#the confederates lost the war – deal with it!

[discrepancybot]

In the unlikely event that I ever decided to visit a supermarket in tighty whities, I'd at least wear ones that fit.

[liberalsarecool]

I owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology. I’ve been critical of the Trump presidency and am still exhausted from the experience.

But to be fair, President Trump wasn’t that bad, other than:

• when he incited an insurrection against the government,

• mismanaged a pandemic that killed over a million Americans

• separated children from their families

• lost those children in the bureaucracy

• tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church

• tried to block all Muslims from entering the country

• got impeached

• got impeached again

• had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history

• pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden

• fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia

• bragged about firing the FBI director on TV

• took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community

• diverted military funding to build his wall

• caused the longest government shutdown in US history

• called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate”

• lied nearly 40,000 times

• banned transgender people from serving in the military

• ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions

• vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers

• refused to release his tax returns

• increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion

• had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history

• called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers

• coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist

• refused to concede the 2020 election

• hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House

• walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl

• called neo-Nazis “very fine people”

• suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID

• abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey

• pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans

• incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic

• withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords

• withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal

• withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances

• insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter

• pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op

• failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies

• called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries

• called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation”

• claimed that he single-handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere

• forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader

• believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

• berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe

• suggested the US should buy Greenland

• colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges

• repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people”

• claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases

• violated the emoluments clause

• thought that Nambia was a country

• told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public

• called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution

• nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet

• nominated a corrupt head of the EPA

• nominated a corrupt head of HHS

• nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department

• nominated a corrupt head of the USDA

• praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies

• refused to allow the presidential transition to begin

• insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death

• spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president

• falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote

• called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser”

• falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year

• considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions

• mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID

• locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones

• used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus”

• hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser

• pardoned several of his shady associates

• gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories

• got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!)

• had a Secretary of State who called him a moron

• forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history

• botched the COVID vaccine rollout

• tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him

• charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties

• constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate

• claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear

• called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas”

• used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise

• opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling

• got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers

• claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US

• ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings

• blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining

• redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle

• got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters”

• threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution

• botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico

• threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them

• pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes

• thought that the Virgin islands had a President

• drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane

• allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing

• rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos

• pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID

• rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers

• held blatant campaign rallies at the White House

• tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man

• refused to attend his successors’ inauguration

• nominated the worst Education Secretary in history

• threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted

• attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci

• promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t)

• allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues

• struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble

• called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ”

• threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders

• went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic

• claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,”

• seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution

• demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director

• praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles

• completely gutted the Voice of America

• placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service

• claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower

• suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country

• suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public

• overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported

• reduced the number of refugees the US accepts

• insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames

• gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address

• named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties

• eliminated the White House office of pandemic response

• used soldiers as campaign props

• fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him

• demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade

• hired a shit ton of white nationalists

• politicized the civil service

• did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government

• falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts

• claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won

• insulted reporters of color

• insulted women reporters

• insulted women reporters of color

• suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs

• attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him

• summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election

• spent countless hours every day watching Fox News

• refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas

• hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer

• tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him

• acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney

• attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault

• held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present

• didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media

• stopped holding press briefings for months at a time

• “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power

• led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform

• claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers

• tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course

• suggested that the government nuke hurricanes

• suggested that wind turbines cause cancer

• said that he had a special aptitude for science

• fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure

• blurted out classified information to Russian officials

• tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida

• fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban

• hired Stephen Miller

• openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them

• interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel

• abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war

• tried to get Russia back into the G7

• held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden

• seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive

• lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated

• falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t

• shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies

• still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan

• still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks"

• forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID

• told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”

• fucked up the Census

• withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic

• did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act

• seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican

• stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win

• constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump

• claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened

• said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake

• claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him

• claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President

• created a commission to whitewash American history

• retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain

• claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there

• hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims

• had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others

• bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties

• apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House

• stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians

• falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police

• said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about

• tried to rescind protection from DREAMers

• gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic

• tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax

• said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states

• deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented

• claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln

• touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all

• retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile

• forced through security clearances for his family

• suggested that police officers should rough up suspects

• suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs

• tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender

• suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher

• nominated a climate change skeptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy

• retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event

• hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags

• accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address

• claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia

• mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault

• obsessed over low-flow toilets

• ordered the re-release of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release

• called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek)

• hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech

• took advice from the MyPillow guy

• claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists

• said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure

• never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign

• falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent

• announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest

• insulted the leader of Canada

• insulted the leader of France

• insulted the leader of Britain

• insulted the leader of Germany

• insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!)

• falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues

• blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually

• continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders,

• said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked

• left a NATO summit early in a huff

• stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of five knows not to do that

• called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary

• refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise

And a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember .

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

Pitch for the Earth Avatar tv show (after Korra):

TITLE -

“Avatar: The Ballad of Inoue” (alt title would be “Avatar: The Tragedy of Inoue”)

STATE OF THE WORLD AFTER KORRA -

For this write-up, Korra lived to be around 120. So the setting is not just several decades after the end of TLOK, it’s also the Avatar world’s version of our modern day. Modern technology is now prevalent, such as computers/the Internet, firearms, commercial airlines, and television.

Regarding the international community, the world is currently in a Cold War scenario in which the nations are on the verge of another 100 Years War. The reason for this is that despite the rise of democracy in the Earth Kingdom, the system was corrupted by bad actors. The Earth Kingdom is now a false democracy; elections are shams since the ruling party - the One Earth party - remains in power while their opposition are all controlled.

The Northern Water Tribe and Southern Water Tribe were taken over by ultranationalists and have formed a confederation for the sole purpose of expanding their influence. The Water Confederation have also formed an alliance with the Earth Kingdom, stemming from their ancestral hatred of the Fire Nation. Despite this, they merely tolerate each other as both nations want to expand their own interests.

Meanwhile, the newly formed Air Federation (no longer Nomads) has grown wary of the Water-Earth alliance. Since they’re the newest nation, the Water Confederation and the Earth Kingdom have been subtly trying to turn the Air Federation into their vassal/puppet state. Basically, those nations are not respecting the Air Federation’s sovereignty. Because of this, the Air Federation have formed their own alliance with the Fire Nation. The Fire Nation have proven themselves to be trustworthy allies to the Air Federation since (1) they genuinely want to atone for causing the Airbender genocide and (2) they recognize the threat that the Earth-Water alliance poses to their own interests.

So the Cold War scenario is the Fire-Air alliance against the Earth-Water alliance. This scenario lasts throughout the entire show. Also, unlike Aang and Korra’s shows, it’s not clear which alliance is the one we should be rooting for. This is because one of the core themes of the show (which I’ll get into later) is that the Avatar is now considered a relic of the past. How are you supposed to maintain the balance of the world when you can’t tell who is in the right? Also, how can you operate in a world that doesn’t want you around anymore?

ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD?

The world has gone through an Enlightenment period due to the rise of democracy. Now that more power is being shifted to the people rather than monarchs, public opinion of the Avatar has become extremely negative. This is because people have started to view the Avatar as someone whose authority supersedes the leaders of each nation - basically, a super fascist. For example, if one nation does something that the Avatar doesn’t like (such as Sozin setting up colonies in the Earth Kingdom), then the Avatar can go in and unilaterally take them down (which Roku sorta did).

This anti-Avatar sentiment started during the final years of Korra’s life, which is one of the things that Inoue talks about with Korra whenever her spirit shows up. But it’s not just Korra who is hated, even the past Avatars have lost their reverence to the people. Personally, I was imagining a scene where Avatar Inoue is walking down a street and sees a statue of Aang that’s been heavily defaced, with one of the graffiti being, “JUSTICE FOR OZAI / I STAND WITH OZAI”.

So a huge issue that Inoue has to deal with is that he’s living in a world that no longer wants him around. This ends up affecting his world view as he starts to wonder if the world is even worth saving anymore.

