Breaking News: Solution To Illinois Budget Crisis!

As you may know, the State of Illinois has been facing a severe budget shortfall and has recently been forced into massive tax hikes. Also, in the 2008 election, then-candidate Mitt Romney accused then-candidate Rudy Giuliani of turning New York City into a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants in order to get more workers and tax revenue. Recently, it appears that Illinois is following this plan, becoming a "sanctuary state" for Democratic politicians who want to avoid voting on bills. Lawmakers have referred to themselves as "refugees", and have been stimulating the Illinois economy by purchasing essential items. There has been speculation about whether police would be able to arrest the rogue legislators and extradite them back to their home states to stand trial. As for me, I am just waiting to see what the Capitol Steps song about it will be like.

Breaking News: More Evidence of Cylon Activity in Illinois Government

"I need your sage advice: Should I spend money I don't have?"

- Overheard at GameStop

----


Unlike my last blog post about Illinois government, this time I won't make any accusations about who is the Cylon: I'll just lay out the facts and let you be the judge.

A few days ago, Governor Quinn unveiled his new "budget plan" - which involves borrowing $4.7 billion, leaving $6 billion worth of bills unpaid, including cuts to education funding, but no tax increase. The Chicago Tribune reported that the reason he did this was to encourage state senators to vote for a tax increase, because nobody would like the alternative. And Quinn's "Illinois Budget web site" now states that he supports a tax increase (see the bottom under "Increased State Revenues.")

And budgetary problems aren't the only "crisis card" that's shown up recently: pretty soon, restaurants and retail business across the state may be the host to yet another round of exciting combat action. That's right, a new bill is going to be passed to allow concealed carry of handguns in Illinois. There are just two interesting amendments that supporters of the bill added: one said that any state legislator who voted against the measure will not be allowed to get a concealed carry permit for himself, and the other says that any retail business that bans handguns inside the business will be civilly liable if a concealed carry permit holder get injured or killed in a violent crime at that business - the theory being that if the business "disarms" the permit holder, who then "can't defend himself" and gets hurt, the business should be liable..

Questions for discussion:

1. The point of the first amendment discussed above is that politicians shouldn't be "hypocrites" by voting against concealed carry but then getting a permit themselves. Should this principle be extended to apply to other laws too? For example, if Legislator X votes against a tax cut that passes, should Legislator X still have to pay the higher tax rate?

2. As for the other amendment, does it work both ways? If the business DOES allow concealed guns, a concealed carry permit holder legally brings a gun in, and the gun is discharged (either accidentally or on purpose) and injures someone, is the business liable for allowing the gun on?

3. If the purpose of concealed carry is to deter crime, then why make it "concealed"? It seems to me like if I was carrying a gun to deter crime, I would want criminals to know that I am armed so they will be deterred. (On the other hand maybe the idea is that if concealed carry is legal, then criminals won't know who is armed and who isn't, so would play it safe and not attack anyone.)

Breaking News: Dungeons & Dragons Evidence of Socialist Takeover Plot

Recently, many conservatives have accused President Barack Obama of trying to turn the United States into a socialist country. Although the "liberal-elite" mainstream media have so far refused to report on this shocking development, there's yet another area that has been infiltrated by socialist propaganda - Dungeons and Dragons.

Yesterday during my Dungeons and Dragons game my character got killed. Since the death panel decided that my character's "level of adventuring productivity" wasn't high enough to warrant spending scarce health care resources on resurrecting him*, I had to create a new character. The new character I am planning to create is an "artificer" - a healer class with an unusual healing ability, which requires some explanation. In D+D, each character has a limited number of "healing surges." Most healing powers require the recipient of the healing to spend a healing surge, and once a character runs out of healing surges he can no longer be healed (until he takes an "extended rest" which resets his healing surges)**. The Artificer's healing power works differently - his healing doesn't require the recipient to spend a healing surge, but at the end of the battle the healing power must be recharged, which requires a character (any character in the party) to spend a healing surge. This effectively allows the character to pool healing resources between his party members, similar to a socialized medicine system. (Just like in real life, this socialized medicine system actually works pretty well.)

