Description: A D&D wizard who uses spells like Color Spray to blind opponents with all the colors of the rainbow.

A chameleon familiar, shifting colors from red to yellow. His name is Skittles.

An ankle-length black robe with a thin gold braid spiraling around the body twice and up the right arm. Beside the gold braid is one of dark green, blue, and red for a rainbow effect.

Holding his dagger overhead in his right hand, pommel up, point down. The prism in the pommel is emitting a flare of colored light. His other hand has a rainbow swirl around it, the start of a Rainbow Pattern or Color Spray spell.

Chroma's schtick is color; his favorite spells are Color Spray, Glitterdust (in red, green, and blue glitter), and Rainbow Pattern. The prism in his dagger's pommel is the focus for Rainbow Pattern, but it's also enchanted with the cantrip Flare. Chroma's too flashy to go totally invisible and sneak attack people, so the flare when he hits advertises his presence and dazzles them for a round. He can also pop a flare to give him +5 on his Bluff check to feint in combat and set up a sneak attack.

What has not followed the drop in violence is a political settlement: for the past year analysts have worried that the failure to disarm or integrate the Sunni Awakening groups into the state risked sowing the seeds of a new insurgency. But the tepid response to the arrest of Mashhadani and other Awakening men suggests that a political reconciliation may not have been necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki himself, can simply continue to expand its power and crush any rivals. One US Army Iraq expert, who worked closely with General David Petraeus to plan and implement the surge, told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when the Shiites realised they had won and the Sunnis realised they had lost. Based on the conversations I had during a trip through Iraq last month, both sides seem to accept that this is the case.

There is nothing the Awakening groups can do. As guerrillas and insurgents they were only effective when they operated covertly, underground, blending in among a Sunni population that has now mostly been dispersed. Now the former resistance fighters-turned-paid guards are publicly known, and their names, addresses and biometric data are in the hands of American and Iraqi forces. They cannot return to an underground that has been cleared, and they still face the wrath of radical Sunnis who view them as traitors. They have failed to unite and as their stories demonstrate, they are on the run.

The cleansing of Sunnis from much of Baghdad deprived Sunni insurgents of sanctuary among the population as they were losing battles with al Qa'eda, the Americans and Shiite militias. The Shiite bloc had numerical superiority, backed by the force of the Iraqi state and its security forces. And so, one by one, groups of Sunni resistance fighters struck ceasefire agreements with the Americans and joined the fight against al Qa'eda and other radical elements.

The "surge" of American forces allowed Maliki to strengthen the authority of the state and its security forces, while the establishment of the Awakening groups neutralised anti-government Sunni militias (in some cases simply by paying them salaries not to fight the state). The decline in sectarian violence gave Maliki space to weaken competing Shiite militias, who had been integral to cleansing Sunnis from mixed areas and establishing Shiite dominance but whose presence prevented his fully consolidating control.

• Making a comprehensive list of your symptoms (a trained medical person can find out exactly what hurts by making you twist just so, they did it to me in therapy and when I tore my back muscle)
  
• Doing a thorough search for possible diagnoses (WebMD or Google is the best I can do, I have not succeded in "becoming an expert on my condition")
  
• Identifying possible treatments (even stuff like "get a computer desk you can put a recliner under," which just occurred to me last week after a random link to the Ergopod 500)
  
• searching out real experts in your condition, connecting you to them and setting up appointments (that last part is trivial but would be great for alleviating the procrastination). I have no idea where to find someone who's actually good at this kind of puzzle or whether they exist.

(quote) Christina Aguilera has really changed.

Let's say you're an experienced driver in California with a single-car policy and a good driving record, paying average rates statewide for liability, collision and comprehensive insurance coverage. That's about $920 annually. If you were an Allstate customer, you'd get a 20% good-driver discount and pay only $736.

One speeding ticket would bring that to $1,129 annually, Allstate says. Get a second minor ticket and you'd lose your good-driver discount, and your premium would rise again, to $1,479, the company says. After a third ticket, expect to pay $1,631. Over three years you would end up paying about $2,685 more than if you'd kept your nose clean.

Washington’s approach thus far has been to prop up the banks and assume that they will know how to fix the problem, and that they'll want to. Of course, they haven’t; rather than loosening credit or resolving troubled assets, they’ve gone on spending sprees, burning through the cash without any clear sense of how to right themselves. The really galling thing about the Citi deal is that the industry’s recalcitrance is now readily apparent--and yet the government negotiators continue to give it the benefit of the doubt.

As someone with accounts at Citibank, I am personally happy to see it get bailed out. But as a taxpayer and a citizen, I am furious at the government’s willingness to spend enormous amounts of money without any apparent strategy.

the US taxpayer might be funding -- and, worse, guaranteeing -- a brand-new subprime bubble.

The rise of the originate-to-distribute model destroyed enormous amounts of institutional knowledge on the subject of responsible underwriting, as bad lenders drove out good ones. And while there's an inchoate impression out there that underwriting standards have tightened up sharply, I suspect that in reality they haven't, and that what we thought was higher underwriting standards was in fact simply a lack of money to lend.