HOW ABOUT INOUE HIMSELF?

In contrast to Aang and Korra, I pictured Inoue to be a darker, angrier, more bitter, anti-heroic Avatar. But it’s not just because of the international politics and the anti-Avatar sentiment. For his backstory, I imagined something like this.

We start off with 16-year-old Inoue finishing up his training. With him is his own Team Avatar - Yuu (the comic relief), Ayumi (the love interest), and Sai (the loudmouth). Inoue, Yuu, Ayumi, and Sai head off into the world, excited to start their journey…

…flashforward 20 years later. 36-year-old Inoue is in a cemetery. We then see he’s paying his respects to Yuu, Ayumi, and Sai, who died shortly after the flashback sequence. No longer the bright-eyed rookie Avatar, Inoue is now bitter and angry, although it’s not clear why his team died (that’ll be answered in later seasons). Inoue has also been living off the grid since his team’s demise and he hasn’t been acting as the Avatar for those 20 years.

While in Republic City, Avatar Inoue is contacted by a woman named Marin. Marin is revealed to be an ex-Dai Li agent who has gone rogue after learning about an Earth Kingdom plot to assassinate the current leader of the Air Federation. Marin asks Inoue to intervene, which he refuses, saying that he’s retired from being the Avatar. Sometime later, Marin is hunted down by her former teammates from the Dai Li, their goal being to eliminate her. Despite Inoue’s refusal to get involved, his good nature shines through and he ends up saving Marin. Because of this, he’s now gotten involved in the Dai Li conspiracy. This plot ends up being the focus of season 1. The rest of the show focuses on the aftermath of Inoue being forced out of his self-imposed retirement.

So in comparison to the other shows:

* Aang’s show was about a naive kid who ran away from his responsibilities and his journey was to accept his role as the Avatar

* Korra’s show was about a hothead who had to learn how to appreciate the responsibilities of being the Avatar

* Inoue’s show is about a depressed, angry man who must rise from his lowest point (grief and depression over his team’s deaths / living in a world that despises his very existence) in order to embrace his role as the Avatar

HYPOTHETICAL CAST (not meant to be the complete list)

1) Avatar Inoue, the protagonist

2) Marin, the deuteragonist and the only other member of Inoue’s new team Avatar (so Inoue has the smallest Team Avatar when compared to Aang and Korra)

3) Yuu, Ayumi, and Sai, members of Inoue’s former team Avatar. They’re all deceased in the present day and the story behind their deaths is one of the main arcs of the show. If I had to pick a reason, they were killed by Air Federation assassins who were actually targeting Inoue because they feared an Earth Avatar would be too loyal to the Earth Kingdom. This would be a season 2 reveal.

4) President Jin-seok: The corrupt president of the Earth Kingdom, leader of the One Earth political party, and the main antagonist of season 1 (it’s his plot to assassinate the Air Federation leader).

5) Ruisa: The leader of the Dai Li and Marin’s mentor. She’s the secondary antagonist of season 1 since she’s the one who spearheads the hunt for Inoue and Marin.

6) Jiang: A social media icon who is the face of the anti-Avatar movement.

7) Prime Minister Noriko: The leader of the Air Federation. It’s revealed later on she’s Jinora and Kai’s great-granddaughter.

8) Masaru: Marin’s father, who works as an engineer in Republic City

9) Chief Mato and Chief Tarlo: The leaders of the Northern and Southern Water Tribes, respectively. They are also the co-leaders of the Water Confederation.

10) Fire Lord Zuko II: The leader of the Fire Nation. (And yes, I did imagine Dante Basco playing this character).

[thebreakfastgenie]

https://www.tumblr.com/thebreakfastgenie/774625007539290112/httpswwwtumblrcomthebreakfastgenie7746218291

I can't help but think that, perhaps in some kind of subconscious way, the reason and way that people treat the likes of Robert Lee and Benedict Arnold stems from the fact that they're kind of a representation of different aspects of America that people don't really want to think too deeply about for different reasons.

Robert Lee is basically the face of the Confederate side of Civil War in one sense, in that he's very much the face of the evils of America's history and present in his defense of slavery and (by longer term proxy) America's bone deep unwillingness to face its own racism against non-whites, and ESPECIALLY against black people.

And this denial is so strong that when the Civil War ended in the Union's favor, they ultimately instead decided to pull a Jekyll and Hyde. Instead of facing their demons and moving America away from its darkness, they tried to essentially hide America's "Hyde" of slavery and racism by putting a "respectable" face that pretended it wasn't the case. Hence Robert Lee going from racist asshole fighting for a racist cause becoming a "noble gentlemen who just happened to be fighting for a different side"...while glossing over that the different side was the EVIL side, and an evil side that America is still so deeply in denial about that TO THIS DAY we have to deal with the aftermath of it all with our current situation.

Benedict Arnold on the other hand is the face of a different part of America's history, in that he's simultaneously the reason why America was likely able to gain its independence due to his many victories...but also how easily it could have LOST, as represented by his switching sides. And also I think, his existence presented a very uncomfortable question about America:

Did America have the right, or even really DESERVE to exist?

While many people most certainly believed in the idea that men should be allowed to represent themselves instead of being ruled over by a monarch, this obviously wasn't the entire story. The War for Independence was ultimately born out of a combination of wealthy assholes basically having issues with the British government, mixed together with the above point about Democracy, AND also the fact that they wanted to keep their slaves during a time when Britain was moving away from that. Neither America nor Britain were exactly pure good or evil in any way shape or form; they both had legit and less than good reasons for fighting, and there wasn't really a real "good guy" in the whole conflict.

But America most certainly wanted to believe they had the right to exist, with all of their oxymorons and contradictory elements. And they needed to believe that their existence and cause was inherently just and righteous despite the obvious evils and atrocities they glossed over.

And then Benedict Arnold existed and swapped sides.

Not because of patriotism (well maybe not only), but due to a combination of debt, resentment towards a Congress and military that had this weird dynamic of being his ally and enemy at the same time due to the resentment and jealousy directed towards him by petty men, and his own complicated relationship with the Loyalists and Britain.

I think this kind of thing ended up being a massive punch to the face of those who fought for America, because it was a giant gaping hole in their belief that they deserved to exist and were RIGHT to exist.

Because if one of their best and most trusted generals was so willing to throw it all away for reasons not related to their patriotic fervor, but instead as a result of his own complex, HUMAN problems AND mixed with the failings of THEIR side to make him feel welcome and respected, then what does that really say about THEM? Oh there most certainly was legit reason to feel betrayed, especially among men like Washington who DID stand for him as best he could, but the feeling was there I think.

And they can't really bear to face that moral gray area. So they demonized Benedict Arnold. Turned this complicated messy man into a representation of betrayal, so that they didn't HAVE to face that "what if?". The what if of whether America deserved to exist, and just how close they could have been to America never gaining independence (because let's face it, they were also dangerously close to losing at many points around that time, and if Washington hadn't won a key battle or two, history could have been very different).

I dunno, maybe I'm just overthinking it, and it's just inertia of how they were seen that people just never bothered to go any deeper into because people are lazy.

With Arnold idk if you're overthinking it; what you're saying makes sense but I also think a lot it was just very straightforward "but you were on our side!" anger.

I think a lot of what you're saying about feelings that go into sympathy for the Confederacy (and I'll note here I used Lee as an example because he's famous and "respected" but it applies to other Confederates too) make sense. There is also a history of historical revisionism in the United States that helped create more sympathy for Confederates. It's mostly about the history of Reconstruction but in the process it's very "don't you feel bad for the South?" and "well these were good guys just loyal to their states." There was this one guy at Columbia named Dunning. A bunch of students went there to study under him because they agreed with his published writings. It's referred to as the Dunning School or the Columbia School and it affected the widespread view of Reconstruction in America. Here are a few links that talk about it; I'm sure you could find more but I was trying to do this quickly.

I think your ideas definitely help explain why modern Americans view this history the way they do!

[stephensmithuk]

Taking a Cure and Breaking Carlsbad

Because there is really nothing new under the sun at the end of the day, some people were just as obsessed about their health as they are now.

CW for discussion of historical atrocities and capital punishment.

