PARANOIA

Treason Point For...er, me

2010-03-01T20:09:00.002-05:00

Loyal IntSec spies have reported that A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Termination Booth has been released by Mongoose Publishing. However, these same spies inform me that one key credit was left out at some point in the production schedule. Hero of Our Complex Andy Solberg was to have been saluted for his role in suggesting the plot of Episode Three (the bit where the Troubleshooters are miniaturised and injected into the bloodstream of a High Programmer). Commie Mutant Traitor saboteurs deleted this vital information, and for this we must apologise.

Citizen Andy Solberg! We have stolen the fruit of your brainmeat without due credit. In recompense, your oxygen ration will be increased by 30%. Respire with joy, citizen!

Inevitable

2010-02-19T14:13:00.002-05:00

Inevitable, a card game designed by Jeremy P. Bushnell and Jonathan A. Leistiko, forthcoming this summer from Invisible City Productions:

Inevitable is a satirical board game set in a slapstick dystopian future. Every play is designed to provide 2-6 players with hours of quality entertainment, danger, violence, betrayal, mayhem, and laughs. It contains a robust amount of high explosives and dead things. It was designed by people who think Orwell's 1984 is a comedy and the Necronomicon is a romance.

Purple Pawn calls Inevitable "a board game in the same dystopian comic world inhabited by games such as PARANOIA and its ilk. Your job is to beat the overlord computer system in an election."

High Programmers imminent!

2010-02-12T16:14:00.003-05:00

From today's Planet Mongoose blog entry by Mongoose Publishing CEO Matthew Sprange:

High Programmers/White Washes: Approval took much longer on this title than expected, but it is now all cleared and has been at print for some time - we'll likely be getting our copies towards the end of this month, but it will probably lap round into early March before it appears on shop shelves (worth waiting for though - this is a good 'un!).

High Programmers, you'll recall, is the final volume in Gareth Hanrahan's trilogy of 25th-Anniversary PARANOIA rulebooks, this one for infighting and intrigue at ULTRAVIOLET Clearance. (White Washes is the limited collector's edition of the same book.)

High Programmers uses an entirely new and unusual rules system, unrelated to earlier PARANOIA books, inspired by Amber Diceless Roleplaying and Nobilis. You don't need to know or own the earlier rulebooks to use it. The Mongoose forum thread "How does High Programmers play?" gives more details.

SAC Command Post film

2010-02-11T09:08:00.002-05:00

From The Grauniad - a film made (but never released) to counter the negative impact of Dr. Strangelove. After all, it would be terrible if the apocalypse happened accidentally, instead of on purpose.

The film is available online, and is ideal PARANOIA fodder.

PARANOIA in the real world: Registering subversives

2010-02-08T14:57:00.002-05:00

If you plan to overthrow the government of South Carolina, the Secretary of State first requires you to pay US$5 and register as a subversive organization. If you overthrow the government without a license, you face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Deserted Latvian town for sale

2010-02-05T23:07:00.004-05:00

Comrades! Now to be leavink corrupt capitalist running-dog Alpha Complex (ptui!) and be movink Outdoors to glorious deserted Russian military town in Latvia:

[B]idding has opened to find a new owner for the former top secret Russian military town of Skrunda.

Bids start at 150,000 Lats (about $290,000 USD). The winning bidder will become the owner of the entire town -- including 5 million square feet of land, 10 apartment buildings, two nightclubs, a shopping center, a child care center, a sauna, and of course a variety of abandoned military buildings. The radar facilities were sadly destroyed, so anyone thinking of starting their own secret missile base will need to find somewhere else.

The town has been abandoned since 1999, so you'll need to make a couple of trips to the local equivalent of Home Depot to fix things up.

Capitalist pig-dog commenter on post: "Wow, a town in Latvia costs as much as a budget condo in the Bay Area."

UPDATINK: Capitalist pig-dog Russian investor is buying Skrunda for US$3.1 million. Never be mindink!

Except for small detail of beink landlocked, Skrunda-1 is othervise beink perfect dock for formerly super-secret Sea Shadow stealth ship, built at cost of US$200 million, now beink given away for free by US Nawy.

WMD bonus material .PDF

2010-02-02T18:33:00.002-05:00

Four or five or eighty-five years ago Mongoose Publishing brought out the PARANOIA Straight-style mission collection WMD. I edited and packaged WMD, and in the introduction I said the Mongoose website would offer a free downloadable WMD bonus .PDF containing material cut for space from the book.

