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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

But there's no evidence that Kromagg Prime is the only Kromagg world, right?  And it sorta goes against the idea of branching.  Unless Kromagg worlds don't branch for whatever reason.

I was going off of what Quinn's double says in The Other Slide of Darkness.  The Kromaggs started sliding and found nothing but world after world dominated by Homo Sapiens.

Also, over five seasons the Sliders landed on dozens and dozens of worlds.  The only other one we saw that had native Kromaggs was the one Isaac Clark took them to in Revelations, where again they shared the world with humans.

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Perhaps the breeding camps are where they use humans as surrogates, since Kromagg women die when they give birth.  Kromagg egg, fertilized by Kromagg male, but gestating in a human female.

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NBC employed Trump and owns Access Hollywood.  They were probably concerned about legal fallout if they used the tape on their news programs.

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The polarization is largely a result of the primaries becoming preeminent in selecting nominees.  We got better candidates when they were picked in smoke filled back rooms.  Today a candidate has to appeal to the lowest common denominator of half the electorate in order to get on the ballot.  Any display of centrism or cross over appeal or less than 100% orthodoxy is damaging if not disqualifying.  The candidates are more extreme because they are chosen by the extremists.

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Project Veritas has a history of misleading editing and outright manipulation of their videos.  After the ACORN fiasco, O'Keefe's credibility is pretty well shot.

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As for the Supreme Court, I think the GOP made a huge gaffe by refusing Judge Garland, because I personally feel he is moderate if not slightly conservative, and if Hillary wins, she can nominate another Ginsberg and there's little they can do about it.

It's not too late for them to confirm him, and they should seriously consider it.  If they lose the senate in addition to the presidency, they'll get someone far to the left of Ginsburg.

How many Kromagg soldiers would need to be left on each Earth to keep it subjugated?  The kromaggs aren't genocidal, they keep some humans alive as slaves.  Our Earth has about seven billion people living on it. Even if half were killed it would require tens of millions of soldiers, maybe over 100 million, to keep the humans from revolting and overthrowing them.  We have 65 million military and paramilitary personnel on our Earth now without it being a brutal dictatorship.

The kromaggs all come from one Earth, which they shared with humans.  Assuming there are four billion kromaggs and half are soldiers (an absurdly high estimate, but whatever) they might be able to control a couple dozen dimensions if they could conquer them all.  But each one they conquer makes it that much harder to take the next, as a large number of soldiers have to be left on the previous world.  If they can conquer each Earth with a 2:1 troop advantage, since the worlds are caught unaware and the kromaggs have superior technology, they would still be able to take no more than about 20.  They could expand that number if they concentrate on worlds with lesser technology and/or populations, but we've seen no evidence that they do that.

There's no way they could have conquered 150 worlds, as they claim, unless the vast majority of them are uninhabited like Outpost 113 originally was.

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TemporalFlux wrote:

That's why polls are pretty useless in this cycle - just look at Brexit, Columbia and even the U.S. primaries.

The primary polls were pretty well spot on.  They said Trump and Clinton were winning, and they both won.  The pundits thought the polls showing Trump winning must be wrong somehow, but they weren't.

The only thing this has solidified for me is that I will never vote Republican again. These self-righteous fools have finally cut it for me and shown who they are - a right wing of the Democratic Party.  You may as well cut out the middle man and just vote Democrat.

We have two military-industrial parties, one pro-choice and one pro-life.

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Informant wrote:

There's a reason why the Tops crumbled without the Cryin' Man.

Who are you kidding?  15 number one hits minus Rembrandt.

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ireactions wrote:

Once again, pilight, I have to ask: given your contemptuous disdain for my thoughts on how SLIDERS could do monster stories while still retaining its identity, do you have any actual alternatives and ideas for how else SLIDERS could do monster movies? Or would you simply have the sliders be snidely dismissive of the monsters?

Quinn and especially the Professor would never for a second believe these creatures to be supernatural.  They're living things that abide by the laws of nature.  Find out what's causing them to be the way they are and you'll find out how to defeat them.  If the monsters are intelligent, negotiation may be possible.

