Brick Fight

The root of the problem here is with women voters. They're the largest, most reliable block. You lose the woman vote, you lose period, especially with the angry Yam-Person chasing away every other block. Nobody wants to be associated with this except for bloggers and media types who make their money off of the Ouroboros of Outrage. You're going to see a lot of Republicans distance themselves to try to find some kind of save and possibly a boost from it. Hell, short of Hannity, I even see Fox News seeing it as their chance to cut the Donald chain they've been stuck to. I never bought into the "Trump as a Clinton agent" theory but god damn if this isn't starting to convince me (joking). At this point, Republicans only have sub-sets of white males interested in voting for him in any large number, and I'd be genuinely surprised if anyone else even considered to split their votes down-ticket. My guess has always been that Donald doesn't want the presidency. I can't imagine that man wants to participate in four plus years of the hardest civil service known to man for an reason other than what it means for Donald and what Donald's wants. He thought he could get his face out there for promotional purposes like Palin for some self-promotion, but it snowballed. He was getting paid, and found out he could hold meetings in his own locations for some layers of tax benefits. Then he started winning states and realized he could drag it out further. If he didn't win, he could run independent and split the vote like he promised, or tank the general election if he won the primary. What would genuinely happen if he won? Who could he actually pick for appointments, and who would actually accept and be approved? What would diplomatic missions or military briefings look like?

The more I see campaign stuff from Battlefield 1, the less convinced I am that they'll mess it up. It seems respectful and bombastic. It's apparently trying to go the CoD 1 route of breaking up the scenery by following different scenarios and actually making unique characters. The dialogue is corny and the trailers look sappy. Fortunately there's no sign of BF4's light-speed stupid dialogue ("Boots on fucking ground, Recker. Boots on fucking ground!"). Also no signs of the plot of BF3, which is probably the dumbest plot I've seen in a game. I honestly want to know what happened to the guy who wrote Bad Company 1. That game was never more than it needed to be. We were part of a penal battalion in a bit of a light-hearted Kelly's Heroes world where we were just fighting the Russians because we needed a backdrop for explosions where we weren't killing "terrorists." Since we were in a penal battalion, that meant that our supporting characters were two troublemakers and a dad-figure volunteer sergeant who all got along despite their differences because they seemed to somehow survive their shit details. Being that far down the hill, you're in a tug of war where your Superiors either spurn or support you. One minute you're part of an armored assault column for a big battle. Next minute the evac meant to extract you and your hilarious drunken dictator you took hostage is refused for unknown, leaving you to steal his golden chopper and go through a relatively free-roaming vehicle section. It was a nice framing device that paced out lone wolf and high-action sections of the game well. Considering that enemy armies were almost always better-equipped than you, the difficulty could change, keeping it from being a constant uphill slog. Bad Company 2 tried to emulate this, but it just fell short in a lot of respects. Mostly what I'm saying is that DICE is the first AAA studio to really do WW1, and they've never done serious particularly well.

The SA threads have been gold today.

Shouldn't have pulled it since we have non-Goons, but it's usually something someone responds to a large angry rant with regardless of anything just as a joke.

source your quotes

Holy shit, Ubi needs a new game engine. It's not even a graphics whore thing so much as it's coming off as aesthetically dull.

No training at all. I sometimes think I have a decent grasp, but I'll always receive some information that shows how little I know. Besides trying to find out on my own to try and sound smart, I worked part time for a lawyer who handled this sort of thing which taught me what was illegal, and I would chew the ear off the cute girl in accounting at one of my chef jobs when we had to go over finances or if I wanted to know how to save money on taxes. Essentially, the Times wasn't wrong, but they have a word limit to adhere to and lack of public knowledge of this kind of thing plus our penchant for stopping reading at the headline, the average person takes away "Donald lost a billion dollars." Essentially his businesses messed up super hard to the point where over a few years, his stocks dropped to less than one percent of their previous high point, and posted massive losses. But since they got their deductibles in line, losing that hard can be beneficial. If you've ever wondered why crashing businesses didn't have to declare bankruptcy or close down this could be one of the reasons and it's one of those things that small business owners don't take advantage of enough. I'm only assuming such a massive NOL was on the pre-audited returns, or I would be blown away since the pre-audit was most likely the much higher number. EIther way, I'd need to see the post-audited papers plus an idea of what their finances looked like leading up to 1995 to make any sort of opinion on what happened. Considering the losses happened over quite a period of time, he could have had similar filings in previous/following years that carried around to different places, which would explain all of the audits they've received to make sure it's being properly assigned. The losses are sort of troubling. The thing is that the $900 million is not the issue, but the losses themselves. You can cover taxes, but losses and debt accrued are a different story. Essentially, that debt can be paid off, forgiven, or bought out/renegotiated. If that debt is still around payment may seem likely as he accrued several billion in debt in the years leading up there and would likely still be paying it off today, maybe after renegotiation. Forgiveness would likely invalidate some of the benefits he received. He filed chapter 11 three times between 1991 and 1992 so renegotiation to a fair payment seems possible. A buyout is a serious accusation as there could be illegal wrongdoing if it is a conflict of interest and I'm not going to make that kind of accusation.