Mr Rubin rose to the top through risk arbitrage. As a trader, he knew that the important thing was to understand the big picture, and get big calls right. He knew to keep his mouth shut: talking about your ideas might let someone else steal your profits. This may be the perfect skill set for a Treasury Secretary, which is why the trader currently running Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, might one day make a good one.

Mr Paulson, by contrast, rose to the top of the firm through investment banking, which is largely about dealmaking. The caricature of a dealmaker is someone who only wants to get the deal done, and cares not one fig for the consequences. Indeed, a lot of investment-banking deals involve undoing mergers put together by previous dealmakers.

The meltdown in the financial markets was arguably due in large part to dealmaking while ignoring the bigger picture. And Mr Paulson has stumbled from one crisis to the next, often fixing one in a way inconsistent with his approach to the next, with little indication of having a bigger strategy.

All this evolved not by design but by accident. The Bank of England did not start out thinking its job was to rescue the banking sector in crisis; it just found there was a crisis and thought it could do some good. Robert Peel did not set out to create a central bank, but prosecuting the Bank of England for charter violations seemed a mistake at the time. The Bank of England did not set out to supplant the market and turn the interest rate into a centrally planned and administered price, but monetary management in extraordinary times led to monetary management in unusual and then in ordinary times. The 1913 U.S. Congress did not set out to turn Ben Bernanke into a philosopher-prince, but the absence of an American central bank was blamed for the dire panics and depressions that struck between the Civil War and World War I. And post–World War II presidents and congresses did not set out to cede all effective powers of national macroeconomic management to the philosopher-princes of the Federal Reserve; it just seemed like the least-bad idea at the time.

1941 - On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler orders that the systematic murder of the mentally ill and handicapped be brought to an end because of protests within Germany.

In 1939, Dr. Viktor Brack, head of Hitler’s Euthanasia Department, oversaw the creation of the T.4 program, which began as the systematic killing of children deemed "mentally defective"...

It wasn’t long before protests began mounting within Germany, especially by doctors and clergy. Some had the courage to write Hitler directly and describe the T.4 program as “barbaric”; others circulated their opinions more discreetly. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the man who would direct the systematic extermination of European Jewry, had only one regret: that the SS had not been put in charge of the whole affair. “We know how to deal with it correctly, without causing useless uproar among the people.”

Finally, in 1941, Bishop Count Clemens von Galen denounced the euthanasia program from his pulpit. Hitler did not need such publicity. He ordered the program suspended, at least in Germany. But 50,000 people had already fallen victim to it. It would be revived in occupied Poland.

I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, 'Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?' I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man..."

"I found my staff having to do public relations in the middle of the most disastrous days Louisiana has ever experienced. The talking heads had been turned on. My staff was saying, 'My God, governor, they are crucifying you politically.' I finally pulled all of my staff together and said, 'We are wasting our energy. We do not have a stable of talking heads. We cannot control the national media. We have lifesaving missions to accomplish, so let's do it.' My staff was upset with me."

"Kathleen," Bush said in their meeting, which was attended by Joe Hagen from Bush's staff but no one from Blanco's staff -- a fact that troubled Blanco -- "I'm going to need you to sign a waiver that the Louisiana National Guard needs to be turned over to the federal government. I can't take them from you but I'm going to need you to federalize them."

Blanco had no intention of signing a waiver. She was concerned about a variety of legal ramifications that could result from her signing over her National Guard, but her main fear was that, without the leverage Blanco had as a free agent in what had now turned into a protracted negotiation with the administration, she would have no means to force Bush to provide any assistance at all. Blanco told Bush she would not sign a waiver. "You need to give General Honore some soldiers," Blanco told Bush...

By federalizing her guardsmen, Blanco would have been admitting that it was the state that was unable to handle the disaster, not the federal government. The Bush administration could have argued that they had had to save the day for Blanco because she was not up to the task. However, if Blanco did not take the bait, the scheme was dead.

[Bush eventually released federal troops without the waiver.]

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. “They looked around,” Landrieu says, “and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans — someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater.”

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him “Ray Reagan.” In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush’s campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin’s ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove’s strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco’s last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

Rove and Nagin were communicating through e-mail. "I heard Nagin was bragging about being in touch with The Man," Blanco says. "Nagin took the position that they were the people who could help the most to do what he wanted. People get highly complimented when they have contact with the White House."

Of all of the stories and subplots, there would be one that, in many ways, symbolized the whole of Katrina, what it revealed about the Bush administration, and how it would affect the lives of so many people. On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here.' He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, 'We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It's awful what's happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can't understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can't get into the Superdome to help. They can't get out. People are drowning in their homes.'

"So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it." There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.

"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I've been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life."

People are used to the idea of state schools, so they don’t think about how uneasily government-controlled education fits with liberal democracy. If someone said that Australia’s media should be owned by the state, with journalists told by the state what they should say, with media audiences examined to make sure they had absorbed the official line, there would be predictable and justifiable outrage.

Yet public education means essentially that for Australia’s young people. The government owns most schools, employs most teachers, tells them what to teach through state-set curricula, and examines students to make sure they have it right—even kids escaping to private schools can’t avoid these last two aspects of state-run education. And unlike state-owned media, there are severe consequences for ignoring state education.... link