointed at her and told to give up the cash.

…Which you aren’t very likely to do once economic conditions have been addressed. Not very many people go out and rob people for the sheer joy of it. Little Johnny shoots Susie because society has taught him that the only acceptable emotion is rage, and he can’t deal with his emotions in any other way. Again: address the messaging–about gender norms and expression in this case-- and fix the underlying problems, and then access to the tools of violence becomes immaterial because there’s no longer the impetus towards violence. Dems have made some inroads regarding gendered emotional expressions, but a lot of far-right influencers are actively working against those efforts.

parents of shooters bought them guns despite clear warnings

I think that this is probably appropriate in limited cases, such as with the Crumbleys in Detroit, MI, and with the Grays in Winder, GA. In both cases, the parents (father, in the case of Mr. Gray) had credible information from authorities that their child was at risk of harming other people, and both of them gave firearms to their child despite and after receiving the credible information about them being a risk. I would say that, if parents made a reasonable attempt to deny a child access to firearms, or did not have credible information about their child being a risk, then you should no longer be looking at a criminal or civil case. It seems to me that having your firearms locked inside your home or vehicle should be enough to say that you made a reasonable effort, because anyone that takes a firearm from those places knows that they’re breaking and entering already.

The desire to make locking firearms up is yet another way of making firearms prohibitively expensive, and functionally denies the right to keep and bear arms to people that can’t pony up the $1000+ for a locking firearms container that’s even slightly secure.

Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they’d ever be found are very, very poor.

Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain’t gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I’d say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there’s no electronic trail of where you’ve been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you’re driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn’t recovered for at least a year, you’re likely in the clear.

The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)

But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.

Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it’s actually good.

Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.

Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.

There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.

Who TF is sending in their registration cards…?

I mean, seriously, I’ve never sent one in. I threw all of them away, along with the cards asking me to join the NRA.

Also, as I’ve said before: if Dems would drop gun control entirely–and concentrate on changing the material conditions that result in gun crime–that would absolutely gut right-wing orgs that rely on fears of gun bans and confiscations to rile up a base.

You have three issues - yeah, the pump doesn’t use that much power, but it does use power. If you’re trying to reduce electricity consumption to the bare minimum, a tankless water heater right at the tap will be slightly more efficient. It doesn’t have to always run, but for people that don’t have predictable schedules, that can result in my wasted water. And your water heater is going to have to run more, because even with insulated pipes, you’ll be losing some heat as the water circulates.

It is absolutely better than running the taps wide open until you get hot water, especially if you live in a place with limited water availability. I wouldn’t use my solution for anything other than new construction due to the cost of running so much new wiring.

If you have the money, the most efficient way to solve this is to install an on-demand tankless water heater at every single outlet that has hot water (e.g., not the toilets). The downside is that this is a very expensive way to solve the problem; not only do you need to buy the water heaters, you need to run new electrical to every single one (or new gas lines, which would be even more expensive). The upside is that you get hot water as fast as a recirculating pump, but without the cost of constantly running a pump and your water heater.

Many years ago I lived in an apartment in San Diego that had recirculating hot water (there was no water heater in my apartment); I guess the apartment complex figured that the cost of constantly heating the water was cheaper than the cost of the water that they would otherwise lose down the sewer while people were waiting for the water to heat up in their apartment.

If he’s still alive, not in prison, and capable of doing more than drooling? Of course he will run again. He has way too much power with the people that vote in Republican primaries; politicians that don’t give him lip services don’t survive primary runs. And, in turn, that’s infected the whole party.