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I am so very excited!
We are starting up a new campaign in the Star Wars universe and what it amazing is that *I* am not running it. I’ve been salvating for years to participate as a player in a adventure. I have a couple of great ideas for my character. She’s gonna be really interesting to play. I’ll update here with highlights as things start to get rolling.
Hurrah! for Rocky Mountain House: (snipped from the edmonton journal)
Rocky Mountain House mayor not surprised by plebiscite’s results
Residents of Rocky Mountain House voted over whelmingly against reversing a 12-year ban on video lottery terminals on Monday.
Town citizens voted to remove VLTs from local bars and lounges in 1997. Monday’s plebiscite was held to determine if town council should ask the province to return the lottery machines to the community, located about 80 kilometres west of Red Deer.
Rocky Mountain House Mayor Jim Bague said 874 people voted against bringing VLTs to the town, while 274 voted in favour of the move.
The outcome of the plebiscite didn’t surprise him, he said.
“It’s the same people talking now as in 1997,” Bague said. “I think it’s important for the public to speak. It’s been 12 years and we’ve now let the public speak again.”
The town’s decision to uphold the ban on VLTs will continue to hurt bars in the community, because customers are going to the next town to play VLTs, said Duffers Pub manager Jim Pogson
“I’m very disappointed … We may have to lay off some girls and cut back shifts. With other businesses, it could be the end of them,” Pogson said.
The controversial plebiscite has largely seen local drinking establishments pitted against churches.
“They definitely have opinions, those in favour or opposed. They’re both figuring that it’s an important issue,” Bague said.
Six bar owners forced the plebiscite by collecting enough names — 10 per cent of the town’s 7,100 residents — on a petition. The bar owners say they are losing money to customers who go to the next town to play VLTs.
In 2009-10, the Alberta Lottery Fund expects to collect $1.5 billion in gaming revenues, including $616 million from VLTs.
The fund supports thousands of charitable, not-for-profit, public and community-based initiatives each year.
Bars reap 15-per-cent commissions from VLTs’ gross profits.
The province caps the number of machines at 6,000 and all of them are in use.
VLT’s or Video Lottery Terminals are a government cash cow to the tune of about $828.2 million a year. We as province really dig our gambling. VLT’s are addictive unecessary additions to pubs and bars accross the province. Rocky Mountain House just held a plebicite reaffirming the populations wishes to remain a VLT free community, much to the chargin of local business. This example needs to be replicated across our province as VLT’s do much to aggravate the social ill of gambling.
Get the full story at the CBC.
The amazingly cogent world of religion strikes once again with timeless wisdom, His Popiness said: 
“You can’t resolve it [the problem of AIDS] with the distribution of condoms.”
The Unctuous High Holy Pope of Vapidity then added:
“On the contrary, it increases the problem.”
It would seem to me, the lowly heathen that I am, that condom use is a good thing. It is a inexpensive way to curtail the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (obvious bastions of Satan) that said, “The male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV [the virus that causes AIDS].”
Hmmm…. a religious edict, basking in the filthy crud of relgious dogmatism, is causing grevious harm to millions of people. Not particularly surprising, (given the religious track record) but disheartening all the same. The “god is love” bunch really have their work cut out for them in this instance.
Religion is a dangerous delusional pursuit; why people continue to propigate such an abberation, given all the evidence, boggles the mind.
The interesting things you find on the net. I’ve been reading the Sword of Truth series as of late. The further you get in the series it seems, the more preachy/inane it becomes. It seems Mr. Goodkind is a strong proponent of the
american style of Libertarianism (see also Objectivism), that for most intensive purposes is a bat-shite crazy in the woods notion of how the world should be run on self-interest and selfishness.
On the blog Randzapper was this gem of a quote refuting a objectivist named Flashman:
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Can you even fathom the stupid coming out of Ireland these days? The pious seem to have hijacked rationality, sprinkled it with magic jebus dust and cranked out this perfidious little gem of proposed legislation.
What is outrageous is the lengths so called rational legislators go to ‘make happy’ with the delusional segments of their constituencies.
Well, it is good to see that oversimplification and deliberate obfuscation of fact is still alive and well. The misuse of scientific fact to support the don’t kiiillll baaaabeeee trope is wonderfully (mis)stated at the abortionfacts.com website. The disingenuous ‘Milestones of Early Life’ article provides a bountiful harvest of misinformation ready for dissemination by the anti-choice horde. This particular pro-life site is a testament to the duplicity of our opponents, enter at your own risk.
Milestones of Early Life
At no time in your life does more growth and change occur than in the first nine months before birth. Here are the amazing milestones of that time in your life:
Day 1: Conception: Of the 200,000,000 sperm that try to penetrate the mother’s egg cell, only one succeeds.2 At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed. All of the inherited features of this new person are already set – whether it’s a boy or girl, the color of the eyes, the color of the hair, the dimples of the cheeks and the cleft of the chin. He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.
The first cell soon divides in two. Each of these new cells divides again and again as they travel toward the womb in search of a protected place to grow.3
“At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed.”
Conception is a process, not a distinct point in time
“The process of conception, also known as fertilisation, involves many chemical reactions and processes. It is not an instantaneous occurrence. Look at the diagram I made:
So somewhere along that set of chemical reactions, which finally result in two cells with a unique human genetic combination (the zygote immediately after the fusion of sperm has two pronuclei – one from the sperm and one from the ovum), are we to say that a single human life has started? If so, at what point does that happen?
The fact of the matter is that conception is no less of an arbitrary ‘line in the sand’ than any other point that one picks, such as the development of the brain, birth or development of self-awareness. But there is nothing wrong per se with something being arbitrary (after all, the time when people are old enough to vote is arbitrary), so we should now look at whether there is a good reason for not using conception as the start of a human being’s life.”
“He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.”
Oversimplifying and anthropomorphizing a complex process to further a political agenda. Wonderful. The pro-life movement relies on clear cut definitions that are patently false and misleading. I assume their gambit is that if they repeat the misinformation long and hard enough it will imprint on the body politic as “fact”.
I am a sucker for cute dog pictures, and my own LWD (little white dog) is the topic of today’s picture post.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…