Don Edwards

The person who said that English is a result of Norman soldiers chatting up Saxon barmaids and about as legitimate as the other results thereof, was oversimplifying. The Norman soldiers (and the Norman French language) were themselves the result of Norse soldiers chatting up barmaids who were the result of Germanic soldiers chatting up barmaids who were the result of Roman soldiers chatting up Celtic barmaids. The Saxon barmaids were the result of Saxon warriors chatting up barmaids who were the result of Roman soldiers chatting up (a different group of) Celtic barmaids. And I'm sure that if I knew the history further back...

Armor at its best causes blows to slide off. Spikes interfere with that and force the energy of the blow into the armor and potentially the wearer. You want the armor to be smoothly convex everywhere it CAN be smoothly convex without interfering overmuch with motion. (The absolute best armor is to not get hit in the first place, of course.)

Yeah, that would be pretty easy. With any decent digital-drawing program - and the free programs paint.net and gimp both qualify, along with others - you don't want to think of your screen as a single sheet of paper. Better to think of it as a collection of magical post-it-notes. You can move them around, stack them on top of each other, just as you can with paper ones. They're magical because you can do things that you can't do with paper ones - change how transparent the background of the note is, change whether things drawn on it are visible or not, pull a note out of the middle of a stack without disturbing those that were on top of it, put one into the middle of the stack just as easily, stretch or shrink it...

Panel size change may not be an issue either. Cropping the panel smaller should be easy, the loss being the time spent on stuff that is no longer in-panel. Shrinking the whole panel and everything in it might be even simpler, although there's some risk of artifacts to clean up. Stretching a panel would be a lot like shrinking it. Cropping it larger would take more time to do stuff that's outside the old boundary but inside the new one...

(the merfolks' understanding of landfolk customs regarding clothing is less than complete.)

The executive order that you're wondering why it doesn't exist was issued Sept 5 2017, to take full effect March 5 2018. See, Trump thinks something-like-DACA would be good policy but he objects to the unconstitutional way it was created - a rather mixed position shared by quite a few other people on the political "right". So, even though Congress had already had five years to enact some legislation, and he had been asking them to do so for some time, he wanted to give them another six months. Trump's executive order is STILL hung up in the court system. It seems that when Trump wants to uphold and defend the Constitution, Democrat politicians object and file lawsuits against him. And no, Congress - in spite of now having had another two years since Trump issued the order to end DACA - still hasn't gotten around to enacting any legislation. This failure is in no way Trump's fault.

Oh by the way, what would you think if Trump publicly acknowledged that he didn't have authority to make a certain policy that is incompatible with the law and such a policy would never hold up in court, arranged for legislation to be submitted in Congress that would authorize the policy, watched that legislation fail, and then established the policy by executive order? Shredding the Constitution, maybe? That actually happened at least twice... by Obama. One result is commonly known as DACA. The other was known as DAPA - until it was terminated by court order, having been found unconstitutional due to the manner of its creation and its being contrary to laws enacted by Congress. DACA, seven years after its probably-unconstitutional creation and two years after Trump ordered its phase-out (with six months written into the plan - explicitly - for Congress to do its job) is still not authorized by Congress, is still running, and is still in the court system.

Is this the same Department of Justice that won't punish people - and the same intelligence community that won't revoke security clearances or flat-out fire people - for leaking classified information to the press if that information is embarrassing to Trump?

By the way, I was not standing up for Trump. "Absolute immunity" is nonsense. I'm just wondering where the objections where when prior Presidents did essentially the same thing. Clinton, by the way, tried to take the position that because he was President, everything he'd ever done was immune to subpoena. He was facing subpoena relating to stuff he'd done well prior to being elected President, and his response was in effect "I'm President so I don't have to respond to that." (The courts informed him that he was mistaken.) Trump's lawyers are at least restricting their ridiculous claim to people's activities while they were senior officials in the federal government. And a less-broad claim of immunity might be reasonable, as it appears that the House actually has no specific claims of wrongdoing in federal agencies to be investigated - they are issuing subpoenas in hopes of finding something that justifies the subpoenas.

That isn't the question. The question is, if I tell you that someone (unnamed) told me someone (ditto) told them that Fred over there did X, can you be a whistleblower against Fred? Your testimony isn't valid in court, by the way. As a matter of US law, I believe the answer to that question is no. You could give an anonymous tip to investigators, and if the investigators find actual evidence things might go to court... but in the case at hand, it might be some people involved in getting the information to you who face charges, as Presidential conversations with foreign dignitaries are classified by default and leaking classified information to persons not authorized to have it is a felony. On the other hand, if you give an anonymous tip to investigators, and the investigators find nothing of substance, it won't show up in the newspapers.

It still can, under certain conditions. Namely if you persist in making them to people who aren't happy to receive obscene phone calls specifically from you.

The last: apparently, Obama. Among earlier ones: according to this article Nixon and Clinton are on the list.

So do Democrats - when there's a Democrat President.

Well, it would make sense that about half of chimeras are of two sexes in different parts of their body; but not all of that half would specifically be mixed in their sexual organs. According to this article (note: has pictures of improperly-developed genitalia) the most common cause of intersexuality in genetic females is an overactive adrenal gland, while in genetic males it's androgen insensitivity syndrome. The article also lists a number of other causes but does not mention chimerism. Most (all?) of the causes listed in said article could occur in chimeras.

Number of cases can be very interesting sometimes. I recently read of a woman who can smell Parkinson's disease. Medical researchers didn't believe her, but she made a good enough argument that they decided to test her. 22 identical T-shirts worn overnight, 11 by people with Parkinson's and 11 by otherwise-similar people without. She correctly identified the shirts of all 12 people with Parkinson's - including the one who hadn't been diagnosed yet. (So now, based on working with her, they're developing a potentially highly accurate, early, and non-invasive test for it. They can't cure the condition, but in most cases they can slow the progression somewhat, and the sooner they start doing so the better.) And actually, even if the one person hadn't been diagnosed with Parkinson's shortly after that test, with the false-negative rate as low as it apparently was, a one-in-twelve false-positive rate isn't bad. (False-negative is when the test should say "yes" but says "no"; false-positive, naturally, is the other way around. You don't want a test with a high false-negative rate; a high false-positive rate is tolerable if the test is cheap&easy - say, getting a sweat sample and dropping an indicator chemical on it - and used as pre-screening for a more accurate, but more expensive and/or uncomfortable, test.)