Taking the Waters

It was believed in the 19th century and indeed for a few centuries before that "taking the waters" from wells in certain inland towns with natural springs was good for your health. A lot of places had gained this reputation, like Bath in England and Spa in Belgium. Yep, that's where the name comes from.

You could either drink the waters, bathe in them or both. This was segregated by sex, as you would generally be naked in the latter case.

The arrival of the railways made "taking a cure" a good deal easier. Bath was connected to London by the Great Western Railway and today you can get there by 125mph train in under 90 minutes from Paddington.

So, many of the rich and famous would take holidays in these places, where they would drink the water, go on a restricted diet, take long walks and undergo various treatments, prescribed by spa physicians.

Some of these were medically sound. Some come across as quackery of the first water, pun fully intended.

Treatments included - and you can still find many of these in modern day spa facilities - mud baths, massages, seaweed wraps, steam rooms etc. There was also something called a Vichy Shower, which involves lying on a slab while being sprayed with water from multiple nozzles in a shower bar.

Yes, Vichy in France is a spa town. The reason the collaborationist government went there in 1940 is because it had a lot of hotels to put everyone up.

Karlovy Vary

Anyway, Carlsbad was the former English spelling of Karlsbad, a town in Bohemia then under Austrian rule. You may know it better under its modern name of Karlovy Vary, today in Czechia (aka the Czech Republic, its long form name), about sixty-six miles west of Prague. It has an airport, but the flights are limited there - you will generally need to go to Prague, then get a coach or train.

Three American places and one in Canada still bear the name Carlsbad, the most notable being the coastal city in California, now home to a Legoland.

The name in both German and Czech means "Charles' baths".

While there were settlements in the area going back to the Bronze Age, legend has it that Charles IV, King of Bohemia, found a warm spring by accident while exploring the local area and the waters healed his injured leg. In any event, he gave the place royal privileges in 1370.

His successor, Wenceslaus IV, would give the town a right of asylum and the place also had a ban on carrying weapons.

In 1526, Louis II would drown as he fled defeat by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Mohács, ending his dynasty as he had no legitimate children. Austrian Ferdinand I was elected as his successor and to cut a long story short, Bohemia lost its independence, becoming part of the Austrian Empire.

The 16th and 17th centuries weren't great for the place; a massive flood, a big fire and Swedish troops looting the place three times in seven years during the Thirty Years' War.

In 1819, the town would hold a conference of representatives from the states of the German Confederation, passing decrees increasing press censorship and banning nationalist societies among other things in an attempt to slow moves towards unification.

In the event, that unification would happen in 1871, but Austria would be excluded from the new Germany and instead unified with Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, aka Austria-Hungary. Karlsbad would be in the Austrian part of this new Empire and was in fact majority-German speaking.

Anyway, back to Karlsbad. The town was rapidly developing in popularity as a resort during the course of the 19th century and would become even more popular in 1870, when a railway line was built from Prague to Eger (now Cheb) on the border with Germany.

The railway line allowed for through carriages to operate from across Europe. In 1888, it took a day and 8 1/2 hours to get there from London. By 1911, CIWL was offering a through sleeping carriage, along with parlor/dining car from Ostend to Carlsbad, the former reachable from Charing Cross via train and ferry. The journey was now doable in 26 hours and 21 minutes.

The appeal for spa fans was clear - 80 springs with water running up to 74 degrees Celsius. Mineral water and herbal bitters were bottled and exported all over Europe. The mountain scenery and fresh air allowed people to take walks as part of their "cure."

The best-known spa by the Raffles time was the Imperial Spa, of which more later.

There were also plenty of hotels or pensions. The September 1888 Bradshaw's Continental advertises eight of them, with no less than seven boasting of English-speaking staff or indeed managers. The most famous hotel, opened in 1701 and still going strong in 2024 is the Grandhotel Pupp, which featured extensively in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale where it played the Hotel Splendide. Indeed, Karlovy Vary has a big starring role in that film.

Churchgoers were well-provided for, with churches for multiple denominations. The Anglican one is now a waxworks museum of all things.

Many rich and famous faces would show up at Carlsbad and nearby Marienbad. Chopin and Beethoven visited there. Anthony Joseph Drexel, founder of what is now J. P. Morgan & Co visited there in 1893... then had a fatal heart attack.

As the Redux points out, all these rich people were prime targets for thieves.

An 1884 guide to the place can be found here:

Things were going pretty swimmingly for the spa town... and then the First World War happened, rather damaging the tourist industry.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary saw the town incorporated into the new country of Czechoslovakia following the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919. Local protests in March 1919 ended in six deaths after things turned violent and Czechoslovak soldiers opened fire, but the local population of what was now Karlovy Vary soon accepted their new situation. A 1930 census made clear that the place remained overwhelmingly German in its composition.

The place didn't recover to its pre-war popularity; the Great Depression really didn't help in that department. The German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia had a lot of industries, like toy-making, which were reliant on exports... and protectionism was now very much in vogue. There were also tensions between the German minority and the Czech majority.

Then a certain Austrian man with a toothbrush moustache came along. Karlovy Vary was in what was becoming known as the Sudetenland... and you can probably see where this is going.

In September 1938, the Munich Agreement, signed without the Czechoslovaks being involved (who had to accept it), saw the Sudetenland handed over to Germany. By March 1939, the Germans had invaded and annexed the rest of the Czech part of the country, Poland and Hungary had taken various bits of territory and a pro-Axis client state was set up in what was left of Slovakia. However, it does not seem there was any mass support for this by the Germans of Karlovy Vary.

The Nazis set up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the Czech bits they'd got in March 1939.

While a full discussion of their horrific rule is beyond the scope of this post, Karl Hermann Frank, born in what was then Carlsbad, would be placed in charge of the Nazi police apparatus in the protectorate. He would eventually become Minister of State, the most powerful official in it and in these roles would play a primary role in the mass murder of the Jewish population in the Protectorate. He would also give the orders to destroy Lidice and Ležáky, murdering nearly all their inhabitants, in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

Karlovy Vary would play host to a Gestapo prison; I imagine the town also saw some use by soldiers on leave.

Karlovy Vary was out of the effective range of Allied bombers for much of the war but came under heavy bombing twice in the final months of the conflict; bombers heading for Dresden in February 1945 appear to have also bombed Karlovy Vary (and Prague) by mistake. The town was heavily damaged, but the spa part escaped destruction.

Karlovy Vary was part of an agreed stop line for George S. Patton's Twelfth Army Group in May 1945 as they raced east. They met some resistance as they approached (namely the dangerous 88mm guns that had to be taken out individually), but the town surrendered without a fight on 7 May 1945; German forces there just wanting to surrender to the Americans and not the Red Army, who would treat them much worse.

However, it had already been agreed that this would be an area under Soviet occupation and Patton's forces had to cross back over the restored border into Germany, handing the place over on 11 May.

The Czechoslovakian-government-in-exile had declared its German and Hungarian minorities collectively responsible for the occupation. The Allies at the Potsdam Conference agreed that Germans east of their new borders should be transferred in an orderly fashion to Germany i.e. expelled.

It would be anything but orderly. Many had already fled west to get away from the Soviets, either in organised evacuations or on their own initiative, the later continuing after the surrender. At least 100,000 civilians died in this flight from aerial attack or other causes, such as the atrocious winter of 1944-45.

Now, Czechoslovakia would kick out nearly all the rest. Germans and Hungarians had their land seized, their citizenships revoked and were sent west or north; around 1.3 million and 800,000 respectively.

Mobs and those in uniforms engaged in massacres with varying degrees of official connivance; with the harsh conditions of the expulsion as well, it is estimated by a joint German-Czech commission that 15,000 to 16,000 died, along with another 3,400 suicides.

Others ended up in internment camps, also with harsh conditions.

Those who could prove they were anti-fascists or who were essential for the economy, a number estimated up to 250,000, were allowed to stay. In other cases, Communist Party redistributed assets to Czechs in the border areas, getting a lot of support in post-war elections as a result.

The expulsion/deportation remains something of an elephant in the room in the now three countries - it was historically a much bigger issue. West Germany paid compensation to those thrown out from its own funds and the international community concluded that Czechoslovakia taking their assets meant that no reparations needed paying. A Czechoslovak law granting immunity for crimes committed in 1945 in the name of liberation remains in force. A joint agreement in 1997 saw Germany accept responsibility for Nazi crimes and Czechia express regret for the deaths in the expulsions; various attempts at reconciliation have happened. The surviving Sudeten Germans do not want their land back in general, just official recognition.

