Commissar

Israel has started - started, I said, not been involved in, but started - more wars in that region than any other nation. I do? Look it up, if you like. Palestine is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, in the top ten if I recall correctly, and that population is 99% Palestinian, not Jewish. That's not really a pure legal perspective. That's a pure Israeli perspective - and yet not so much, anymore. Why? Have you talked to any Palestinians? Once again, one of the world's ten most densely populated areas, with one of the world's highest unemployment rates. The settlers have their perspective, sure - though they're considered extreme right-wing even in Israel - but so do the Palestinians. Why is their perspective any less worthwhile? First of all, Palestine wasn't represented in the UN when Israel was formed, but nevertheless they complained, and complained loudly, as did every single other Arab state in the region. As far as your "no civilian murder" bit, Israel has time and again targeted residential areas where suspected Palestinian terrorists reside. There has been a hell of a lot of collateral damage in Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets; Israel's killed it's fair share of civilians who have had nothing to do with attacks, but you don't condemn them. I've seen plenty of people dragged kicking and screaming from their homes in eminent domain cases right here at home. And the settlers are going to be compensated, believe me.

That's not what I said, though. I said that the Israelis don't belong in Gaza, for sure. I don't consider them terrorists, and I certainly think they have a right to their own state. By the same token, I think the Palestinians do, too. I have no idea how they're actually going to work Gaza into a greater Palestine, though. It's kind of...disconnected, and stuff.

That's not really the way it went, Ender. The Strip was occupied by Egypt until Israel captured it - yes, captured it - in the Six-Day War. Previous to its occupation by Egyptian and Israeli forces, it was the British mandate of Palestine, which was dissolved shortly before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, as part of actually making the state of Israel. The Gaza Strip is 99.4% Palestinian in population. Why shouldn't Palestinians get authority over the whole thing? Palestinians view it as their land; they've been fighting for it basically since it was taken from them, and they haven't shown any signs of stopping that fight. Fifty-odd years. You think maybe it just so happened that Israel got the message that it couldn't win and decided to pull out? Besides, holding onto Gaza and other Palestinian territories kind of makes Israel a little nervous, I think. Why? Well, when you add up the respective populations, it gives Israel more Arabs than Jews, and that never was really the intention of Israel, now was it? As far as terrorism goes...the whole 'terrorism' argument always makes me chuckle. We honestly expect them to stand up and fight 'fair'. They'd lose such a conflict...why would they do it? Terrorists by their very nature don't have conventional armies. "Oh, but they shouldn't hit civilian targets." No, they shouldn't, but neither should the Israeli military, which has happened plenty. Both sides are guilty in that regard. And finally, to address the point of the settlers being removed, well...welcome to government! That happens right here in America, you know, just because a city decides that a certain neighborhood would be better put to use as something other than residential housing. The government can move people if it wants to, here and in Israel.

anyone know who yrkoon is? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I do.

Virginia. The sane, we-have-all-of-our-teeth part. Born in California, though. Edwards Air Force Base, to be exact, out in the middle of the desert. Luckily, I've never had to live in a flyover state.

Doesn't bother me in the slightest. My buddies refer to me as 'that pinko Commie,' so just getting accused of being Russian is a welcome change. Andante, Trio Sonata in G Major, Op. 5/1 - Locatelli

I'm not Russian myself, but the little lady is. She likes the Dead, too, though. Johnny Cash - Hurt

I favor the Russians, anyway. Grateful Dead - Uncle John's Band. The only good version.

Not to mention a favorable exchange rate and surprisingly hot women.

You listen to what at least appears to be some hardcore stuff for 8:30 in the morning.

