Have you been reading my dream journal?

The Dreadfort is, unless I'm misremembering, the second largest castle in the North. It's located near a couple of rivers (or bights, I guess) which seem as though they could be jumping off points for naval expeditions south (since it's on the east, and the ocean west of Westeros has the Iron Islands in it). Perhaps…

In 1968? Not many more, and certainly fewer than the hundreds of thousands who did die because Richard Nixon stalled the Paris Peace Talks for a campaign talking point, and then escalated the Vietnam war because it was a good distraction from the social unrest caused by his violent attacks on civil rights and civil…

Neither I nor my usage need be particularly liberal (in any sense of the word) in order to classify massive bombing campaigns against non-combatant countries as war crimes. Guantanamo is appalling, but extraterritorial prisons with limited due process pale in comparison to bombing a nation so badly that 25% of the…

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? How exactly do you propose that Johnson could have "just ended it"? Pulling out and letting South Vietnam fall (like Nixon ultimately did, after pissing away tens of thousands more lives)?

I've got to think it has some strategic value, or why would it have been built in the first place? The propaganda message almost certainly wouldn't outweigh the loss in strategic assets.

A war that Johnson was trying to end in 1968, and probably would have had Richard fucking Nixon not sent Anna Chennault to tell Nguyen Van Thieu to pull out of the Paris talks with the promise that Nixon would keep the war going until South Vietnam was victorious, if he could just get elected. The man was a traitor…

I gave him demerits for his personal actions that were terrible, and pointed out that the most laudable things that happened under him were done by the legislature. Contemporaries lauded SALT, so he wasn't an unmitigated disaster on the foreign policy front.

You mean beyond prolonging the Vietnam war for personal political gain, expanding the war in Vietnam, including bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, inaugurating the Southern Strategy and giving disaffected racists and bigots a welcoming new home, using the apparatus of the federal government to "screw his enemies"…

I shudder to imagine Nixon, in this day and age, with Republicans reliably controlling both chambers of Congress. As horrible as he was, he at least had to deal with a powerful Democratic Congress during his tenure. Nixon with a compliant legislature might have been worse than W.

I thought Aggo got his head crushed with a rock? Hence "Fuck Aggo"?

Yeah, I almost wrote that Tywin might conceivably have given Joff up if his "legitimacy" had been questioned, but then I remembered that Stannis told everyone and Lannister's approach was like the Bush brothers in Florida.

I can kind of buy it for two reasons. First, Jorah fought in the arena with his weapons, and skill with a sword and shield goes a long way. He wasn't brute forcing his way through the fight, and even so he got lucky a few times. Second, Aggo was a khal's bloodrider, so he's one of the elite among the Dothraki, who…

No, because Joffrey was useless beyond his legitimacy. Tywin knew he'd be a useless and horrible king, and that he would have to effectively rule in his stead, but he was okay with that because it put the Lannisters on the Iron Throne.

Speedy public execution. Especially at this point, he has little to no value as a hostage. Keeping him alive in a dungeon does nothing but preserve the heir to a house that has defied the King in the North/Warden of the North/Iron Throne and any number of other players, each of whom will be happy to see him dead. …

The Mountain is exactly the character I'd parallel him with. The casting hasn't really helped, either. In the books, he's physically ogreish and a powerful (if raw) fighter. Iwan Rheon is more like a corrupt dandy than an unhinged northern bastard.

Also, without his evil but scheming and intelligent father, the writers have been forced to abruptly alter his personality from "sadistic mad dog" to "relatively low-key middling schemer." This Ramsay Bolton doesn't really resemble the Ramsay Snow who hunted women with dogs and flayed the Ironborn at Moat Cailin and…

Just in from Yorba Linda, California, after 8,061 days, Nixon is still safely in hell.

This is very true. Most of the buildings I've lived in in my life have been modern, urban construction, which (rightly or wrongly) makes one discount the threat of fire. I've seen a fair number of FDNY response teams, but never an actual fire—every time it's a non-fire emergency or a "smoke hazard," or something…

Ramsay is pretty close to a Deadpool villain.