The events have come up from time to time in the politics of the area, but I shall leave that discussion for others to have.

In the aftermath, the Czechoslovaks also conducted war crimes trials of those who had engaged in such horror upon their country. Karl Hermann Frank, captured by the Americans the day after the war ended, was extradited back to Czechoslovakia, and sentenced to death by the People's Court in Prague. On 22 May 1946, he was executed in front of 5,000 people in the courtyard of Pankrác prison; it was a ticketed event with "scalpers" to boot in what would be the final public execution in Prague. It was also photographed and filmed for the media; the footage can be found easily online, so you may not want to look this up. Especially as the method of hanging was the Austro-Hungarian pole method, not a pleasant way to go.

The Communists, starting to lose popularity, sized power in a coup in 1948 and created a Soviet-aligned state.

The Grandhotel Pupp had already been nationalised, the Pupp family having been expelled and was renamed the Grandhotel Moskva in 1951.

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival began in 1946 and quickly became prominent after it introduced an international film competition two years later, by 1956, it was a top-tier festival, up there with the likes of Venice and Cannes. Moscow got jealous and forced the festival to go from annually to bi-annually; it alternated with the festival in the Soviet capital until 1993.

The need for "hard currency" such as the West German mark to be used to pay for imports into the CSSR meant Karlovy Vary continued to market itself to foreign tourists, especially West Germans. The erection of the Iron Curtain made travel to and from Czechoslovakia a lot harder, as you now needed a visa to go there from the West; there was also a mandatory foreign exchange requirement, although paying for the hotel could cover that. East Germans, who could travel to Czechoslovakia without the need for a visa, seem to have found Karlovy Vary too expensive and went to other spa towns. In any event, the Soviet invasion of 1968 that ended the Prague Spring damaged visitor numbers further, not to mention destroying the credibility of much of the Eurocommunist movement, who mostly parted company with Moscow in short order.

As for the Imperial Spa, built in 1895 and known as Spa I since 1922, it had been renovated in the late 1940s so it could operate all-year round and declared a cultural monument. However, increasing maintenance costs meant it stopped operating as a spa in the late 1980s, becoming a casino, falling further into disrepair.

Things, however, were about to improve. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 saw the largelyFilm/TheMummy1999 peaceful end of the Communist government (a lot of people were beaten up by security forces, but no-one died, although a hoax story of a death played a key part) and Czechoslovakia's return to democracy. It became two democracies in short order; it became clear that the Czechs and Slovaks had different ideas of the direction of travel for their country, so the Velvet Divorce followed in 1993, creating Czechia and Slovakia. Both countries would maintain good relationships with each other and join the EU together in the 2004; Czechia retains the koruna, having not yet joined the eurozone.

In 1990, Karlovy Vary got city status as the tourists came back. The Grandhotel Pupp got its name back - a deal being reached with the family in 1992 for use of the trademark. The film festival returned to being an annual event, only being skipped in 2020 for obvious reasons, although a shorter festival happened in November. In 2024, the Crystal Globe was won by A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, a British documentary on an abstract artist called Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

The Imperial Spa was declared a national monument in 2010 and a renovation began in 2019, allowing the place to fully reopen in 2023.

I think that's a good place to end it. I am now thinking of going there myself...

[flipshitz]

Refuting common blood libel about Jews and israel:

gen·o·cide

noun

the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

"a campaign of genocide"

From 1990 to 2022 the population of Palestine increased from 1.98 million to 5.04 million people. This is a growth of 155.0 percent in 32 years. The highest increase in Palestine was recorded in 1991 with 4.58 percent.

Israel is estimated to possess somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads (one can be used to wipe out all Palestinians if wanted but Israel will not)

What percent of Gaza's population has been killed?

1%

7, 2023. With 23,357 killed in Israel's military operation in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, the Gaza Strip population has now lost 1% of its 2.3 million residents. (There is no reason to believe these numbers are true as hamas is a terrorist organization with no intention of reporting accurate numbers therefore we can estimate less.)

Jews originally trace their ancestry to a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes known as the Israelites that inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods. Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah.

With this we know that Jews come from Judea and Arabs come from Arabia.

49 Muslim countries 2 billion Muslims

To 15 million Jews in their one Jewish state the size of New Jersey. 100 to 1 odds.

Zion: the hill in Jerusalem where king David built his kingdom -David (flourished c. 1000 bce) was the second ruler of the united kingdom of ancient Israel and Judah

Israel predates Islam by 1500 years.

ZionISM: the believe that Jews have the right to self determination in their homeland.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (189?-1974) was the Mufti (chief Muslim Islamic legal religious authority) of Jerusalem under the political authority of the British Mandate in Palestine from 1921 to 1937. His primary political causes were: -exiling and further blocking from Jews in diaspora from immigration.

-Organizing pogroms against Jews

-meeting with Hitler

-launching a war that would they would again lose & effectively displace thousands of Palestinians back into their neighboring Arab countries where they came from and blaming it all on the Jews.

After three defensive wars in 1949, 1956, and 1967, Israel had expanded its territory, leading to heightened tensions with the Arab states. On October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the Jewish holy day of atonement.

After these victories and acquiring of more land, the Israelis chose to give back their ancestral soil as a land for peace deal which the Palestinians would violate year after year by electing genocidal governments that seek to finish hitlers bidding.

To date; The bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinians contain no prohibition against the building or expansion of settlements.

Despite contrary allegations repeated ad nauseam.

2001 Israelis uprooted its citizens who had settled in Gaza already in order to make way for the Arabs to settle in an effort for peace but almost immediately they elect Hamas which is a proxy of Iran much like Hezbollah who’s only political agenda is to kill all Jews.

Oct 7th is a direct result of what happens when you invite terrorists to your front door.

For more copy and paste link:

SATURDAY-OCTOBER-SEVEN.COM

For the “UN” excuse;

Islamic Countries in the UN (46): Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Morocco, Iraq, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Syria, Kazakhstan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Tunisia, Guinea, Azerbaijan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Libya, Jordan, UAE, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Lebanon, Kuwait, Albania, Mauritania, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Gambia, Comoros, Djibouti, Maldives, Brunei, Lebanon. All of which are under the influence of IRAN which guess what? Owns Hezbollah and Hamas as its proxies. All of these nations have genocided or exiled all of its Jews. It’s no wonder they all take a majority vote over israel while simultaneously burying their crimes against humanity - but no mention of that from the peanut gallery on ur end right? Doesn’t fit your shill narrative. And to make matters worse; Iran's appointment to chair UN yes that’s right IRAN was appointed as chair for human rights - which drew rightful criticism at least thank god. Oh and 450 terror operatives in Gaza, mostly Hamas members, are also employed by UNRWA

Attacks on Israel: (still on going)

Shlomo Zalman Zoref 1851

Battle of Tel Hai 1920

Jaffa riots 1921

Meora’ot Tarpat 1929

Hebron Massacre 1929

The great revolt 1936-1939

*in the years 1937-1939 was funded by nazi germany*

War of independence 1948

Scorpions pass massacre 1954

Palestinian fedayeen

Jerusalem bombings 1969

Lord Airport massacre 1972

Munich massacre 1972

Yom Kippur Surprise attack 1973

Ma’alot Massacre 1974

Coastal road massacre 1978

Lanarca yacht killings 1985

1st intifada 1987-1993

Tel Aviv Jerusalem bus 405 attack 1989

Night of the pitchforks 1992

Western wall tunnel riots 1996

2nd intifada 2000-2008

Dolphinarium Discoteque massacre 2001

Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing 2001

Haifa bus bombing (16 suicide bombs) 2001

Passover massacre 2002

Yeshiva beit Yisrael bombing 2002

Cafe moment moment bombing 2002

Matza restaurant suicide bombing 2002

Yagur junction bombing 2002

Rishon lezion bombing 2002

Meggido junction bus bombing 2002

Patt junction bus bombing 2002

Karkur junction bombing 2002

Kiryat Menachem bus bombing 2002

Tel Aviv central bus station massacre 2003

Beersheba bus bombing 2004

2nd rosh ha’ir Restaraunt bombing 2006

Kedumim bombing 2006

Eilat bombing 2007

Jerusalem bus stop bombing 20011

Itamar massacre 2011

Tel Aviv truck attack 2011

Shaar ha negev school bus attack 2011

Tel Aviv bus bombing 2012

Gush Etzion kidnapping and murder 2014

Jerusalem synagogue attack 2014

Stabbing intifada 2015-2016

Tel Aviv shooting 2016

Temple Mount shooting 2017

Ariel stabbing 2018

Samaria combined attack 2019

Wave of terror 2022

Jerusalem bombings 2022

Bizengoff shooting 2023

Ramot junction attack 2023

October 7th massacre 2023

[inspofromancientworld]

Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius

By ElfQrin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45294722

Pompeii was a Roman city in southern Italy that is best known for being buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. This, however, was not the first city built in this location, nor was it the first time that people had to escape from an eruption by Mount Vesuvius.

