Alderaan

I will never change my avatar.

TV’s Frink said:

I’m not uncomfortable because there is literally zero reason for the CIA to target me.

You sound like a Republican.

That guy who wrote the 1,000 page rebuttal of RLM’s prequel reviews must have more time on his hands or something.

Warbler said:

I object to the path for citizenship idea.

What are you going to do, round them all up into camps? Create a new deportation militia force that would eventually just become local gangs who try and extort everybody?

The problem isn’t the immigrants, it’s your stupid venal lawmakers who allowed the situation to happen so they could get rich, and it’s also your fault for voting them into office in the first place.

Working on the Battle of Yavin right now. Here’s about the first minute, thirty seconds.

Lots of Harmy’s Despecialized here but I’ve edited in the digital shots and tried my best to make them look good and less artificial. I’m not an expert but just took out some of the pink, adjusted colors with the RGB curve corrector, maybe did a little masking on some of the Xwing shots for better compositing, stuff like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9E09C6lX9A&feature=youtu.be

Shot of the takeoff looks much brighter with better contrast compared to the BR version.

Republicans had a messed up coalition. They’ve always been lead by rich CEO and Judge Smails country club types, who were happy to flood the labor market with cheap workers and crush wages and break labor unions. But their rank and file members are mouthbreathing xenophobes in the post-civil rights era who were inevitably going to riot against those policies.

Then you have the Democrats, who once upon a time were actually liberals. Then they got taken over by the Clintons and corporatists, and turned into a tail party made up of well-off professionals who benefited from globalism at one end, and relatively poor and marginalized minorities at the other end, with no middle class in between. The Democrats no longer gave a **** about wages or socioeconomic equality–like the Republicans, the professional class were happy to flood the labor market with cheap labor, while the political class looked at these new migrants as potential new voters.

So you wound up with an unsustainable situation which both political parties enabled in order to make themselves richer, without concern for the long-term social consequences.

The Democrats are a joke at this point, because like Merkel and the neoliberals in Europe, they continue to advocate for open borders despite all of the obvious adverse social consequences that such policies have created, just so they can continue enriching themselves while adding minorities to their voter rolls. The minorities get promises that their civil rights will be protected, but the neoliberal economic policies pursued guarantee increased wealth inequality and lower standards of living for those same people.

Meanwhile the Republican party is fracturing apart. The Paul Ryan Republicans are devoid of any policy agenda whatsoever. They just want to run their businesses and make money and who gives a **** about anyone else in the world. The angry rural white voters who used to be their base are now on Team Trump and they would be happy to round up every dark skinned person in this country and put them in concentration camps.

Where are the adults in all of this?

Wow, that’s a hall of fame post Catbus. I’m impressed!

It’s all about narrative. After you’ve been doing heavy lifting with Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Lando, the droids, and all their friends and allies for a couple of hours (even the ewoks), and they’re ready for a final celebration and goodbye, you don’t tell them to hold on and wait a few minutes, because you need to wander around the galaxy and peek behind the curtain and see what these other planets are up to who weren’t even in the rest of the movie.

That doesn’t even touch on the fact that some place like Coruscant, for example, is not going to be celebrating the destruction of its own military forces.

Return of the Jedi is the characters’ story. The ones who actually appeared in the movie. It’s not George Lucas and the universe of Star Wars story. We don’t stop the movie so we can devote pointless camera time to random creatures that pop out of walls but have nothing to do with the story. We don’t fly off to fifteen different planets and subtitle each one of them just so we can make new Wookiepedia entries and masturbate to them in our sleep.

We just don’t do those things. We stay with our characters and our intimate setting and that’s the story.

What part doesn’t make any sense? You’ve just watched a 2-hour movie, it’s the ending, but instead of winding things down with the setting and characters you’ve been following all along, the camera suddenly cuts away to a bunch of nonsense that isn’t even in the rest of the movie.

How does that fit exactly?

SwissArmyTin said:

Genuine question to mods: what constitutes a strike?

I think it has to go over the plate, between the knees and belt. ymmv

Lord Haseo said:

I’m also pondering if it’s okay for people to shit on the OT because of ROTJ…I am extremely incredulous that you would be okay with that. Given your hypocrisy and all.

ROTJ is a good movie. Just not as good as Star Wars and Empire.

TFA is not a good movie. It’s a bad movie. Just not as bad as the prequels.

See the difference?

It has a Gini coefficient of 0.471, ranked #44 in the United States and the same as the Dominican Republic.

Warbler said:

Wait, we’re hacking cars to commit assassinations? I didn’t know this. Who have we assassinated via this method, so far?

I don’t know, maybe this guy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke said that what is known about the crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack”. He was quoted as saying “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car. So if there were a cyber attack on [Hastings’] car — and I’m not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.”

That was written 4 years ago.

Terrific article on the Republican healthcare lie:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/09/gop-is-now-paying-for-years-of-obamacare-lies-commentary.html

What are sentences, Alex?

Replacing Obamacare is a must. Of course, I’m in favor of single payer, but they need to fund it. That’s the problem Trump and the RINO’s are going to run into: they aren’t offering funding for what they are proposing. It’s just an empty equity transfer from poor people on the margins of coverage to wealthy insurance execs and CEOs.

Great article from Andrew Napolitano:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/09/andrew-napolitano-spies-among-us-congress-has-created-monster-that-is-coming-for-us.html

You should probably look up the definition of the world “or”.

The FBI director saying “there is no such thing as absolute privacy”, coming from an organization which has a disturbing history of illegally wiretapping and spying on private citizens; details of programs that involve mass data collection, backdooring consumer electronics equipment and software, hacking remote cars to commit assassinations…yeah I guess we can chalk all of that kind of behavior up to benign peacekeeping, right?

My point is that you said Wikileaks is a tool of the Russian government probably for no other reason than because you read it over and over again in the New York Times or heard it over and over again on MSNBC or CNN or something.

They are very clearly just an outlet for anti-government, anti-corruption whistleblowers. If you don’t want them publishing anything on you, don’t do anything corrupt. It’s pretty simple. Who cares who reports the intel, if government officials, CEOs and the like weren’t doing questionable or illegal things, there wouldn’t be any stories to talk about in the first place.

Well I am smart enough to not fall for the blame-everything-on-the-Russians bs. Wikileaks goes back a lot further than the recent election cycle, and they made a name for themselves outing U.S. abuses against civilians in the war on terror, which is a common cause with the Russians. It’s pretty clear they are just anti-government, and the idea that Assange or anyone there is a Russian agent is about as stupid as it gets.

If the Russians were the source for Wikileaks dumps, then you know it stands to reason the U.S. could source them with intel on Putin and the Russians as well, right? But since it ain’t workin’ like that, you should be be able to figure out logically that all of their info is coming from inside Washington D.C., not Russia.

Nah I don’t think so, it’s going to be one or the other.

DominicCobb said:

I can’t help but wonder if this whole CIA info dump has something to do with the rift between the intel community and Trump.

There isn’t a rift. There is a war. Either Trump or the CIA is gonna go bye-bye.

moviefreakedmind said:

This is a major problem with Wikileaks, which I think is definitely a tool of Russia at this point

Wrong.

Is it possible to put Trump in place of the Emperor?