The Earth spun, the seasons passed, the hourglass emptied, the months flew off the wall calendar in a tasteful animation, yet I never got around to putting together that WMD bonus .PDF. Never, until a few months ago, JUST in time for Mongoose to pull all the bonus .PDF content for the 2004 PARANOIA edition. Yeah, I know. Go me.

But! Now! Thanks to kind permission from Mongoose and from PARANOIA's owners, the fan site Paranoia-Live.net has kindly made available the free downloadable WMD bonus .PDF. Commendation point to P-L.net High Programmer Phial for his worthy assistance in making the .PDF available.

Dear me, it's out at last. Whatever shall I procrastinate about now?

PARANOIA in the real world: The friendly euthanasia booth on the corner

2010-01-25T17:20:00.004-05:00

English novelist Martin Amis, doing publicity ahead of next week's publication of his new novel The Pregnant Widow, spoke to the Sunday Times of London. At the end of a long interview, Amis predicted an imminent demographic timebomb, a "silver tsunami" of old demented boomers. His suggested solution provided the grabber headline "Martin Amis calls for euthanasia booths on street corners":

“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”

Amis, himself 60 and a grandfather, added: “There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal.”

The writer says his support for euthanasia has deepened since the deaths of Lord Kilmarnock, his stepfather, and Dame Iris Murdoch, the writer. Amis said: “My stepfather died very horribly last year ... He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn’t get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse.”

Murdoch died in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Amis said: “I’d known her a very long time, a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, ‘I’ve entered a dark place’.” [...]

“There should be a way out for rational people who’ve decided they’re in the negative. That should be available, and it should be quite easy. I can’t think it would be too hard to establish some sort of test that shows that you understand.”

Would he kill himself? “There’s a certain point where your life slips into the negative. If you can recognise that point . . .”

In later comments to The Guardian, Amis clarified his comments were meant to be satirical rather than glib:

"What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction. [...] Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they'll say 'he asked me to do it', or 'he wanted to die', Amis said. "That's what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on."

Answering critics who said his comments were "offensive' to older people, Amis, a grandfather, said: "Well, I'm not a million miles away from that myself."

He added: "I had a friend who was desperately ill and she wanted to go to Switzerland, to Dignitas, but she was defeated by bureaucracy at this end. And, I think it is existentially more terrifying to feel that life is something you can't get out of.

"Frankly, I can't think of any reason for prolonging life once the mind goes. You are without dignity then."

Interesting, if not exactly supportive, discussion at Skeptic Exchange.

(Hat tip to GRWatson on Twitter.)

FRUP!

2010-01-22T14:04:00.002-05:00

Long-long-longtime gamers may remember talk throughout the 1990s of a forthcoming comedy-fantasy RPG called FRUP. A brainstorm from British gentleman game designer James Wallis (The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and his company Hogshead Publishing (which published many licensed Warhammer FRP books), FRUP made you laugh from the moment you heard the premise:

Come with us into a strangely familiar world of warriors and wizards, elves and dwarves, character sheets and combat rounds, dungeons and… what do you call those big lizard things? This is the land of Frup, where three enormous RPG rulebooks fell from the sky and were proclaimed as a Message from the Gods. Two thousand years later the holy rules contained in the Great Books have become the foundation for Frup’s entire religion and law. Breaking the rules is heresy. Heretics get burned at the stake.

So you’re in a world where everybody absolutely believes that they’re characters in a huge campaign of a certain market-leading RPG, being played by the Gods of Frup. Everyone has a character chart with their attributes (Brawn, Agility, Stamina, Influence, Cunning and Sagacity and morality (from Evenly Nice to Oddly Naughty) on it, plus their Career and Stage if they’re a PC. Anyone found without a character chart is clearly a monster, and will be butchered for career points. The same treatment is usually given to NPCs, and PCs a few stages lower than yourself. Stay alert. Keep your longsword handy.

Though long forthcoming, FRUP never came forth. But now James Wallis's FRUP may be rising! He has started a What is Frup blog, where he reprints the original 1995 FRUP preview article distributed as a handout at Hogshead convention tables.

Let's hope some sort of Frupping is imminent!

New Paranoia-Live topic lists

2010-01-19T23:59:00.004-05:00

On the Paranoia-Live.net fan forums, loyal and hard-working Citizen No. 5127 has once again posted several helpful indices of interesting topics discussed in 2009. For instance, his Information Booth forum topic list includes everything from A Great Big List of Uncommon, Unlikely, and Unhealthy skills to Ready to Buy: XP or Troubleshooters?

