Midnight Thoughts

The essentials you need to know to give the self-conceited poli-sci major in your next social event a run for their money. Indictments Don "average US president has 2 indictments" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average president has 0 indictments total. Indictments Don, who lives in resort & has 91 indictments, is an outlier adn [sic] should not have been counted." Miles ahead of the other candidates, the race is his to lose. Conventional pundits claim that his numerous indictments and the media coverage of them are sure to hurt him in the general election. What is undeniable is that a significant portion of the Republican Party (also called the GOP, which stands for Grand Old Party) have rallied to his defense against what is seen among many Republican voters as a witch-hunt. Trump isn't extreme on any particular policy, yet draws his highest levels of support from self-professed "very conservative" voters. It may be because some of thos...

“So this is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause” - Padmé Amidala, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, 2005. What does it mean to be a democracy? What does it mean to be a republic? Can a republic sacrifice democracy to save itself?      The provisional government attempted to deal with the rampant unemployment (remember that whole economy in a ditch thing?) by establishing national workshops. Only some thousands managed to get accepted, and they mostly were assigned meaningless menial labor like digging then filling holes. A sorry excuse for an employment program. Those accepted to the program who weren’t even assigned meaningless tasks were given a Franc a day. Keep an eye on these workshops though, they’re gonna become important. At least the new government tried. Remember Guizot? Lesson four: Never tell the people that you’re not gonna help them. You’d have figured that government leaders would have learned their lesson after the famous “let them ...

  The idea of universal male suffrage flowered in 1848. To not learn the lessons from the trailblazers of democracy is to endanger the democracies that follow them.  22nd of February, 1848. Paris.  Municipal Guardsmen begin to return to their regular duties as the day starts quietly. The widely expected demonstrations didn’t seem to materialize. Only a minimal contingent of troops remained. Thus the authorities were caught off their footing as crowds filled the streets around noon. The crowds soon became too large to suppress. Reinforcements called by the authorities dispersed them somewhat, but demonstrators regrouped, the first barricades rose, and light skirmishes started. 23rd of February. Shouts of “Down with Guizot!” and “Long live the Reform!” echoed across the streets .  The National Guard was mobilized, yet instead of holding the demonstrators at bay, they joined them. And here is the first lesson of 1848: It’s not about how many storm the palace, but how ma...

“Sheng ji is a family of point-based, trick-taking card games played in China and in Chinese immigrant communities . They have a dynamic trump, i.e., which cards are trump changes every round. As these games are played over a wide area with no standardization , rules vary widely from region to region.” - Wikipedia Quite frankly the other versions are stupid, so here’s the best version. We call it tractor, though there are other versions that call it that too. The game is played with one deck per 2 people. The standard is 4 people 2 decks but it can be expanded to 6 people 3 decks and so on. The game is point based, with attackers trying to gain points and defenders trying to stop the attackers. The attackers’ objective is 40 points per deck used. So the bar for the attackers in a standard game is 80 points. Setup First “ bury ” 4 cards per deck being used (so 8 cards in a normal game) by setting them aside, then the players take turns drawing cards until the remainder is split. For...

If this goes well I might post a more detailed and disciplined revision later.  The year 1848 is known as Springtime of Nations, when nationalism (glorified racism) sprouted among Europe’s empires as people demanded their government, the state, be centered around ethnicities and not necessarily royal families. A nation-state, if you will. Western Europe already got the whole ethnonationalism thing figured out, but that didn’t stop France from having an identity crisis anyways. British colonial elites didn’t want to pay taxes, argued that the government ought to be by the people and of the people, and had a revolution. The French intellectuals thought that was swell and threw a revolution too. The idea of government for the people remains strong among the French intellectuals. Napoleon Bonaparte had proclaimed himself as Emperor of the French (people), not Emperor of (the state of) France. Following Bonaparte’s defeat, the French people only accepted a restoration of the Hou...