Amentep

Iirc, the US would have a negative population growth if not for immigration.

I think often times people want to make things simple and in so doing give a false impression because rarely is anything simple. Simplicity glosses over the years of racial tension around the country caused the ill treatment we have inflicted on ourselves based on race. Sure there were lynchings and mob violence in the south, and it was more prevalent there. Certainly the Jim Crow laws were unique (but exist, primarily, because the North kind of gave up on 'fixing' the south), but you can find examples of gerrymandering to disenfranchise or violence in the north. For a Rosewood in Florida, you get a Greenwood district in Tulsa. For a race riot in Atlanta (1909) you get one in Chicago (1919); for one in Watts (in 1965) you get one in Newark (1967). Maybe history in public schools is better now but back in my day, a lot of this wasn't ever touched on (and no mention of the Asian immigration restrictions via quotas or what was really going on with native peoples for the most part, although perhaps some sort of ambivalence about Custer had begun to creep in). The Japanese internment camps were seen as bad, but were presented as I recall as a bit of an anomaly and not part of an interconnected picture about fears of Asians in the west. That said, I seriously doubt the South would have honored any promises made to the native peoples anymore than the North/US generally did. There was too much money being poured into the plantation system for them to give plantation lands back to native peoples, and too much money in mining in the mountains. Lincoln I think from what I've read mostly wanted to preserve the union. I don't think he was a fan of slavery, IIRC, but he'd have kept it if he'd been able to keep the union together. He didn't really have a lot of chance though, having spoken out against the spread of slavery he saw as inherent in the Kansas-Nebraska act while a Representative, South Carolina succeeded before he took office.

What do you do when two bears spawn?

IIRC it was about 3,000 that fought for the north (and lost about 10%), but were primarily the northern tribes that had been working well in the northern states. So yes, the vast majority who picked a side, sided with the south. Note the the reasons they did were complex and differed between groups. The Choctow, for example, sided with the south because their laws allowed slave ownership, and their agent who they liked was a southern sympathizer. Combine that with the US government having more or less ignored them and their issues for years and its easy to see why they'd side with the south. The western Cherokee siding with the south was a bit weird - yes it was the US government who sent them west, but it was to open up the southern states for southern plantation owning whites, so I'd imagine if everyone else around them weren't supporting the south so that they would have to fight in their homes constantly, they may have chosen differently. The big difference in the industrial revolution 'wage slave' and the slaves of the south is that - as far as I know - the factory owner didn't have a legal right to kill you, to break up your family or to chase you down if you left and drag you back to work for them (albeit some of what they were allowed to do could kill you and/or break up your family; I don't recall them being able to drag you back to work except when prison labor got used).

As I recall the Delaware, Pamunkee, Lumbee, Iroquois, Powhaten, Pequot, Ottawa, Seneca, Huron Oneida, Potawatomi and Ojibwa fought on the Union side. The Cherokee (western and Carolinian), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Catawba fought on the Confederate side. I think the Creek ended up fighting on both sides. Wasn't it the Oklahoma Creek who sided with the Union? The Lakota, Arpaho, Cheyenne and others were still fighting the US out west when the civil war started if memory serves me, and not really considered to have taken a side. At any rate, while you can argue the civil war was a libertarian movement against 'big government' (big business is, IMO not supportable, as the whole continuation of slavery was necessary for the economy as it was established, and therefore supported the southern wealthy), you'll never escape that what 'big government' was doing that the south objected to was freeing the slaves. It will always come back to slavery and protecting the money interests of the wealthy southern families that had invested in the plantation system and that needed to feed the cotton gin in volume to be sustained.

...with turnips...??? Seriously though, I don't like Minsc either. I also preferred Imoen as a thief. But I'd rather have a classless system than hybrid class system mechanics and so was never fond of BG2 forcing me to have her a dual class character. Anyhow, imagine if Khalid and Dynahir had been the survivors in Irenicus' dungeon instead of Minsc and Jaheria...!

Since you can post, can you send a PM to @Fionavar?

Okay moved to Grounded forums. Don't know what other game I lost.

As I was working evenings at the time, I was at my computer desk playing Baldur's Gate, hoovering the Fog of War off maps, when the news I had on in the background started showing the towers after the first plane hit. They were talking about how they thought a plane had hit when the second hit.

Which game?

RIP - a good actress, and seemed to be a fun person from her interviews.

I believe its supposed to be a series of one off episodes with percolating story lines over multiple episides.

vampires.

He probably means blood. Hurl's outed himself as a vampire.

New thread:

Previous thread:

How is Moontrap? Thats one I haven't seen. Also haven't seen Thou Shall Not Kill...Except.

I haven't seen the series since it ended, so am watching them all as a lot of them I just have at best vague memories of.

It wasn't awful, but like a lot of the weaker (IMO) episodes, it is sort of half baked. Like they could have used a couple more script passes to better work out the ideas they were working with.

I am too. An episode a week. I'm nearing the end of season four.

In other news, I always find it puzzling how people seem to think that 'guilty' people shouldn't have a lawyer to defend them. There's a local politician who I'm not a fan of, but there are some disturbing PAC attack ads that are like "AND AS A LAWYER HE DEFENDED MURDERS AND RAPISTS!!!! AND THEY GOT BAIL! OMG!"

Unfortunately I can't remember the organization whose data was used when the governing body redesigning Learning Support; its over 5 years old and perhaps supplanted by the suggested studies from the quoted article. But at the time the data showed even with grade inflation, GPA alone was a better predictor than SAT/ACT alone. Also tests can be used in ways they can't really support - the old ACT COMPASS test was used for admissions decisions by a lot of universities when its stated intended use was to fine tune placement decisions for students that the institution already knew where their skill range lay. The best methods, from the data at the time, were always one that took into account many factors about the student, to get as much data about the student to make decisions.