I used to hate this kind of game for how kingmakery they are. But these days a lot of boardgaming is dominated by games that are just as kingmakery, but also:

• Overly complicated, with rules that would’ve made more sense as an unpolished MS-DOS game of a magazine cover floppy in the pre-CD era than a board game
• Surly and isolationist, with individual player boards that makes it feel more like we’re all playing on separate boards than on one board game
• Ameri/Euro hybrids that bring all the tedium from eurogames but all the violence and hurting each other from American Thematic games
• Bogged down with a thousand special cards and special powers that makes the game feel more like playing Magic than a board game
• A lot of the variety comes from expansions and special cards instead of emergent combinations of fewer, more versatile components

Chrysanthopoulos says that the government has hired Blackwater, the American private military firm infamous for its activities in Iraq, which now goes by the name “Academi”, along with five other international for-profit security outfits. Explaining why this has happened, he says bluntly: “The Greek government does not trust the police whose salaries have also been cut.”

There is some good news however that he hears from the contacts he maintains amongst his former colleagues and politicians. He is confident that there will be no military coup, as there was in 1967.

“There are contacts by certain politicians with elements in the armed forces to guarantee that in the event of major social unrest, the army will not intervene.”

Lue tämä. En osannut valita parasta kohtaa lainaukseksi koska koko artikkeli on niin mielenkiintoinen.

We made a distastrous tactical error when we decided to choose the interests of the bankers over the people. Europe does not have to take that same route. We have not admitted that the system is flawed and in dire need of restructuring. And the result is that the world’s largest economy has an economic “recovery” with a laughable 9% unemployment rate and an economic strategy that is based on the same gimmicks that helped cause the crisis. Europe needs to recognize what the markets are telling these leaders that there is a structural flaw at work here. And it needs to be fixed.

The euro gained against the dollar and bounced from all-time lows against the Swiss franc on Wednesday, boosted by a news report that China was ready to buy significant amounts of Portuguese sovereign debt