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ireactions wrote:

So what you're saying is that there's an episode of MACGYVER where he fights zombies, vampires, animal human hybrids, killer robots and Morlocks? I'm only in the first season; when does he start fighting monsters? I'm looking forward to it.

In fanfiction, MacGyver deals with monsters and supernatural creatures all the time.

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I don't object to MacGyver.  It's just that we already have a MacGyver, we don't need another one.

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Maybe most of the worlds they encounter aren't violent like that.  It could be a subtle point of the reboot, that violence isn't a necessary part of civilization and thus the Sliders don't develop those skills.

I don't have a problem with them handwaving the money stuff.  Sliders isn't the kind of show that demands hyper-realism.

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The Sliders shouldn't be "charging into battle" at all.  They're not soldiers.  They need to find ways to defeat their enemies indirectly.  Use their scientific knowledge to undermine the monsters' power or protect people from them.  That's what Quinn and company did in the first two seasons.  They didn't confront the California Health Commission in "Fever", they found a way to diminish its power.  In "The Good, the Bad, and the Wealthy" Quinn did everything he could to avoid direct confrontation.  That's the Sliders ethos for the first two seasons.

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ireactions wrote:

On the Season 3 monsters in general -- I always figured Quinn and Arturo would whip up some inventive solutions with something of Torme's sense of humour -- such as where the key elements to defeating the zombies, animal-human hybrids, vampires, scarab and robots could be a stick of butter, a jar of aspirin, a tin of peanuts, an insulin kit, cough syrup and a case of golf balls. I've been thinking about this a lot.

Yes, what Sliders really needed was to be more like Macgyver

436

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Colin Powell's emails pretty well sum up what the whole country thinks of the two larger party candidates.  Clinton screws up everything she touches, Trump is a national disgrace.

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RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

It would have been ok as a b-movie horror/comedy flick.


Which is exactly what Species is, an OK b-movie horror/comedy flick.

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It's like Obama's birth certificate, the people who don't trust Clinton won't start no matter how much documentation she puts out there.

ireactions wrote:

Well, I made the poster with the sliders looking at the Golden Gate Bridge with the all-lower case logo that I think is pretty sharp?

It looks like the Azure Gate Bridge, but otherwise is great.

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It's such a ripoff of "Species", right down to emulating specific shots from the film, that it's hard to take seriously.

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

This is clearly just for fun.  No one is allowed to get offended or say anything that would cause someone to otherwise be offended.

The "Safe Space" mentality is everywhere!

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1. Rules of the Game   B
2. Double Cross           A     
3. Electric Twister Acid   B
4. The Guardian           A+
5. the Dream Masters     C
6. Desert Storm            C
7. Dragon Slide             B
8   The Fire Within         C-
9   Prince of Slides        B+
10 Dead Man Sliding      B+
11. State of the Art        C
12. Seasons Greedings   A
13. Murder Most Foul      B
14. Slide like an Egyptian  D
15. Paradise Lost             F
16. Exodus pt 1              A
17. Exodus pt 2              F
18.Sole Survivors            B
19. The Breeder              D
20.  The Last of Eden      C+
21.  Other slide of Darkness    D
22. Slither                      F
23.Stoker                       C
24. Dinoslide                  B
25. This slide of Paradise   C

443

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I can't bring myself to hate The Fire Within, because I love Olaf Stapledon's The Flames.  Yeah, Sliders fumbled the concept but it still holds a certain fondness for me.

444

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I answered 'Earth Prime' and it seemed to accept that

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The BleachBit stuff in the FBI reports is the stuff I found the most damning because I'd only heard Republicans saying it before that.  I even searched on Snopes to verify if it was a real thing that happened.  But....yep, she paid a ton of money to permanently delete emails and had staffers smash her Blackberrys with a hammer.  That sounds like the work of a drug dealer flushing all his drugs down the toilet.