Credit: Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Salerno e Avellino

A recent discovery of animal and human footprints was found while excavations were being done for a gas pipeline that were preserved in pyroclastic deposits dated to 1995 BCE. This eruption was discovered to be much larger than the one that covered Pompeii in 79 CE. There are also suggestions that when it became safe, people moved back into the area, between 1200 and 900 BCE, in at least two rural villas that were focused on agriculture.

Around the 8th century BCE, the Oscans of central Italy set up five villages in in the area that would become Pompeii. Soon after, in about 740 BCE, the Greeks arrived in the area and influenced those living there. A Doric style temple was built there and the cult of Apollo was introduced. This area was also used as a safe harbor by the Greeks and Phoenicians.

Beginning in the early 6th century BCE, the five villages merged into a single community and a city wall was built with a type of limestone called tufa. This city wall was unusual in that it surrounded a larger area than the town and included much of the surrounding agricultural land. Such a large work shows that Pompeii had gained a great deal of wealth as a center of trading. A port was built on the mouth of the Sarno River.

By Heinz-Josef Lücking, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33119131

By 524 BCE, the Etruscans settled in the area without conquering the city, though they did come to control it, though Pompeii was allowed a measure of autonomy from the Etruscan League even being a member of it. They developed a market and/or a forum, and built the Temple of Apollo. They also strengthened the city walls by widening it to about four meters with earth between panels of limestone.

In 474 BCE, the Etruscans were defeated by the Greeks of Cumae and Syracuse, giving them control of Pompeii. At this time, larger portions of the city, including the Temple of Apollo, were abandoned based on a lack of remains. The Samnites, who were allies of the Romans, conquered the Greeks at Cumae by 420 BCE and controlled the area around Cumae including Pompeii. While the Samnites technically ruled Pompeii, they were under the rule of the Romans.

Around 290 BCE, after several wars in the Italian peninsula, Pompeii gained the status of socii, as part of the confederation of Rome, though they were largely autonomous. During the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE), Pompeii remained faithful to Rome. Despite this loyalty, Pompeii rebelled during the Social Wars from 91-88 BCE, leaving ballistic evidence around the city. After this, Pompeii became a Roman colony with a full name of Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum with land given to those who fought for Rome and those who fought against Rome lost their property. This did allow the people of Pompeii to become Roman citizens as well.

By Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany - CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133810894

On 5 February 62 CE, Pliny the Younger recorded that there was a minor earthquake that he described as 'not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania', though there is evidence of considerable earthquake, probably about a 5 or 6 on the Richter magnitude scale. That day was the anniversary of Augustus being named Pater Patriae, the 'Father of the Country', as well as a feast day for the guardian spirits of the city. Burning oil lamps fell, starting fires, which cause panic among the chaos of the earthquake.

Between 62 and 79 CE, efforts were made to restore the city, both publicly and privately, with the public repairs also attempting to introduce improvements, such as improving the city plan and Forum. Central Baths, for example, were added after the earthquake.

Pliny the Younger wrote about the 79 CE eruption almost 30 years later. They place the date of the eruption on 24 August 79. This date was questioned because the original letters he wrote to Tacitus, a Roman historian. Some, who came much later, claimed that the eruption happened in October or November with various reasoning behind their claims, ranging from when the Romans counted the beginning of the season to a charcoal inscription on a wall in the excavated ruins. Those at the ruins today have run experiments that show charcoal inscriptions can last up to a year and thus the inscription that says it was written on 17 October could have easily been written 10 months previously.

This isn't to say that Pliny the Younger's recollections of the date were right as he was 18 at the time of the eruption and around 47 when he wrote to Tacitus about the eruption. There is evidence of people wearing thicker garments than would be expected for a summer, as August would have been, and the foods that were fresh and those that were dried were more indicative of fall. Wine jars were found sealed, as well, which would not have happened until the end of October. There were also coins found in a woman's purse that wouldn't have been minted before the second week of August. In 2022, an eruption date of 24-25 October was determined based on available evidence, though there is a version of Pliny the Younger's letter that gives an eruption date of 23 November, which is consistent with the evidence, as well.

Soon after the eruption, there were efforts to help the victims of the destruction. Titus, the emperor at the time, visited Pompeii after the eruption and then a year later, though there were no organized efforts to uncover the city. Survivors came back, trying to salvage their valuables, and possibly thieves, as evidenced by signs of disturbance and missing statues and building materials. There were parts of the city that weren't fully buried, making it easier to take those. There are even graffiti saying things like 'house dug' indicating either thieves or survivors marking their passage. Later eruptions, especially those from 471-473 and in 512, finished burying Pompeii, and erased it from memory with it being remembered only as 'La Civita', the city, because of faint outlines that remained in the land.

Further reading:

4,000-year-old footprints near Pompeii reveal Bronze Age escape from Vesuvius via Archaeology Magazine

Pompeii Experts Back Up Pliny’s Historical Account of Vesuvius Eruption via ArtNet News

[waluigis-biggest-fan]

So I wanted to explain some stuff for a friend who's not into Battletech so that he knows what I'm talking about.

Timeline

Pre-Star League

humanity expands out to form the Inner Sphere (basically the closest planets to Earth which is called Terra because sci-fi story) and the periphery (planets further than the Inner Sphere). Then humanity had a big war, like we do, and formed the Star League.

Star League (2570-2780)

Humanity forms space United Nations but this United Nations has an emperor and 5 great houses, namely House Steiner, House Merik, House Davion, House Kurita, and House Liao (we'll get to them in a second). It was all Star Trek and happiness (except for the fucks at House Kurita who kept trying to samurai duel people with mechs to the point there was an elite organization called the Gunslinger Program specifically trained for dealing with their bullshit). Then this fucker Ameris came along and tried to take it all over. This not fucker called Karensky kicked his ass then took all the Star League Defense Forces (space UN peacekeepers) and fucked off beyond the periphery where nobody heard about them for hundreds of years.

Succession Wars (2781-3049)

Ok so now we get to the most commonly used era in Battletech, the Succession Wars. Basically, every House wanted to create a new Star League with themselves as the leader. This is followed by two centuries of warfare encouraged by the fucks at Comstar (we'll get to them too don't you worry your pretty little head).

Clan Invasion (3050-3061)

OH HEY SO YOU REMEMBER KARENSKY AND HIS FUCKERS!?! So they came back but now they're a warrior cult based around fighting in Battlemechs. Whereas the rest of the galaxy was involved in war that destroyed all their tech production bases, the Clans were having a technological renaissance so their shit is better than the Inner Sphere shit. They fight a lot and kill a lot until eventually Comstar challenges them to a Batchal (their version of a duel but on a planetary scale with multiple armies involved). The clans all sent basically 2/3rds of their entire armies to fight Comstar...

and Comstar kicked their fucking asses.

The general who Comstar chose to do so was named Focht and that's exactly what he told the Clans to get. They retreated and could no longer threaten the newly reforged Star League.

Civil War (3062-3067)

So now the newly reforged Star League immediately started infighting and destroying itself. Go figure.

Jihad (3068-3080)

The Word of Blake, a religious cult offshoot of Comstar, starts jihading everybody after Star League 2: Electric Boogaloo falls apart.

Dark Age (3081-3150)

Nobody liked this era and it doesn't matter. Basically, the internet shut down and everyone lost their minds.