Also, my college roleplaying club has a "club campaign" of D+D, and anyone who wants to can go to each adventure. But of course this would lead to a problem because people who go to more adventures would go up in level and gain treasure faster, and if you were to start in the middle then you would be at low level and have a hard time contributing to the group. The way they solve this problem is classic socialism. Everyone levels at the same rate regardless of how often they play - on the campaign web site it says what level the characters are so you create a character of that level. There is also an "audit value" that indicates how much treasure you are supposed to have, and if you fall below that amount then you can ask a DM to "audit" your character, which gives you an amount of treasure to get your total treasure value up to the audit level. A similar system is used on a larger scale in the RPGA, which is a set of "official" adventures published by Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes D+D. There are "official RPGA events" where you go to play, and sign in, and after signing in a certain number of times you can get "rewards cards" mailed to you that give you special bonuses in play (like being allowed to reroll a die roll.) Or at least that used to be the way they did it - they eventually changed it so the rewards cards are on a freely downloadable PDF, so you can just print them all out and bring them to the game (although you are only allowed to use a certain number of cards per game, depending on your character's level).

Also one more thing that may be interesting, although only tangentially related to socialism. In D+D there are six character attributes - Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Different character classes require different attributes to work well - for example fighters require Strength, wizards require Intelligence, etc. Additionally, there are different "races" like human, elf, etc. Each race has two attributes that it gets a +2 bonus to (except humans, who only have one +2 bonus but can apply it to any attribute). This means that races that don't have a bonus to a particular character class's attribute are weaker choices for that character class. One common goal of "house rules" discussed on D+D fan sites is aimed at eliminating this disparity by changing how racial stat bonuses are determined, like by allowing players to move one of their stat bonuses to a different stat. In other words, it's like an affirmative action system. And more than that, it's an affirmative action system based on a point system***.

*This isn't the actual reason. In reality the DM told me that I could have the character revived by our party's employer next session, or I could create a new character. I chose to create a new character because I wanted to try out the Artificer class. But I'll still try to use the explanation above as an "in-game" explanation for why my character couldn't get revived.

**This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but there's actually a good reason for it. In the 3rd edition of D+D, there were only two character classes that could do healing, and their healing spells took a "standard action" to cast. (Characters get one standard action per turn, and standard actions are used to do most things like spellcasting and attacking.) This basically meant that you had to have one of those characters in your party to provide healing, but that playing those characters was often uninteresting because in tough fights you would spend most of your actions just healing others rather than doing anything to the enemy - hence they were sometimes called "hit point vending machines." In 4th edition, which is what we are playing, they fixed these problems by giving more classes healing abilities, giving everyone the ability to heal themselves to full at the end of the fight, and making most healing spells a "minor action" which means that you can use a healing spell and attack in the same turn. But of course this created another problem - a party full of healers would be almost unstoppable because they could keep healing each other while still pumping out just as much damage on the enemy. Sot the healing surge system is designed to limit the amount of healing one character can get.

***Another instance of something similar was in Planetside, a massively multiplayer shooter. Players got rewarded with experience points when they participated in a successful assault on an enemy base, so if one side started losing, the players would realize they were unlikely to win and pull out, moving to another front looking for more experience point potential in other areas. This meant that once one side started to win, they would usually continue to win, and it was hard to find a battle in serious contention for very long. The solution? Give the side with fewer people in a particular area bonus health and experience points to encourage them to stay. This of course led to complaints that the game was "becoming most like the University of Michigan every day." (At the time, the University of Michigan was in the news due to its controversial affirmative action policy, later overturned by the courts, that rated applicants according to a point system gave members of underrepresented races bonus points during the admission process.)

Breaking News: University of Maryland Descends into Sin

Just days after showing a porn movie on campus, the University of Maryland has decided to leave prayer out of the commencement ceremony.

Also, just days after the preliminary findings of a report on the history of slavery in building the university came out, the Gemstone Program has decided to raise money with a "date auction" - an auction in which volunteer dates are "sold" to buyers for the night.