He reported a net operating loss in 1995 of $916 million. Net operating losses are the difference between deductions and collectable income and can be carried forward 18 years, or if you pass certain checks, backwards 2 years. He essentially would have been an idiot if he didn't use it, but it's worth it to note that a lot of it came via a series of horrible business decisions that lost countless amounts of money.

Depends on the state sometimes. Like he said, there are broad interpretations here in Pennsylvania. I've been doing Poll Watching since I want to say 2006, and I've seen a few incidents of participants over-stepping their bounds who usually back down when you tell them to sit or you'll call the police. Around here, it's usually mentlaly unstable middle aged guys harassing young kids and non-whites, or dorky college students unaware of how poll watching is actually supposed to work and aggressively proselytizing. It's taken fairly seriously and the police will usually have them vacate if it ever comes down to it. One of those nutters I was talking about turned out to be missing for several days, off his meds, and carrying around a large knife in his backpack. Every election day you'll hear some cable news or blogging parties try to make a big deal out of isolated incidents (fuck, Fox News still pulls up that footage of some Nation guy like 10+ years ago who was there for all of a half-hour before being vacated), but it's usually exaggerated. It was bad pre-'64 from what I read. There were direct violent threats, actions, and harassment of minority groups and it got largely overlooked.

They're under investigation by some European consumer rights group right now for both false trailers and promises. Steam is also thrown in because they continue to display false advertising. I mean I'm okay with it, but you know they're only going after it because they're big, but not too big. I hardly expect Ubisoft would end up copping something like this for one of their fake trailers. This always seems to be a thing with space games in particular. Fans get mega-hyped and ask about features and the developers don't want to say no. See Star Citizen for the ultimate example. I think the big reason why so many Shitizens hate Elite: Dangerous so much is because the developers said no once in a while.

Bought Humble Bundle 7, and it had some good stuff in there. I've already put an embarrassing amount of time into Prison Architect.

Yeah, media polls are always bad and mostly serve to work up the base. Poll companies are kind of tearing their hair out these days since they were traditionally land-line calls, so they miss out on large amounts of demographics right now. They have plans to try to beat it, but they hardly have their bases covered. FiveThirtyEight is pretty good, but they have a habit of chickening out of unsure races.

I really don't know. A lot of it is booked on a whime and I guess the idea is "we can slip them in here, so let's do it." In 2008, we called in to get Bill and Obama and other dems to do speaking arrangements, and we got whiplash at how quickly they responded and booked us. We even started calling for equipment and seats and stuff and found out that they booked pretty much everything we needed not long after the phone call. I mean, I guess the quick response most likely had to do with us being the main campus at Penn State, but even then we were taken aback. Looking at campaign schedules gives me jet lag. Trying to imagine pretty much not having a single off-day as you're darted around the country talking to the press every day and huge crowds sounds like one of the most mentally exhausting things I can think of. You'll pretty much be in transit a majority of the time trying to make sure you don't say the exact wrong thing and turn on to find that someone on cable news is calling you the worst person ever for putting dijon mustard on your food.

Went to a gun show today. Almost bought a Steyr 1895 for $175. It was pretty beat up, and I assume it had problems for that price. Still kicking myself for not getting it. Though I did get about 30 rounds of ammo for my Argentine including clips for $15. Is it me, or are prices going to drop out on the Garands? It's always funny because any time I pass by a table with a Garand, the dude is usually shit-talking CMP ones as hard as he can to validate that $1,600 H&R he's got.

Yeah, played it to death on every difficulty. I hear Cam Clarke jumping in my sleep sometimes. I unfortunately did miss out on a lot of the "golden age" or whatever shooters that I plan on picking up, including Deus Ex and System Shock 1+2.

DOOM has ruined me. I'm normally a shooter guy, but DOOM was so perfect, that it's hard for me to pick up shooters that aren't as well-designed and fun. Probably explains why I've been playing nothing but RPG and strategy games for months, now. I hope some publishers took notice and we get more of the same. Once I'm finished with the Dragon Age games, I'm probably going to finally suck it up and go through The Witcher.

And it's perfectly fine with me to ask reasonable questions. I admit, I'm genuinely curious about the situation. My issue is that his article doesn't explain enough to me, with an underlying problem of how he has been known to make outlandish, unverifiable claims, and that it could feed into a poisonous based on inaccuracies as a result. I feel that at least gives me the right to be highly skeptical. Properly verified Secret Service (agents or otherwise) accounts are fascinating to read. There seems to be general rules about what you should or shouldn't relay, probably due to how they can be used. Secret Service for FDR have been actively accused of having coniscated pictures and cameras that could have revealed information about his illness. I'm only also assuming that they had to physically assist him in moving around. It was the same deal for Kennedy, who was supposedly non-ambulatory at times. The way I tend to receive such claims I treat like we treat first-hand stories of military action. I'll accept the story, and scrutinize it against as many relevant factors as possible, including personal character.