IlClan (3151-Present)

(Credit to KingsofWinter on Deviantart for the map)

The Clans form a massive big clan called the IlClan (pronounced ill-clan) who conquer Terra and form a new Star League but with tech-fetishism and batchals.

Everyone is still fighting.

The Big Factions

There are a couple big factions with a lot of lore to them so I'll get the main ones out of the way just so you know them.

House Steiner (Lyran Commonwealth)

Germans with attitude and no sense of stealth. Basically just take the biggest mechs possible and throw them at the enemy.

House Merik (Free Worlds League)

'Murica fuck yeah.

House Kurita (Draconis Combine)

You know japan? Its that but in space.

House Davion (Federated Suns)

Also 'Murica fuck yeah but with a more knightly aesthetic.

House Liao (Capellan Confederation)

China plus Soviet Russia.

Comstar

A cult that runs all the faster than light telephones. They basically stop technology from progressing and keep everyone at war with stealth operations. They also control Terra and nowhere else. Their plan is basically to blast humanity back to the stone age then everyone will have to follow their cult's teachings. Fun stuff.

Terms and Definitions

Battlemech: Just a mech designed to fight.

Autocannon (AC): An automatic canon. The higher the number after it, the bigger the rounds it fires.

Particle Projector Cannon (PPC): It takes a particle and accelerates it massively. Its the worst weapon you can get hit by in Battletech short of a Gauss Rifle or a Heavy PPC.

Extra Range (ER): Some weapons have extra range variants. It does what it says on the tin.

[blueiscoool]

700+ Civil War-Era Gold Coins Found Buried in Kentucky

A man unearthed a huge hoard of Civil War-era gold and silver coins on his Kentucky farm.

A Kentucky man got the surprise of his life while digging in his field earlier this year: a cache of over 700 coins from the American Civil War era.

The "Great Kentucky Hoard" includes hundreds of U.S. gold pieces dating to between 1840 and 1863, in addition to a handful of silver coins. In a short video, the man who discovered the hoard — whose identity and specific location have not been revealed to the public — says, "This is the most insane thing ever: Those are all $1 gold coins, $20 gold coins, $10 gold coins," as he aims his camera at the artifacts tumbling out of the dirt.

According to the Numismatic Guaranty Co. (NGC), which certified the coins' authenticity, and GovMint, where the coins were sold, 95% of the hoard is composed of gold dollars, along with 20 $10 Liberty coins and eight $20 Liberty coins. The rarest is the 1863-P $20 1-ounce gold Liberty coin. Just one of these coins can go for six figures at auction, and the Great Kentucky Hoard boasts 18 of them. NGC's website notes that the $20 Liberty coin, which circulated from 1850 to 1907, was minted by the Treasury Department after gold was discovered in California. The $20 Liberty coins in the hoard are even rarer because they do not include "In God We Trust," which was added in 1866 after the end of the Civil War.

Potentially more important, though, is what the hoard can tell us about America's history during an extremely tumultuous period.

Ryan McNutt, a conflict archaeologist at Georgia Southern University who has heard about but not seen the hoard, said in an email that "given the time period and the location in Kentucky, which was neutral at the time, it is entirely possible this was buried in advance of Confederate John Hunt Morgan's June to July 1863 raid."

Many wealthy Kentuckians are rumored to have buried huge sums of money to prevent it from being stolen by the Confederacy. James Langstaff left a letter saying he had buried $20,000 in coins on his property in Paducah, William Pettit buried $80,000 worth of gold coins near Lexington, and Confederate soldiers quarantined for measles reportedly stole payroll and hid it in a cave in Cumberland Gap. None of these caches has ever been recovered.

Considering the hoard coins are federal currency, McNutt said, it may be the result of a Kentuckian's dealings with the federal government — "dealings that it would be wise to conceal from a Confederate raiding party." Many Americans affected by the Civil War "became experienced with hiding goods and valuables," he said.

Most concentrations of historical artifacts found on private land end up going to market or being collected without archaeological consultation, according to McNutt. "As a conflict archaeologist, I find this loss of information particularly frustrating," he said. Hoards have an incredible amount of information about the person who collected the objects, offering archaeologists insight into a brief window in time.

Historical finds like these on private land in the U.S. do not need to be reported to an archaeologist. But McNutt, who has developed close relationships with landowners, believes that education and outreach are key to learning more about these rare coin caches.

"It is entirely up to the landowner," McNutt said, but not engaging with an archaeologist means "it's a snapshot of the past, lost forever."

By Kristina Killgrove.

[ankoku-teion]

Dioraden: Nations - Lakhessa

The kingdom of Lakhessa is the successor to the realm of Vitessa. Near the end of the 5th age the Underdark and its residents chose to reconnect with the material plane. One of the first to do so was a Drow Necromancer called Lakhessi, in the year 962.

Prior to Lakhessi’s arrival, Vitessa was ruled by a dark magician who enslaved many creatures to be his labour force, most notably the Orcs and Goblins (See the entry on Vitessa for more information).

In the year 964 the dread necromancer Lakhessi arrived in the southern border region with her small horde of undead. The border between Vitessa and Ebrela had always been a vague one, the line on the map more of a suggestion than a fact. Many clans lived in that border region, evading enslavement from the north and death from the south, and serving as a useful buffer from invasion in either direction. rather than continue to the north Lakhessa began to meet with various warlords and clan chiefs, most notably Rorq Bone-crusher, the young war-chief of the Iron Tooth orc clan, at the time the strongest of the 7 orc clans in the region. Rorq became her chief general and trusted advisor, as well as the great-chief of the Yedish Mafiko, the confederation of the 7 orcish tribes.

Her other generals were similarly the leaders of tribes or confederations with whom she forged various pacts. Zurkidal, the Hobgoblin Warlord, Barnak, the bugbear Boss of the White Stone clan, and head of the Pact of 3 (an alliance between the 3 mixed-race clans near the coast), and the goblins Wrogz and Droq, of the Hill Clans and HornFoot tribe, respectively. (the first being a confederation of inter-related goblin tribes living in the foothills to the east, the second being a large and powerful tribe of goblins living in the mountains proper, ostracised by the other groups for their cannibalism and brutality.)

The forging of this great alliance took another 2 years and a great deal of negotiating to settle a thousand squabbles between the many clans. When, in the year 966, they were at last ready to go to war, the word was sent out to every slave in the kingdom, “war is coming, freedom is coming, your brothers are coming.” On the same day that the allied clans made their first attack, eleven separate slave revolts broke out across Vitessa. The Battle of Southwall, the first engagement of the war, ended with only 10 deaths. most of the slaves abandoned their work and joined Lakhessi’s army. the small force of warriors protecting the town were quickly subdued and all but one of them defected. Their leader was beheaded along with nine overseers, the bodies raised from the dead to march at the front of the army.

Every battle from there onwards bar the last followed a similar path. Before the battler the Lakhessan forces would offer clemency and freedom to all who did not fight. Most of the Vitessan forces would desert, and the rest would rebel. There was very little real fighting to be had.

the Battle of the Black Tower was a different matter. The tower was heavily fortified, the only true fortress in the entire kingdom. Its guards were not simple slaves, but Kull, brainwashed orcs that had been surgically and magically augmented. The battle was long and bloody, but after more than a week of battle the Kull were overrun by superior numbers and killed. The dark mage who had ruled was unceremoniously thrown from the ramparts and killed.

The entire war took only 3 months.

The Ebrelans took advantage of that time. Marching as far as they dared into the now largely abandoned border region. There they built a 200-mile-long border wall. Initially a simple palisade wall, but they quickly began to re-enforce it with spiked ditches, covered traps, and later, squat stone towers.

Buoyed up by their previous successes, the Lakhessan army marched south against the Ebrelans wall in order to reclaim their lost homes. This proved to be a far harder task than expected. the combined forces were not trained in the military tactics of a large-scale battle, relying instead on the simpler methods of inter-clan conflicts that they had used for generations, so-called hatchet wars. These  hatchet wars would usually involve 2 forces clashing and withdrawing repeatedly until one side it routed and flees, these conflicts would be short and relatively bloodless battles focused more on the honour of those fighting than on territorial gains or capturing prisoners.