No. 5127 has also compiled a 2009 Rec Hall topic index and (accessible to those cleared for the Gamemaster-only forum) an annual GM Meeting Room topic index. For your sterling efforts, Citizen No. 5127, accept with gratitude and grace this shiny commendation point!

Orwell's diaries

2010-01-14T11:42:00.002-05:00

Tangential to PARANOIA, but interesting in its own right, is this Times (UK) review of George Orwell's diaries by Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor.

PARANOIA: 2009 in review

2010-01-02T01:03:00.000-05:00

The Computer's loyal servants in Housing Preservation & Development and Mind Control report greatly increased happiness metrics associated with Year 214 across all polled sectors. Congratulations to all sector entities that achieved performance review ratings of Acceptable or higher, and best wishes to the successors of those that didn't. Following recommendations by the HPD&MC Committee for Applied Social Tranquility Resource Allocation and Technical Optimization (CASTRATO), The Computer has instructed all service groups to repeat Year 214 until further notice.

The first edition of PARANOIA, from West End Games, debuted at Gen Con in August 1984. In 2009 Mongoose Publishing marked PARANOIA's 25th year in high style with two new anniversary rulebooks: Troubleshooter, for RED-Clearance missions (a "point-one" revision of the 2004 edition), and Internal Security, for BLUE-Clearance missions. For each of these rules sets, Mongoose issued a companion mission collection: Treason in Word and Deed for Troubleshooter, and Termination Quota Exceeded for Internal Security. Soon the new year will bring another Troubleshooter mission collection, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Termination Booth, and -- ta dahh! -- the third and final anniversary rulebook, High Programmers (for ULTRAVIOLET-Clearance missions). The companion High Programmers mission collection, None of This is My Fault, will include a partial adaptation of Sam Shirley's 1987 West End PARANOIA adventure, The Iceman Returneth.

These fine books were all written by one gifted designer -- Mongoose's ever-industrious staff writer Gareth Hanrahan. Gareth also wrote Citizen's Guide to Surviving Alpha Complex, published this past spring for Free RPG Day. All told, in 2009 Gareth wrote or adapted over 700 pages of PARANOIA -- around 400,000 words! He also found time to write Aslan and Scoundrel for Traveller and an ongoing webcomic, Fish for Fish. We are fortunate Gareth has chosen to use his powers in the cause of good.

At this writing PARANOIA ranks #14 of 1,422 core rules systems in the RPG.net Gaming Index, and #18 overall of 13,550 products. Among RPGs originally published in the 1980s, only King Arthur Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Talislanta, and Warhammer Fantasy rank higher, with Fantasy Hero close behind. Fine company!

Commie Mints

2009-12-24T13:56:00.002-05:00

Comrades! Now to be repudiatink capitalist running-dog (ptui!) consumer-drunk materialist holiday by purchasink glorious Commie Mints! "Revolutionize your breath!" Is good!

(Thanks to loyal citizen David Boyle.)

INTSEC review

2009-11-30T14:43:00.002-05:00

Commendation point to citizen Aratos for his fine review of the new PARANOIA INTSEC rulebook on the leading fan site, Paranoia-Live.net.

State of the Mongoose 2009

2009-11-25T10:17:00.003-05:00

Mongoose Publishing CEO Matthew Sprange continues his long-standing annual tradition of "State of the Mongoose" posts on the Mongoose forum. Learn about Mongoose's successes in the past year and ambitious plans for 2010, including a new edition of RuneQuest, lots and lots of Traveller goodness, and this bit about PARANOIA:

Right now, we are waiting to see what PARANOIA fans make of our two latest core rulebooks, Internal Security and the imminent High Programmers. They are part of a grand experiment to see whether fans are ready to explore other aspects of Alpha Complex beyond Troubleshooters.

All three core books will be supported by missions next year, and PARANOIA High Programmer Gareth Hanrahan has been hard at work on them already. There are some great titles coming – literally, some of these missions have great names, such as Scenes From a Surveillance Society, Meltdowns get me Down, and A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Termination Booth. We are going to have trouble fitting some of those on the front cover of the books!

While there are no solid plans as of yet, we are also looking at the possibility of new core books for PARANOIA, such as delving into the Vulture Squadrons – but also looking beyond Alpha Complex to see whether the rules and dynamics can work in other settings. There are two lead contenders for this idea at the moment, and we’ll keep you informed as to how they are turning out.

State of the Mongoose 2009.

Friend Computer resumes tweeting

2009-11-07T21:06:00.002-05:00

After a brief and long-planned and entirely not-unexpected and not in any way non-routine downtime, Friend_Computer's Twitter account is once more active.

