How are things across the pond Chap?

[MeDotOrg]

Hell, South Korea has controlled major outbreaks without lockdowns because their people listen to and follow the direction of their leaders.

North Korea has zero cases of Covid thanks to the Dear Leader.

If you thought the United States had strict lockdown protocols, wait until you hear about what’s going on in North Korea.

According to reports from South Korea’s spy agency, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has issued a lockdown for the entire capital city of Pyongyang, banned fishing at sea, and has even called for the execution of at least two people in an effort to protect his borders from the coronavirus.

Kim also reportedly told North Korean diplomats around the world not to act in any way that could potentially provoke the United States and is gearing up for a different approach toward North Korea from the media’s president-elect Joe Biden.

Ha Tae-keung, one of the lawmakers briefed by South Korean officials, said Kim is displaying “excessive anger” and taking “irrational measures” in fear that the pandemic will bring economic turmoil to North Korea. One of the people executed last month was reportedly a high-profile currency changer in the nation’s capital, who Kim blamed for the falling exchange rate of the North Korean currency.

For the last 9 months, North Korea has boasted that the government has not found a single case of COVID-19 within its borders, a claim that has been widely contested by observers and experts around the world. Despite this, the country has still been forced to close its border with its largest trading partner: China. North Korea’s current trade with China has totaled only about 25 percent of the numbers it did last year, a massive blow to the North Korean economy, according to Just The News.

https://thegreggjarrett.com/do-or-die-n ... -of-covid/

Yeah, there's no Covid-19 in North Korea, just like there was no prostitution in the Soviet Union and no homosexuality in Cuba.

Meanwhile, North Korean hackers have been trying to penetrate AstraZenica.

[ajax18]

Do you think your opinion ever mattered to me?

Nope.

Chronically selfish people are too psychologically broken to feel the shame they would if they were decent human beings. My comments aren't for you. They're about you.

We all know you ignore everything you read which has the audacity to contain facts. Of course you can't process my posts.

Are you a charitable person Schmo? How much do give in private charity?

You're to spiritually dead to even be aware of how foul and carnally minded your views are.

[Icarus]

You're to spiritually dead to even be aware of how foul and carnally minded your views are.

Coming from the human trash who is a Nazi racist prick, that's rich.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ajax,

For the 40th time:

https://prowritingaid.com/art/625/To-vs ... --Two.aspx

Too = also and excessive

To = toward or ->

- Doc

[Some Schmo]

Are you a charitable person Schmo? How much do give in private charity?

This isn't something I (or most charitable people) normally talk about, because if I did, I wouldn't be giving for the real reason it's important. All I will say is that I don't fear anyone's judgment on this score.

You're to spiritually dead to even be aware of how foul and carnally minded your views are.

That would be impossible for you to tell, given how obviously dishonest you are. I'm content to let the people who know me judge me. I'm mindful that what I say is honest. You don't give a crap about telling the truth. I'll take my morals over yours every day.

Do you think your opinion ever mattered to me? That's what you asked me, and then you post the above, as though I care about your opinion of me. That's funny. Maybe you care what I think more than I suspected. Maybe you're having a hard time understanding why someone who refuses to buy into your god delusion would turn out to be a more honest, charitable person than you are.

[honorentheos]

Are you a charitable person Schmo? How much do give in private charity?

This really reminds me of one of the kids in the D&D game I've been DMing for my daughter and her friends. And I'm using this as an excuse to talk about it before I get to the point. So feel free to bail now or skip to the end.

This friend is the main reason they wanted someone to DM. They all had played a couple of one-shots together, had fun, and this kid really wanted to play a full campaign but none of the friends in the group wanted to DM a campaign. Enter me. Anyway, the guy is pretty alpha in real life, and is really into the game in a power-gaming way. He chose to play a Dwarf Barbarian but after a couple of sessions of seeing how the other PCs played he became jealous of the cleric (my daughter) and the wizard (another guy in the group) getting the most kills in the first major encounter. He asked me to look into options so he could do magic, too, and we came up with having him dip into Forge Cleric as a multi-class which buffed his Barbarian abilities and gave him a few cool spells he could throw out when he wasn't hack-and-slashing his way through the world.