This attitude carried over into the rebellion as the battles were mostly a show of strength with very little real conflict as the opposing forces would repeatedly break before the armies clashed. These battles did little in the way of providing real combat experience. The final conflict, the battle of Black Tower provided some limited experience of siege warfare but was incredibly one-sided with only 20 Krull against more than a thousand orcs and goblinoids.

The Ebrelan army on the other hand was a professional force with years of experience in both open battle and siege warfare. Their positions, increasingly heavily fortified and well-guarded by traps.

The first attempt on the wall came in 967. The Lakhessan army had collected around a small village by the name of Jandaq in the foothills of the blue mountains a days walk form the wall. This point was chosen for 2 reasons: 1) the thick forest cover meant a large force could approach the wall closer before being seen. 2) the difficult terrain had slowed construction, meaning the wall here was a simple wooden palisade with a ditch, rather than the larger stone walls further west.

the first charge consisted of 250 men, a mixed force of 80 White Fang Orcs and 30 Bugbears and 20 hobgoblins from the White Stone Clan and 120 goblins from assorted clans. much of this force was taken out by spiked pit traps before even reaching the wall and most of the bugbears were taken out by archers. Those forces that did reach the wall were brutally slaughtered by spearmen as they attempted to cross the trench, very few made it over the wall and those that did found themselves surrounded and outmatched. Of the 250 that set off, only 20 came back alive on the first day.

Over the coming month, every second day would see a fresh assault against the wall with new tactics, but always with a heavy death toll. The newly crowned Queen Lakhessa would raise the fallen as undead and add them to the next assault. Towards the end of the month a breach was at last made by bundling a skeletal goblin

she promised freedom to the enslaved races in exchange for loyalty, and with their help overthrew the old mage and installed herself as queen.

Under her Rule, the kingdom that now bares her name became a sanctuary for all those monstrous races that are oppressed by the Vathic faith. Many goblinoid and orcish clans live safely there under the condition that their dead belong to the Queen. Fields, mines and forges are all worked by the shuffling undead of those races, kept carefully under control.

[uboat53]

Happy Appomattox Day everyone! Today is the day in 1865 when the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the United States Civil War, and we can all be thankful that conflict did not go the other way.

On the occasion of this event, I thought I'd leave you with Grant's reflections upon Lee in that moment:

"I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Also, given the more than a century that Grant has been slandered as nothing more than a boor or a drunk by the Lost Cause movement that seeks to rehabilitate the Confederacy, I thought I'd also share General William Tecumseh Sherman's comparison of himself to Grant and why Grant, ultimately, was the better general:

"I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does; I know more about organization, supply, and administration and about everything else than he does; but I’ll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don’t care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell!"

[magnetarbeam]

LotF/FotJ: Miscellaneous Reactions/Outprocessing 14

In Backlash, when Daala and Dorvan are discussing the reactions to Niathal's death, Dorvan mentions "crazy Confederation holdouts," which I took as an implication that the Confederation, or at least the major systems/sectors, have in fact been reintegrated into the Alliance after they were trying to do that in Outcast.

Honestly, I've been skipping a lot of the Coruscant political scenes in FotJ because they're not as interesting to me. I really need to go back and read that.

There's a bit in Tempest where Jaina and Zekk run into some YVH droids on whatever Hapan planet they go to to warn the nobles there about some strategically valuable info that I don't remember, and Jaina says something to the effect of "We gotta talk to Lando about who he's selling these things to." Which is, quite frankly, a good point.

I want to know what the deal is with the tombs on Kessel, that according to Han, "no qualified archaeologist has ever opened," and through which Abeloth contacts Allana. I don't think those come up in anything else, and Allana's like eight, so she's not a very reliable narrator.

Does the Alliance have a specific Supreme Commander of its military by FotJ? They always talk about the people in charge of the different branches - Bwua'tu of the Navy, Jaxton of the Starfighter Corps, Thaal of the Army, Gavin of the Marines - but I don't remember seeing a specific name of the person whose job description is specifically to lead the military. Did the positions of Chief of State and Supreme Commander get merged under Daala? This would be the first time since Palpatine's consolidation of power in the Clone Wars, and even he handed that title off to Vader once he became Emperor.

The Transitory Mists are part of what inspired me to come up with the "Canon-Typical Inaccurate Astrophysics" AO3 tag.

That would be a very good place to hide shit, though. If you can't get a holonet connection in there, it stands to reason that any homing beacons you place on a ship are also nullified. I have to believe Caedus never would have been able to find Shedu Maad if not for the blood trail. The Hapans themselves undoubtedly know the place much better.

I don't think Christie Golden is a bad writer, but her lack of experience definitely shows at some points. Like, I know the Lost Tribe was cut off from the galaxy for five thousand years, but Vestara and Taalon not knowing what a Hutt is in Allies was too far. Like, the history of the Hutts as a galactic power goes back way further than that.

[valerie09]

It is the spring of 1861. Scarlett O’Hara, a pretty Southern belle, lives on Tara, a large plantation in Georgia. She concerns herself only with her numerous suitors and her desire to marry Ashley Wilkes. One day she hears that Ashley is engaged to Melanie Hamilton, his frail, plain cousin from Atlanta. At a barbecue at the Wilkes plantation the next day, Scarlett confesses her feelings to Ashley. He tells her that he does love her but that he is marrying Melanie because she is similar to him, whereas he and Scarlett are very different. Scarlett slaps Ashley and he leaves the room. Suddenly Scarlett realizes that she is not alone. Rhett Butler, a scandalous but dashing adventurer, has been watching the whole scene, and he compliments Scarlett on being unladylike.

The Civil War begins. Charles Hamilton, Melanie’s timid, dull brother, proposes to Scarlett. She spitefully agrees to marry him, hoping to hurt Ashley. Over the course of two months, Scarlett and Charles marry, Charles joins the army and dies of the measles, and Scarlett learns that she is pregnant. After Scarlett gives birth to a son, Wade, she becomes bored and unhappy. She makes a long trip to Atlanta to stay with Melanie and Melanie’s aunt, Pittypat. The busy city agrees with Scarlett’s temperament, and she begins to see a great deal of Rhett. Rhett infuriates Scarlett with his bluntness and mockery, but he also encourages her to flout the severely restrictive social requirements for mourning Southern widows. As the war progresses, food and clothing run scarce in Atlanta. Scarlett and Melanie fear for Ashley’s safety. After the bloody battle of Gettysburg, Ashley is captured and sent to prison, and the Yankee army begins bearing down on Atlanta. Scarlett desperately wants to return home to Tara, but she has promised Ashley she will stay with the pregnant Melanie, who could give birth at any time.

On the night the Yankees capture Atlanta and set it afire, Melanie gives birth to her son, Beau. Rhett helps Scarlett and Melanie escape the Yankees, escorting them through the burning streets of the city, but he abandons them outside Atlanta so he can join the Confederate Army. Scarlett drives the cart all night and day through a dangerous forest full of deserters and soldiers, at last reaching Tara. She arrives to find that her mother, Ellen, is dead; her father, Gerald, has lost his mind; and the Yankee army has looted the plantation, leaving no food or cotton. Scavenging for subsistence, a furious Scarlett vows never to go hungry again.Scarlett takes charge of rebuilding Tara. She murders a Yankee thief and puts out a fire set by a spiteful Yankee soldier. At last the war ends, word comes that Ashley is free and on his way home, and a stream of returning soldiers begins pouring through Tara. One such soldier, a one-legged homeless Confederate named Will Benteen, stays on and helps Scarlett with the plantation. One day, Will brings terrible news: Jonas Wilkerson, a former employee at Tara and current government official, has raised the taxes on Tara, hoping to drive the O’Haras out so that he might buy the plantation. Distraught, Scarlett hurries to Atlanta to seduce Rhett Butler so that he will give her the three hundred dollars she needs for taxes. Rhett has emerged from the war a fabulously wealthy man, dripping with earnings from his blockade-running operation and from food speculation. However, Rhett is in a Yankee jail and cannot help Scarlett. Scarlett sees her sister’s beau, Frank Kennedy, who now owns a general store, and forges a plan. Determined to save Tara, she betrays her sister and marries Frank, pays the taxes on Tara, and devotes herself to making Frank’s business more profitable, After Rhett blackmails his way out of prison, he lends Scarlett enough money to buy a sawmill. To the displeasure of Atlanta society, Scarlett becomes a shrewd businesswoman. Gerald dies, and Scarlett returns to Tara for the funeral. There, she persuades Ashley and Melanie to move to Atlanta and accept a share in her lumber business. Shortly thereafter, Scarlett gives birth to Frank’s child, Ella Lorena.