As I'm still on crazy-ass Russian time, and consequently still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed despite it being 7:30AM, I thought I'd pose a question to you lot. Why is it that the only successful MMORPGs seem to be sword-and-sorcery types? The exception is Star Wars Galaxies, of course, and possibly Matrix Online, though I haven't followed the latter enough to know if it's gone silent yet or not. But the point still stands; it seems (at least to me) like the vast majority of MMORPGs are essentially Dungeons & Dragons clones, and I'm wondering why the sci-fi ones don't fare better. Is it developers only wanting to back a sure bet? The general caution of the game industry? I'd imagine that most, if not all, big game studios would want a piece of the MMORPG pie, and they could easily get it, provided they had the right licenses. The two settings that come most readily to my mind as brilliant matches for the MMO playstyle are Fallout and Shadowrun. For the record, I've already designed Shadowrun Online in my head, from top to bottom; if I had one iota of programming or game development experience, I'd make a few million and call it a day. So for any game company CEOs out there that want to retire in style, just PM me. Yeah, it's that good. Anyway, feel free to post your thoughts.

Is it, though? I mentioned earlier that on the old boards Yrkoon and I were at each other's throats constantly; I came to the realization a while ago that today we'd probably be in agreement on most issues. I certainly know that my views have changed (or as I prefer to think of it, matured) over time, and I'd imagine it's possible for others' to do the same as well. Furthermore, you guys may know each others' views like the backs of your hands, but I sure don't. I drop in only occasionally, and I've probably missed a lot. The only ones I could really nail down would be 11XHooah (or somesuch), who I haven't seen recently, and metadigital.

Oh, I take your point. I was just saying that I'm not part of either camp. I'm a holdover from the days when Way Off-Topic was a friggin' cutthroat place, when Yrkoon would haul out link upon link to make his foaming-at-the-mouth arguments creditable, and when others on the opposite side would do the same. Twenty-page discussions on current events and issues. I liked it.

Eh. I'll be watching all the football I can during the season, both college and NFL, but for some reason the fantasy thing has never stoked my interest. Actually, I know precisely what it is. I'm a stickler for realism. I freak out if the rosters in Madden aren't exactly correct. In my Rome: Total War games, I do my best to keep the map historically accurate as far as who controls what. I'm just weird like that.

Could be, I suppose, but on the other hand, I'm the rare bird who doesn't post anywhere BUT off-topic. I came over here after the pre-Obsidian board went the way of the dodo, simply because I was used to winding down an evening with political bickering. I don't believe I've posted on-topic in this forum, or more precisely this forum's predecessor, since Icewind Dale II was hitting shelves. I didn't even buy KotOR II. Or KotOR, for that matter. For my money, Star Wars games went to seed after TIE Fighter.

As Vasquez said, "Hudson may be right." Still, there was a time when it wasn't boring, at least not around here, or more precisely, where some of us were before here. But, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, as the thread title implies. And the Walken thing was a hoax, as I very well knew right off the bat, though I did spend a good ten minutes trying to get the site to open on a crappy Russian dial-up connection.

Seriously. What happened to this place? Used to be, there'd be political discussions going on all the time. Now all I see are bizarre anime sketches and "Cats or Dogs?" polls. I'm not really criticizing, I'm just curious what brought about the change. Is it a user thing, or is it that the moderators tend to shut down anything that doesn't involve people handing virtual flowers to each other? Have folks actually gone and found a more appropriate forum for political debate, or have the ones who were actually interested in such things been silenced? Just curious, myself. Got back from Russia and finally caught up on some good ol' American news - I was shocked to notice that we're actually reporting on the Gaza pullout, when I'm sure something terribly interesting is happening in Kentucky - and figured there were enough hot-button issues in the headlines to make this place interesting. But nope. Just, you know, "I like bread!" types of posts. Just curious.

Uh huh. Sure.

Oh, and you know where the headquarters is for all large-scale Masonic interference in the US, right? The Denver International Airport. Why, you ask? Happy to tell you. First of all, it is much too large for an airport designed to handle the amount of traffic it does (it's larger than some major cities in the continental US) -- clear proof that there's an underground complex beneath it, and the surface stuff is just masking. If you've ever flown through Denver, you also know how amazingly far the airport is from the actual city -- it's downright remote. Furthermore, what about the time capsule in the airport? Anybody else notice the conspicious Freemason symbol in it? And what about those creepy murals on the walls? They've been painted over now, sure, but when it first opened, there were pictures of burning cities, gas-mask-wearing soldiers, little girls in coffins, Masonic symbols and some rather strange, undocumented writing. What more proof do you need? Listen to what I'm telling you, people, and start preparing.