He told two different stories about the possibility of "destroying evidence." One story involved him personally doing it in his book, the other involved a vague story of someone else doing it in his Starr report testimony. By simply looking at them, one of them is a lie. According to his bosses, he never had the clearance to have been "outside the President's office while he was in it." And he wouldn't have just been able to walk right in and see him making out with a reporter without having been checked out first. He then changed his story from him being the one witnessing the event to saying it was something he had just heard. If you want to know what part he played in the Secret Service, here it is: http://theweek.com/articles/443399/what-uniformed-division-secret-service-anyway So until he has proof for any of these stories, they are only the truth to Gary Byrne. And he has nothing to refute that, so his stories of constantly being around Cheating Bill and Raging Hillary ring hollow unless he provides some kind of proof for any of his stories. So if you're going to focus on me calling him a liar, I'll retract. How about this as my position instead: "He has made many claims which cannot be backed by other parties with a seeming end towards discrediting Bill and Hillary Clinton at all costs. His own peers have discredited his claims by pointing out that being part of the Uniformed Division, he would not have had such close, regular, intiimate access to the Clintons as he claimed in he did in his book. Due to these ends, I reserve the right to not consider his allegations of supposedly being so regularly angry that it's negatively affecting her health. His veracity has the possibility of discoloring his analyzation of the issue. I therefore do not accept what he says without large amounts of skepticism." An olive branch on where I stand and what I hate about modern discourse. Out of the blue I admit, but whatever.

I think Donald Trump is one of the worst presidential candidates, excluding obvious horrible past people. But I'm not going to immediately jump behind any effort like Pepegate to discredit him. Likewise, I'm a left-leaner who has serious complaints about Clinton's backing and turnarounds on issues. But I ask anyone who genuinely can't come up with a positive thing to say about her as a politician also base it on something besides conjecture and conspiracy theories. Otherwise, we're never going to get anyone better in the future.

Is there any evidence that a series of blatantly unprovable stories that he himself contradicts are true? Because if his stories in his book are true, then he lied to the Starr report.

My point is he has done nothing in my eyes to believe anything he says as he has lied extensively about his clearance and experiences. If it was maybe corroborated by someone more trustworthy, maybe I would consider, but this man has done nohting to earn my trust, but plenty for me to not trust him, especially when his analysis ends as such: "When I protected her, I witnessed her irate behavior and, frankly, I don't think anyone can operate with such uncontrollable fits of anger and not have it take a toll on a person's health- I think that's exactly what has resulted. I can't help but feel sorry for her detail, because I know from personal experience that they will bear the burden for as long as their mental and physical resilience will tolerate. I bet that night they got berated for letting this "leak," but it has nothing to do with their performance and everything to do with her character. When I worked at the White House, a man exhibited the same exact behavior as he froze inside a medical detector. On his full time nurse's request I held him under the armpits and stood by him until his seizure passed. he was an average American, and while it was embarrassing for him in front of all those people, I was employed to protect and serve. All he had to do was be straight with me and all was well. I expect Hillary to do thte same and I expect my media to do like I did , ask what's going on so we know how to respond." Besides him making an assumption that her "uncontrollable fits of rage" affected her health ("I think that's exactly what resulted"). Then makes up more stories (like he enjoys doing) about them getting berated for a "leak." Then follows up with some kind of story about holding a man having a seizure and some kind of lesson we should learn about honesty.

This is the guy, who was a low-level staff member of the Secret Service who former members said he would likely have never been around the First Family, yet somehow "walked in on" the most guarded human on the planet making out with a journalist and daughter of Walter Mondale. But then when he got called out on it by higher-ranking Secret Servicemen, he merely "heard about it." He also claimed to have personally thrown out semen-and-lipstick stained towels, lamenting destroying of "evidence" at the time, which would stand out as a really lame and easy contradiction in an Encyclopedia Brown mystery. But flashback to 1998 and he merely claimed to have witnessed people throwing out towels that he merely assumed to have semen stains on them. So I'm sorry if this is going to be the one lie he doesn't tell in service of his career of taking down the Clintons for profit, but I'm not going to take any of this guy's stuff at face value. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-bill-clinton-secret-service-224578

This just in: That guy's not a medical professional either.

He did say after the fact that the grips are obviously a later thing. I don't know. I don't know why it can't be "a really cool old 1911" without having to worry about some phony-sounding story. I see a lot of perfectly reasonable C&R stuff that sits on store shelves years longer than they need to be because the owner is devoted to getting an extra $400 out of a story.

And I bet people who own and like XDs still bitch about Mosin triggers.