A free black man and his white male companion attack Scarlett on her way home from the sawmill one day. That night, the Ku Klux Klan avenges the attack on Scarlett, and Frank ends up dead. Rhett proposes to Scarlett and she quickly accepts. After a long, luxurious honeymoon in New Orleans, Scarlett and Rhett return to Atlanta, where Scarlett builds a garish mansion and socializes with wealthy Yankees. Scarlett becomes pregnant again and has another child, Bonnie Blue Butler. Rhett dotes on the girl and begins a successful campaign to win back the good graces of the prominent Atlanta citizens in order to keep Bonnie from being an outcast like Scarlett.Scarlett and Rhett’s marriage begins happily, but Rhett becomes increasingly bitter and indifferent toward her. Scarlett’s feelings for Ashley have diminished into a warm, sympathetic friendship, but Ashley’s jealous sister, India, finds them in a friendly embrace and spreads the rumor that they are having an affair. To Scarlett’s surprise, Melanie takes Scarlett’s side and refuses to believe the rumors.

After Bonnie is killed in a horse-riding accident, Rhett nearly loses his mind, and his marriage with Scarlett worsens. Not long after the funeral, Melanie has a miscarriage and falls very ill. Distraught, Scarlett hurries to see her. Melanie makes Scarlett promise to look after Ashley and Beau. Scarlett realizes that she loves and depends on Melanie and that Ashley has been only a fantasy for her. She concludes that she truly loves Rhett. After Melanie dies, Scarlett hurries to tell Rhett of her revelation. Rhett, however, says that he has lost his love for Scarlett, and he leaves her. Grief-stricken and alone, Scarlett makes up her mind to go back to Tara to recover her strength in the comforting arms of her childhood nurse and slave, Mammy, and to think of a way to win Rhett back.

III. Analysis:

Gone with the Wind is a historical fiction told in simple language from an omniscient perspective and also with heavily accented vernacular from most of the characters. The book is rich in themes of war, the uncomfortable issue of race, slavery, social class, human nature, and gender dynamics.

IV. CONCLUSION:

The conclusion on the book of Gone with the wind is Scarlett understands that Melanie is the one she loves and depends on, and that Ashley has only ever been a dream. She concludes that she does love Rhett deeply. I learned the part of Scarlett is we must have an happy and fun to our life. I also learned to how many times bad lucks or hard time we experience, they can always get worse but they will always get better.

[ptseti]

MUST LISTEN: Although @makyalittle gave this powerful speech and plea long before the current sweep of book bans and the rewriting history about black history (a book on Rosa Parks has been banned from schools) along with LGBTQ+ books (Fun Home, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), this hit me more than anything I’ve seen. Most parents reading this post will never experience first hand what Makya Little had to deal with that day…

It never occurred to me what it must be like to be a black parent and have your child come home and read their own history with such false narrative based on policy. Policy?!

After speaking with Thomas who’s been in education for 21 years and discovering this quote by Jennifer Rainey Marquez, this helped me understand how some of this banning and rewriting started with policy makers threatening to cancel contracts and putting publishers out of business:

After the Civil War, when public schooling became more widespread in the South, Confederate sympathizers wanted to ensure that their children received an “appropriate” education on Southern history and culture which developed statewide adoption policies for textbooks. This allowed the state textbook committees to control content by demanding changes or threatening to cancel book contracts unless the publishers agreed.

To keep their business, Northern publishers began adapting history books to appease Southerners, essentially publishing a separate version of Civil War history for those states. These editions reinforced a lost cause narrative for Southern audiences. For example, they depicted enslaved people as happy and content. Officials even counted the textbook lines to make sure authors had mentioned Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee as many times as Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant. - Jennifer Rainey Marquez.

And imagine now happening all over again in 2023.

[calico-spiral]

Aliens in Calico Spiral

Being as it is influenced by the likes of Babylon 5, Star Wars, and sci-fi anime like Macross and Outlaw Star, it should come as little surprise that a lot of the setting's major alien races are of the "rubber forehead" variety, being largely humanoid in their external physiology. Though the setting does have its share of proper starfish aliens as well, a lot of the ones that would get the most "screen time" mainly look like people with weird eyes, extra parts, and skin colors.

Anyway there are the major aliens kickin' around in the galaxy (not including humans).

Au'bei - The Au'bei are humanoids from a super-Earth with gravity much higher than ours, differentiated by long pointy ears, black sclerae, and the fact that the average Au'bei is strong enough to kill a man with a slap. Their society is composed of a loose confederation of planetary states called the Au'bei League, which generally have pretty good relations with their neighbors...which is good for them, because none of them really want to get into a fight with a species of heavyworlders in a setting where the spaceships don't have inertial damping.

Tilps - Tilps are basically space-elves with skin coloration borrowed from tropical fish and the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis if no males are around. Being one of the oldest (plot-relevant) spacefaring races in the setting they've had plenty of time to break apart into a lot of different space nations, a lot of which are largely pretty chill but the largest and most powerful, the Shining Ascendancy, is a fascist nation of imperialist dick-waving scumbags responsible for an alarming number of genocides.

Vrann - The Vrann are a race of hermaphroditic reptiloids that basically look like nine-foot-tall crocodile men. Despite their intimidating appearance and the unsettling effect of their partially-infrasonic voices, they're probably the closest thing the setting has to an unambiguously "good guy" race, with their dominant philosophy dictating that the duty of the strong is to defend the weak.

Dhugarls - Dhugarls share a homeworld and a common ancestor with the Au'bei, and like them they're a lot stronger and more durable than humans. Having evolved in a desert environment their ears are much larger than their Au'bei cousins for shedding excess heat, with Dhugarl women with especially large and fuzzy ears being considered very attractive. The Dhugarl also practice a ritualized form of slavery wherein enemies defeated in combat are (usually temporarily) taken as slaves, though most tend to look down on chattel slavery.

Dzvruubgh - The Dzvruubgh are a non-humanoid race from a planet with an extremely dense atmosphere, and must use mechanical environment suits to do anything offworld. They're mostly known for being friendly and completely unintelligible without a translator.

Vindaslee - Vindaslee are kind of a joke race, being completely unable to understand the concept of hostility. In a more cynical setting they'd probably be genocided just because, but here they mostly act excessively friendly to everyone they meet and offer pirates snacks and drinks when they come to rob their ships. Also they look like seven-foot-tall bipedal fuzzy geckos.

Mo'e-Mo'e - The Mo'e-Mo'e are basically marsupial space-goblins who lost their homeworld when the Shining Ascendancy tried to colonize them and they fought back so fiercely that the Ascendancy finally got sick of dealing with their shit, slapped an FTL drive on the nearest dwarf planet, and aimed it at their planet. After that Mo'e-Mo'e mostly live either as the descendants of refugees that settled on other planets, or as wandering space nomads.

Kran - The Kran are a species of lanky humanoids with sharp teeth, four arms, and hands for feet. They're native to Sundaraam, an Earth-like moon orbiting a gas giant that was also colonized by humans hundreds of years ago.

Herrakans - Herrakans are native to Herrak, another moon orbiting the same gas giant as Sundaraam, and resemble a meter-long cross between a cuttlefish and a mantis shrimp. Much like the Dzvruubgh, having evolved in an extremely dense, cold atmosphere requires them to use mechanical environment suits in order to leave their home, though theirs tend to be more humanoid due to heavy cultural influence from the human colonists in their system.

The Cluster - The Cluster is a mysterious...race? being? consciousness? that mostly just spends its time observing the other races and generally being inscrutable. And also weirdly rude.

Oumaa - The Oumaa are a race of elephant-sized tentacled gastropods that used to rule over a brutal interstellar empire that eventually collapsed under its own weight and left a bunch of their shit scattered all over the galaxy. Though the surviving Oumaa have since abandoned their imperialist ways and acknowledge the damage they did during their reign, they also show zero remorse for it.