Don't you destroy anything with a hard drive in it when you are done with it? Personally, I always use a drill first and then a hammer before I recycle it. And the only thing I am concerned about is getting my identity stolen...

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

That's exactly right.  What's crazy is that the Republicans are already making moves to "rig" their next election, and the Democrats don't really have their next guy lined up.  The Democratic Party has spent the last 16 years trying to set up Hillary Clinton for a run that I'm guessing we'll have a wide-open field next time.  Bernie will probably be dead and Tim Kaine would be 66 this time around if Hillary wins two terms.


Whoever wins will be a one term president.  The US has never had four consecutive two term presidents.  This is only the second time we've had three in a row.  The first was Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe in the Era of Good Feelings.

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I still can't believe she's running against Donald Trump.  This should be the easiest election the Republicans ever had, and they've completely blown it.

One of my conservative friends said he can't decide whether he's more pissed that the Democrats rigged their primaries or that the Republicans didn't.

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Trump has been talking about "touchback" amnesty for a long while.

From July of 2015

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/30/t … al-status/

Trump said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that as president he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then allow the “good ones” to reenter the country through an “expedited process” and live in the U.S. legally

From November 2015

http://time.com/4107636/transcript-read … milwaukee/

Going to have to go out and they will come back but they are going to have to go out and hopefully they get back

From April 2016

http://www.today.com/video/trump-on-tod … 0689347771

“we’re going to create a path” for undocumented residents of the country to come back to the country legally after being deported

The media has grossly distorted his position.

Hollywood is far more likely to turn Asian characters white than the other way around.  See Last Airbender, Starship Troopers, Aloha, 21, Argo, Edge of Tomorrow, Ghost in the Shell, The Hunger Games, Star Trek Into Darkness, and many others.

When adapting universes that were created long ago, when all the writers were white and mostly didn't concern themselves with diversity, you either end up with unrealistically white casts or you have to make some adjustments.  Either course will draw criticism.

Season Three is the worst of Sliders

Vader was a fully trained Jedi before he turned.  Ren was a Padawan who had barely begun learning the ways of the force.  If Ren is Vader's equal then training doesn't mean that much and Rey's (and Luke's) ability to use the force is not at all surprising or out of character.  If Ren is less powerful than Vader, then Rey (and Finn) being able to compete in a fight with him is not surprising or out of character.

The idea of Ren being a villain who has a lot of power he doesn't fully understand or know how to use is an interesting one.  Snoke says at the end that Ren's training is incomplete.  You have to wonder whether he is deliberately keeping Ren from reaching his full potential to avoid meeting the same fate Palpatine did at the hands of his right hand man.

Rey beat a super-experienced Force user

I just watched this again last night.  I'm not sure where people get the idea Kylo Ren is super experienced.  He barely beat Finn in a lightsaber duel, the same Finn who got his ass handed to him by a random storm trooper with a riot baton just a day earlier.  He struggled to retrieve Luke's lightsaber from the snow.  He didn't actually do much to suggest he's super experienced.  He seemed more like someone who had rudimentary training of a marginal talent.

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I don't know what can be done for the people who have lost low skill, decent paying factory jobs.  As a society, the answer is to invest more heavily in education so that the next generation can get the higher skill jobs that are out there.  For the people already 20 years into their careers it's a more difficult problem.  It's what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.  In order to create new jobs, some of the old ones have to be eliminated.  That's good and necessary for the country as a whole, but some people wind up getting hurt by it.

Of course Schumpeter thought the cycle of creative destruction would eventually be the doom of capitalism.  He may be right, but that's a much longer term issue.

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Welcome aboard, Neno

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Those low skill factory jobs aren't coming back because they don't exist anymore.  The US does 21% of the world's manufacturing, a number that hasn't moved since the 1960's.  It's less labor intensive than it was, and the labor it does use isn't the kind that those old factory workers do.  It's electronics and chemicals and other highly skilled manufacturing we do now, while most of the grunt work type jobs have been automated.