Somewhere in the third session or so I introduced a succubus to the party, with the expectation she could build into a good encounter down the road when they had leveled up a bit. She met them at a place in the main city they live in, and she started chatting the party up to get to know them. She caught him giving her a look and started paying him more attention. He resisted the direct attention so she charmed him for kicks to get in his head and let them go on their way...while following them in the ethereal plane. They ended up getting jumped by thugs on the way home who had bumped into them early in the day but backed off because the thugs were intimidated by the barbarian who used Thaumaturgy and a high intimidation roll to prevent the encounter. Or rather, delay the encounter. This time they brought back up and more muscle but still got their asses handed to them by the party. After the last body hit the ground the party immediately went to scavenging off the dead because kids these days are apparently into that. (Turns out kids play D&D like a video game,...but that's a tangent in a tangent so let's put a pin in it and save that tangent for a different day.)

While robbing the bodies, the barbarian dwarf who recently found Tharmekhûl decided he was going to keep some of the gold he found for himself and not tell the others. His sleight of hand roll was high enough to beat their passive perception...but not the succubus' perception role who was deliberately watching him. Picking up that he might not be vulnerable to her seduction via lust, she realized that greed was actually his vice of choice and went to work on him. First, she offered to help him find a pearl he wanted for a spell and she did...requiring him to step out of an encounter a bit and let the other members of the party finish a fight while he went looking for a hidden jewelry box. Then she helped him find a secret item that is really powerful...and something being sought by the leadership of the rival city from the one they live in. She let him know that if he wanted to keep it for himself he could, BUT she knew someone who would pay A LOT for it. He was level 3 at this point so a lot of gold sounded pretty tempting. He then went to sleep for the night and I had his god appear to him in vision and convey that he was at a fork in his destiny. He would need to choose between the path that could lead to a heroic future in the service of his people or one that satisfied his greed and lust for power.

The guy playing the barbarian/cleric was as conflicted as a barbarian/cleric ought to be. So it was perfect. He ended up following through on finding the buyer for the item who offered him a lot of gold for it, but also made it clear he was doing it to help overthrow the leadership of the city. His way of dealing with this? He took about a third of what he was given, went to the shanty town part of the city where the families of miners and other laborers live and gave the gold to the families of miners who had been recently killed in an incident at the mine.

The game is interesting to me for what it reveals about human nature. I've had a member of the group kill a guy in public with magic who had been following them, they grabbed him to try and interrogate him, he denied he was up to anything, he broke free and started to run and this PC didn't want him to get away so he shot him in the back with a lightning bolt and a wish that the DM would let it not kill him. As if. After each session I ask the kids questions about it because I haven't done this in a couple of decades and want to get their feedback on what they liked and didn't like to make sure they're having fun and improve my DM skills. One of the kids in the group was mad at this kid for killing the person spying on them when they had a plan for catching him. And he said, "But I was mad!" and I said, "And that's how police shootings happen." That took them a bit aback because they are early college age Biden supporting anti-Trumpers and yet here you had at least a couple of them slipping easily into the role of authority that made excuses for the use of lethal force in a clear case of it not being self defense.

Anyway, ajax. Charity as you are applying it makes it akin to indulgences in modern religion. It doesn't make a person a good or bad person if they give them or not. Don't be a T__. (PC name removed.)

[Meadowchik]

My uni program is studying Covid this year and varying models starting with SIR the simplest onto SEIR and SEQIR, all delving into the relationships between susceptible, exposed (latent period), quarantined, Infected, and recovered individuals. We're required to implement the models with UK Covid-19 data and there is, predictably, a strong relationship between quarantining and smaller infection curves.

I'm really happy with the way the schools are navigating this and impressed by consistent mask usage in public indoors. If we can get an effective vaccine soon hopefully daily life can be more again, but with much lower casualties than would have happened without the measures.

[Some Schmo]

You're to spiritually dead to even be aware of how foul and carnally minded your views are.

I was thinking about ajax actually typing this out and hitting the "Submit" button when he has admitted on this forum that he would be totally fine with 2 million Americans dying of COVID if it meant no more lockdowns.

And I'm the one with "foul views." This is next-level daft.

I suppose that since I actually care about all that human death, I am carnally minded. I consider that a good thing. Only a damned psychopath is fine with 2 million preventable deaths. You know, Hitler, Stalin, and the like.

ajax makes quite a sales pitch for religion, doesn't he?