The Happiness Hat

2009-10-30T22:45:00.003-04:00

Yes, we do already know about interactive artist and designer Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat. (Thanks to loyal citizen Allandaros.)

High Programmer Biographies

2009-10-27T11:29:00.003-04:00

One chapter of the upcoming High Programmer rulebook discusses sample NPC High Programmers. These Heroes of Our Complex (or disgraced traitors, depending on which of them was the last to edit The Computer's memory files) are for use both as non-player characters by GMs and as inspiring examples for the players.

We need a few more, though, so get writing! High Programmer biographies should be short, punchy and funny. We take no responsibilities for any terminations resulting from your involvement in this chapter.

Again, submit via comments to this post.

Attention, Hygiene Officers!

2009-10-27T10:16:00.001-04:00

Slashdot: Clean smells promote ethical behavior. Check the comments for trenchant analysis. Or, at least, for dumb jokes.

Innocent? Pay up!

2009-10-26T11:05:00.000-04:00

Loyal citizen Zild points us to the United Kingdom government's latest ingenious cost-cutting/fundraising move, described in this September 28, 2009 Telegraph (UK) story by Transport Editor David Millward, "Innocent motorists to be asked to pay court costs":

Drivers will fall victim to reforms which will see people who are acquitted by the courts expected to foot the majority of their own defence costs. It is thought some innocent motorists will plead guilty to reduce their costs.

Currently, somebody who is cleared of a motoring offence can expect to be reimbursed most, if not all, of the money they spend clearing their name. [...]

According to the Ministry of Justice's own statistics, 24 per cent of 1.4 million motorists prosecuted in the courts in 2007 were cleared. It meant that nearly 380,000 motorists recouped about 80 per cent of their costs.

Under the new arrangements, which come into force next month, acquitted defendants will only get a fraction of their money back. The reimbursement of lawyers' fees is being limited to the legal aid rate of £60 an hour – around a quarter of the what is normally charged.

Zild comments that this is an obvious idea for PARANOIA. "IntSec could falsely accuse a citizen of a crime simply to charge them for the cost of the resulting investigation -- presumably a tactic reserved for days when they are too busy to plant sufficient evidence for a conviction."

Zild also highlights another aspect of the ever-evolving UK strategic interception landscape, "Public to monitor CCTV from home" (BBC October 6): "Members of the public could earn cash by monitoring commercial CCTV cameras in their own home, in a scheme planned to begin next month. The Internet Eyes website will offer up to £1,000 if viewers spot shoplifting or other crimes in progress."

Charles Farrier from No CCTV said: "It is a distasteful and a worrying development. This is a private company using private cameras and asking private citizens to spy on each other. It represents a privatisation of the surveillance state."

Internet Eyes has defended its plans, saying viewers will not know exactly which camera they're watching or where it is located.

Although the UK is the "world capital of CCTV" - with an estimated one camera per 14 people - viewing hours of mostly tedious and often poor quality images is a lengthy and unpopular job, said the BBC's home affairs correspondent Andy Tighe.

In August, an internal report commissioned by London's Metropolitan Police estimated that in 2008 just one crime was solved per thousand CCTV cameras in the capital. The deficit was partly blamed on officers not being able to make the best use of the many thousands of hours of video generated by CCTV.

How will they fund these rewards for civilian snoopery? Hmm -- how about from court costs paid by accused innocents?

iWatch the LAPD watch you

2009-10-24T12:09:00.002-04:00

Alison Kilkenny at True/Slant reports on the Los Angeles Police Department's re-broadcast of HPD&MC's latest ad campaign to encourage your neighbors to snitch on you.

High Programmer dialogues

2009-10-22T14:30:00.002-04:00

Mongoose Publishing staff writer Gareth Hanrahan is in the final stretch of High Programmers, last of the three 25th-Anniversary PARANOIA rulebooks. This version, you'll recall, casts players as ULTRAVIOLET-Clearance supremos, the rulers of Alpha Complex. For one of the last fiddly bits of High Programmers, Gareth wants your help.

Past PARANOIA rulebooks have illuminated the entries on service groups (CPU, PLC, R&D, etc.) with bits of illustrative dialogue. You'll recall, for instance, this Armed Forces dialogue:

IntSec goon: We have a major problem here.

Army: Why, you just let my boys have a crack, and we'll settle this little contretemps in no time a-tall.