Hillary Clinton may have alienated some people when she talked about killing the coal industry, but the truth is it's pretty much dead already.  The Dow Jones coal index is down 93% since 2011 and has only one company listed that's not in bankruptcy (Consol).  In a few more years producing coal will be akin to making buggy whips or phonograph needles.

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Anti-establishment voters won't switch to Clinton, but they might stay home or vote for a smaller party candidate.

458

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Jackson, who played himself in Eggheads, is leaving the Worldwide Leader after 29 years.  He is 65 years old.

http://espnmediazone.com/us/press-relea … -29-years/

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If Trump quits then his followers are back at square one, since he selected a long time GOP insider as a running mate.  The prospect of Pence becoming president is likely to drive voters towards Clinton, or at least away from Trump.

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The Trump fortune was built by Fred Trump in the 1940's and 50's on FHA loan profiteering.  Donald had nothing to do with it.  He has maintained his inheritance, nothing more.

The notion of Quinn being the least interesting of the original quartet is easy to understand.  The boy genius thing has been done to death.  Sliders was best as an ensemble.  Quinn, as the nominal central figure, is required to be the straight arrow that the eccentricities of the others play off of.  Normally this is a comedy trope.  You can see in shows as disparate as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld, and ICarly that the titular main character/actor is predominantly used as a straight man for zany supporting characters.  In action shows the most obvious antecedent is the original Mission: Impossible.  Few people, if any, felt Jim Phelps was the most interesting part of the Impossible Mission Force.  He was the glue that held the rest together.  Jerry O'Connell apparently wasn't satisfied with that, and as he gained more influence over the show the more Quinn-centric it became and the more like Jerry the character became.  Watch the Pilot again and note how little Quinn actually had to do with the second half.  That's what Sliders should have been all the time, and with a less egotistical star maybe it would have been.

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Trump being buddy-buddy with Putin suggests that the Russians would have even more free reign in the Middle East and worldwide than they do now.

463

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The Wonder Woman trailer looks great

464

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He might repeal Obamacare to replace it with a universal health care system.  He has favored such a thing for a long time.

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Informant wrote:

People should look at voting for a president the same way they would look at handing a loaded gun to a random stranger on the street.

So people shouldn't vote?

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All the people who voted for Joe Biden need to shut the hell up about how bad plagiarism is.

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

Everyone is reporting that Pence is the guy.  So that'd explain why he's not on the list.

Apparently not everyone on the list will actually be speaking.  Tim Tebow announced that he would not be and did not know how he got on the list.  I guess that's the kind of attention to detail we can expect from a Trump presidency.

As for Pence, that should be the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Trump is anything other than a GOP establishment shill.  Nobody is more Republican insider than Pence.

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The GOP released the list of convention speakers.  Notable absences include Mike Pence and Sarah Palin.

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Obama has been pretty bad, mostly because he was underqualified for the job in the first place.  That's part of what makes Trump so scary.  He's even less qualified than Obama.

The only good thing to say about Obama is that he's a step up over his predecessor, which is like bragging about having a faster Yugo than your neighbor.

470

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Back to the original subject, Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton today

471

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I fully admit that I have a bias against cops.  The way they are recruited and trained in most areas results in systemic abuse of power and inequality of protection.

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Your bias is betrayed by your asymmetrical use of names.  You often call Martin by his first name, as you would a child, while you always call Zimmerman by his last name, as you would an adult.  Why?  Because you want to portray Zimmerman as the cool headed grown up in the situation.  You may not even be conscious of it.  The notion of black as being undeserving of being treated equally with white is deeply ingrained in many people.

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FWIW, I never said Zimmerman stalked the kid.  I don't think he ever intended for it to go down the way it did.  My guess as to what happened is that Zimmerman tried to intimidate Martin, emboldened by his gun and the knowledge that cops will virtually always take the word of a white dude over that of a black kid.  Martin responded by getting pissed off and whaling on Zimmerman.  Having gotten in over his head, Zimmerman pulled his weapon and fired.

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Informant wrote:

Actually, Martin had been suspended from school for possession of marijuana and of stolen property. So he had a history.

