But your entire last paragraph, on the practicality and realism spectrum, ranks just a bit lower than “worthless, idle wishful thinking”.

It’s no more or less serious than if you’d said we should all just join together in song and force aliens to show up to fix all our problems.

It’s not organized enough.

And if any gun-grabbers think the cops and ICE and politicians are fascist enough as-is, imagine how they would be acting if they could kick down doors with full impunity and zero fear. Yeah, the local cops could get a squad of 20 and take this house apart. But somebody’s getting hurt. I guarantee it.

And there’s the real case for private ownership.

If you have the choice of being disappeared and killed…or being disappeared and killed while taking a few of them with you, definitely choose the latter.

It won’t help you, but if you do it, your neighbor does it, and the next 10, 20…50 people do it, eventually two things are going to happen: if it’s local forces, they’re gonna start needing help, and if it’s not local, it forces those powers into a more difficult decision of having to either get more overt with their fascism or backing off. It’s not ideal but that’s pretty much the options you have.

If they want to do all the shitty fascist things, don’t let them do it easily and for free. The higher ups might not care, but that local cop in the red hat might start to think twice when “his” government keeps asking him to haul away people, and each time, another of his friends goes down. If not from a place of shifting world view, then maybe from self preservation.

I mean, that’s a pretty hard shift in the defense of your assertion.

You lead off strong with “I think it’s XYZ”, with no support, then when that’s challenged, you’re restating it in the framework of “you need to prove it’s not XYZ”.

Might as well have said the purge is because these guys liked raspberry donuts and Xi hates that flavor. Good luck proving that negative.

A bag of onions and a jar of minced garlic punch above their price tag for pasta enhancement as well.

I like to saute the onion (diced) until golden and translucent, then add a scoop of the minced garlic, then just as it starts to brown, dump in the sauce, Italian seasoning, and stir at a very low simmer while the noodles cook.

Add some pasta water to the sauce before you strain so it sticks to the noodles better.

Even longer than that.

But gas means money, so fuck anyone and everything else that might get in the way.

I mean, shit, at least lionize some blinkered fanatic like Stonewall Jackson.

Jackson was a 19th century Christian jihadist.

On the other hand… instead of Lee or Jackson, James Longstreet is right there.

You’re mostly right with the depth of field being the big difference but the image being darker is not a function of aperture (f-stop) directly, but rather overall exposure. At the same ISO setting, two identical shots in the same lighting would be the same brightness with truly equal exposure: the reduction in aperture (increasing to m the f-stop number to a higher value) would be compensated for with an equivalent decrease in shutter speed (in simple terms, constricting the hole lets in less light, so we leave the hole open longer to let in the same amount as before).

In the example, if the scene is darker it’s because the exposure changed, not just because of the aperture.

Additionally, the number is shown as a fraction because it is a fraction. The “f” in the value (f/2.8) is a variable that stands for “focal length”, that being the focal length of the lens being used. So, for example, a 50mm lens set to f/2 would have its aperture set to a 25mm diameter. (50/2)

The reason the numbers are strange numbers and non-linear in scale is because they correspond to aperture diameters that let in either double or half the amount of light from the stop next to them. So adjusting from f/2 to f/2.8 cuts the amount of light in half (I think this is basically doubling or halving the area of the circle of the aperture).

This is why a one stop change at lower values (bigger openings) has a much smaller numeric shift than a one stop change at higher values: adding or subtracting diameter of a larger circle adds or subtracts much more area than the same diameter change to a smaller circle. That’s why one stop goes only from f/2 to f/2.8 on the wide open end, but on the closed down end, one stop goes from f/11 to f/16.

Finding new and different applications for the Musk RTO technology!

The Rock, Sean Connery

I love this!

I also thought Matrix, but Neo would be Gonzo and Morpheus would be still played by Laurence Fishburne.

Oh man, I feel like the energy between the Muppets and Viggo Mortenson would make me pick him instead.

Animal could play Gimli, Sam the Eagle is Gandalf.

My favorite summary and comparison of two movies was something along the lines of:

"In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine plays it absolutely straight, as if there were no Muppets at all, and as if he were completely surrounded by nothing but classically trained professional actors…

…in Muppet Treasure Island, on the other hand, Tim Curry plays it as if he himself were a Muppet."

My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.

I think their argument is that the tax revenue is still owed, whether it’s collected or not. So the IRS could absolutely get back on track post Trump and pursue these unpaid taxes.

I’m starting to think maybe the username isn’t just a username, and the account is literally for a wall panel to express its views.

Of the entire list, I guess I’d pick Grassley.

At least he’s from the old school of partisan bickering.

Remember when Obama wearing a tan suit was enough to keep the right frothing at the mouth for weeks?

Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.

All they do is make prices jump for consumers. It doesn’t put domestic goods at an advantage because the domestic producers of those goods increase their prices artificially to achieve parity with import pricing.

So prices go up for the consumer with the extra money going to either:

1. For imported goods, to pay the tariff, a tax, to the government, which in this case wants to use that tax revenue to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

or

2. For domestic goods, it’s pure straight profit for the unethical corporations who are price gouging their domestic customer base. They’re not giving the consumer a break on price and they’re not sharing the profits by giving employees raises. Hell, they’re not even taking advantage of the competitive advantage to ramp up production and create jobs. They’re just pocketing that extra cash for doing exactly what they’re always doing…passing it on to, you guessed it…the wealthy.

Uh…great story?