The Knights Templar stuff is all just a red herring, set up to keep people off the real scent. Who do you think pays Umberto Eco's bills? Dan Brown's? That's right, friend. I have it on good authority they're paid in installments of $33,000 quarterly.

And while we're on the subject of Freemasonry... Anyone ever heard of the Department of Defense Information Awareness Office? First, its avowed purpose is to gather and correlate information on ordinary citizens for the purpose of predicting terrorism and other crime. Second, its logo depicted the eye in the pyramid, a symbol associated with Illuminati and Masonic representations of power or divinity, casting a beam over the globe of the Earth. This has since been changed. The original logo is still widely available on the Internet, however. Lastly, the name "Iao" is a Gnostic word for God. And you know that the IAO is keyed in to the Echelon system - the communications interception network operated by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is designed to capture telephone calls, fax and e-mail messages. And what do all of these countries have in common? That's right, a history of English possession. And where did Freemasonry come from, again?

So are you serious about all this? Because I'm finding this sort of interesting even if it is all made up. :D <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Let's just say I've done extensive research into the power-brokers of the world, past and present. Reagan, for instance. He was just another patsy. He likes to take credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, but was that really the case? No. Nor was it the Polish priest. No, no. It was the Queen of England in cahoots with the Rothschilds and the Gettys, determined to take back lands originally annexed from the Holy Roman Empire. Why do you think the Brits were so eager to get their thumbs in the West German pie? They weren't in the least bit concerned with ensuring that communism didn't spread, they just wanted what they'd originally been promised. The House of Hanover becoming the House of Windsor, anyone? And where does Freemasonry originate? That's right, jolly old England.

Nobody wants to admit it. Nobody.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you know what's going on in this world. The first duty of power is to perpetuate itself, and we don't even know who the actual powerful people are. Truman started the whole American tradition of secrecy after WWII with Project Paperclip, in which the CIA put captured Nazi scientists to work on America's nuclear arsenal, the space program, and all this "otherworldly" technology they'd come across. (And you know what I mean.) Then they got Truman to create the super-secret Majestic 12 committee to oversee Project Paperclip, not to mention other weird stuff the government wanted hidden. They ran the whole thing, and they've been running it for years, but nobody knows who "they" are. But I'm pretty sure they're all Freemasons. The whole Kennedy thing is so huge because it's at the center of so many other covert shadow-government operations. Kennedy himself was the smallest part of it, because it was actually a power play between Dulles' CIA, the anti-Castro military, LBJ, the Giancana Mafia, and a bunch of other dirty players. Oswald was a patsy, sure, but he put a gun on Jack. Of course, so did other test-mules from Dulles' MK-Ultra LSD-mind-control experiments. Zapruder was in on it, too: He was a KGB mole from way back. And the whole thing had ripple effects, like Jonestown, which was an assassin training camp that got found out. As for the Warren Commission, that thing was a joke--Dulles himself was on it, and there was only one person on the whole commission who wasn't on the CIA payroll and suspected Oswald didn't act alone. He died in a plane crash, after a young congressional aide named Bill Clinton drove him to the airport. It's all true, but nobody wants to admit it. Nobody. Now, Roswell, that's a bunch of crap. The Air Force was in possession of captured alien technology years before that. In '43, they started reverse-engineering a torus-shaped craft that came down in Arizona, and the next thing you know, America has The Bomb, supersonic aircraft, and a space program. Glenn saw stuff up there, flying lights. You can look it up. You know what I think? I think that skirt-chaser Kennedy wanted to spill the beans about our alien friends, so they killed him. He told his girlfriend Marilyn Monroe, and they killed her, too. No doubt, you're wondering, "Who are 'they'?" Well, I think the numbers speak for themselves: The Trinity site, where the first A-bomb was detonated, Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy bought the farm, and Area 51 are all on the 33rd parallel. And what other significance does the number 33 happen to have? It's the highest rank of the Masonic order. Wheels within wheels, my friend. Wheels within wheels.

Hey, Hooah. To operate that OCWS thing, are two guys really going to have to hump each other like that?