That's a far cry from a history of violent confrontation resulting in mandated anger management classes, like Zimmerman had.  A school suspension is not a criminal record in any event.

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Informant wrote:

Was Zimmerman legally allowed to get out of his car? It is as simple as that.

What you're saying is that because Martin was a thug, Zimmerman's rights no longer apply.


The fact is that George Zimmerman (a member of the neighborhood watch) spotted a suspicious person, walking not on the sidewalk, but close to the houses and looking into windows. He called 911 and reported this person (don't know about you, but I don't typically call 911 before I intend to make trouble). He followed Martin at a distance (not confronting him, as you say) to see where he was going. He apparently even walked up to the next street to get an address for the 911 operator. After that, he was told that he didn't have to follow the suspect and he apparently turned around.
During all of this time, Martin had a clear path home and the time to get there. He wasn't being chased or threatened.

After Zimmerman turned around, Martin assaulted him. That means that Martin turned around, pursued Zimmerman and physically endangered his life.

Your entire argument is crap. You're saying that because you're on Martin's side, Zimmerman's rights didn't apply. You say that Zimmerman had no right to follow someone suspicious, yet Martin had the right to kill someone that he thought was suspicious (and this is a clear distinction. Zimmerman did not assault Martin or threaten his life. Martin threatened Zimmerman's life in no uncertain terms).

What you're saying is that the law didn't apply to Martin because... he was black and the rules applying to him wouldn't fit your narrative?

No, I'm saying I don't take Zimmerman at his word like you do.  Only two people know what happened between them and one of them is dead.  Zimmerman had every reason to make Martin seem like the aggressor, and himself as acting in self defense.  He wanted to avoid prison, and the jury bought it.  I have a very hard time believing someone in a neighborhood watch doesn't know the address of the neighborhood he's watching.  Only one of the two had a criminal record, and it wasn't Martin.

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Zimmerman was in his car when he spotted Martin.  If he hadn't gotten out to cause trouble, he would have never been in a position to get beat up like that.

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Informant wrote:

And "unarmed" means nothing. People can cause severe bodily harm without a gun. I'm no George Zimmerman fan, but if someone slammed my head into cement repeatedly, I wouldn't feel bad about shooting them either.

That's a pretty good example of the problem.  If George Zimmerman didn't want to get his ass kicked he shouldn't have confronted the random stranger in the middle of the night.  Cops do the same thing, they escalate situations then claim self defense when the person fights back.

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TemporalFlux wrote:
pilight wrote:

It's a crying shame that the cops have to be a little more circumspect about just shooting the uppity black folks.  "No fear of repercussions" is what's led to the many, many deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of over-aggressive cops.

I just hope that you're prepared to shoot someone to save your own life or someone you love, because one day you may not have the police to come do your dirty work when you scream for help.

You say that as if they'd be there in time to do something other than fill out paperwork now.  How privileged you are that your encounters with cops have been positive.

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TemporalFlux wrote:

If you're worried about the world going to hell under him, then you don't realize just how bad we're already going to hell.  The Democrats and Republicans aren't going to be able to use business as usual to hold it together forever; and working with law enforcement, I can tell you unequivocally that since January violent crime in my area has spiked to levels I haven't seen since Hurricane Katrina.  The resurgence is not because of Trump; the largest contributing factor seems to be this Black Lives Matter business that has emboldened the criminal elements.  They know law enforcement is being rendered toothless by politics; there is no fear of repercussions.  It's been going that way for decades, but now it's dropped off a cliff.

It's a crying shame that the cops have to be a little more circumspect about just shooting the uppity black folks.  "No fear of repercussions" is what's led to the many, many deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of over-aggressive cops.

In any event, violent crime rates in the US are at historically low levels, even below the Leave It To Beaver 1950's.

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If they put in someone that Trump just beat in the primaries, then the GOP rank and file are likely to react very badly.  The result might well be worse than letting Trump lose.  It will be yet another sign that the Republican party insiders are out of touch with their own voters.