High Programmers needs an equivalent brief conversation for each service group, one that captures the group's characteristic form of subservient truckling to some UV's whim. Please write such a conversation and post it in the comments. Be terse, punchy, funny.

As always, neither Gareth, Mongoose Publishing, nor anybody at all will pay you anything or give you a free copy of anything. You grant Mongoose Publishing a dreadfully perpetual right to use your contribution in any way they see fit. Gareth will try to credit you in the rulebook, but no promises; if you post in the comments, please include your real name, or send it along separately. (See this blog's footer for the full horrifying rights-grab.)

PARANOIA in the real world: Hither and yon

2009-10-12T21:47:00.003-04:00

Loyal citizen George R. Watson (@grwatson on Twitter) points us to a worthy Troubleshooter assignment at the British Festival of Science.

Parliament has forbidden the UK newspaper Guardian from reporting on Parliament, for reasons Parliament has forbidden the paper to reveal:

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented -- for the first time in memory -- from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

Update Oct. 17, 2009: The restriction on reporting has been lifted. Lawyers for oil trader Trafigura had tried to conceal a report on toxic waste dumping in west Africa.

In The New York Review of Books, James Bamford's "Who's in Big Brother's Database" reviews Matthew M. Aid's The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency:

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. [...]

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." [...]

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

The Central Organization Department

2009-10-01T19:06:00.002-04:00

As part of the newspaper's coverage of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, Richard MacGregor in the Financial Times describes the Chinese Communist government's formidable and all-encroaching "Central Organization Department," the third component (with the army and the media) of its absolute control:

The department replicates what was known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura, the “list of names” of party members who formed the Communist ruling class through their eligibility to fill prized jobs in any sectors the state controlled. “The system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme,” says Yuan Weishi, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong. “China is more radical. [The party here] wants to lead everything.”

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department’s job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.

All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department. With a few largely symbolic exceptions, the people who fill these jobs are also party members. Not only that, the vetting process takes place behind closed doors and appointments are announced without any explanation about why they have been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does so in secret as well.

The patronage dispensed through the department, in the form of the most powerful party and government positions in the country, has turned it into a forum for the system’s toughest internal political battles. Politburo members, factional groupings, the centre and the provinces, and individuals aligned to different ministries and industries all struggle to place their people into positions of influence in state institutions. [...]

Officials holding posts such as governor or mayor are rated according to a lengthy list of numerical indicators that look like they were drawn up by management consultants. Economic growth, investment, the quality of the air and water in their localities and public order all theoretically count in the performance metric.

Richard MacGregor's article is "The party organiser," from the September 30, 2009 FT.

On a completely unrelated note, Gareth Hanrahan continues to work on High Programmers, the third of the PARANOIA 25th-Anniversary rulebooks, this one for players of ULTRAVIOLET Clearance. The elevator pitch was "Yes, Minister with lasers and a high body count."

PARANOIA in the real world: The short legs of the law

2009-09-22T23:18:00.003-04:00

You recall the early George Lucas feature THX-1138 was a key influence on PARANOIA. Remember how, in the final chase scene, THX-1138 escapes the pursuing security forces because -- well, no, I won't spoil it. But to those who recall that plot twist, I present the mayor of Wellford, South Carolina and her recently announced no-chase policy:

The Mayor of Wellford is defending her policy which bans police officers in that city from chasing suspects. Sallie Peake says the policy also includes vehicle chases along with pursuits on foot.

A memo issued on September 2nd from Peake to all Wellford officers reads:

“As of this date, there are to be no more foot chases when a suspect runs. I do not want anyone chasing after any suspects whatsoever.“

WSPA first reported the mandate on Wednesday after an anonymous citizen faxed a copy of the memo to our newsroom. Peake was out of town and unavailable for comment. On Friday, reporter Chris Cato caught up with her in her office and questioned her about the origin of the policy. Peake says she issued the mandate because several officers have been injured during chases, driving up insurance costs for the town.

“The officers are costing us more money on insurance than most citizens here in the city of Wellford are even earning,“ says Peake.

She says the city is paying out $20,000 annually in workers’ compensation claims, much of it due to the police force. In July, two officers wrecked their cruisers while chasing suspects and had to go to the hospital for minor treatment. The police chief says three officers have been injured during foot chases in the last two years.

Reporter Chris Cato, in quizzing Mayor Peake about the policy, says she became "defensive and irate," certainly an inexplicable response to his barrage of inane and silly questions. Full story at the WSPA-TV Channel 7 news site. (Commendation point to loyal citizen Veton at Paranoia-Live.net.)