not normally a fan of Winston, but that was gold.

He's not going to be around (in a political sense) after the weekend though.

Sponsored by Winston cigarettes.

Winston Tastes Good Like A Cigarette Should.

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It's amazing how well the creature effects on Predator (and Aliens) have aged. Some of the other effects (the camouflage, the opening shot of the spaceship*) are obviously very 80s, but the creature itself still holds up.

*promote one of my all time favourite movies and a true legend in his field; Stan Winston.

* shouldn't have been in the movie!

I'm not sure I'd class Winston in with the rest. Legs kinda lack the appropriate stubbiness.

Anyone who didn't read Winston's dialogs in John Hurt's voice after watching 1984?

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*ban
Winston Plays Educational Games For Kids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UauJNQiyTrU

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
― Winston Churchill

God, so much wasted potential. Great music for the trailer, vfx don't actually look that bad, but the characters are just gender swapped cutouts of the originals.


Basically, you've put 4 women in the roles of childhood memories that were played by.. well, MOSTLY legends. And even then, I'll take Winston over Patty any day, at least Winston seemed to be more than a "tough as nails black {chick} for comic black relief".

I believe that you are correct, and Carr was not actually fined or otherwise legally penalized for his remarks.

However, it *was* a possibility that he would be, according to the first line in the article I linked to in my first post in this thread:
"Jimmy Carr could face sanctions for making a joke about dwarves during an appearance on BBC1’s The One Show."

I believe that I read other news articles that suggested that was a possibility at the time it happened, but I can't find anything with a real quick search now.

Going outside of the scope of that single incident, I definitely have seen quite a few reports of things that I would consider to be fairly trivial incidents like this being looked at by the UK government as "hate speech" and therefore potentially subject to "fines, imprisonment, or both" (according to that wikipedia article).

Samples from a quick search include a politician being arrested for quoting a passage about Islam from a book by Winston Churchill, a young man who was jailed for 12 weeks because of "some offensive Facebook posts making derogatory comments about a missing child" (it doesn't say what the posts were exactly; I am not saying I would defend his posts but I don't think anyone should go to jail for being an idiot and running their mouth on the internet), and another young man who was fined for saying that "all soldiers should die and go to hell". Plenty more incidents beyond those as well, it seems.

So while Jimmy Carr didn't end up actually facing any legal repercussions for his joke, I think it is not far fetched at all to suggest that he might have (and there seems to be some evidence that legal repercussions enacted by the government were being considered in that particular incident).

That is what seems crazy / wrong to me. That is NOT freedom of speech; it is freedom of benign speech, with an increasingly narrow view of what speech is benign.

I'm 100% OK with their being "consequences" for Jimmy Carr for his joke. But the government shouldn't be involved in that (and again, to be fair they DID end up staying out of it in that case). The consequences that I think are fine include:

* Ofcom or the BBC passing on some/all of any fines that the government levels against them on to Carr (ie., IF they get fined for breaking broadcast decency standards, make Carr foot the some or all of the bill for that).

* Ofcom or the BBC electing not to invite Carr to appear on any more programs if they are concerned about preventing fines / protecting their image / whatever. They are a business, they gotta look out for themselves.

* Individual people who were offended by Carr's joke boycotting programs that he appears on, refusing to pay to attend his live performances, etc. Obviously. If you don't like what he has to say, you are are of course not obliged to continue to listen to him.

Anything beyond those consequences is going too far in a society that claims it is democratic and free, in my opinion.

I haven't been following Krugman's column/blog for quite some time, but every once in a while, a piece of his makes its way onto my screen. And his recent takes on HRC/Sanders/Single Payer reminded me that he's a member of the establishment first and foremost.

Many point out how his views of the electability of Sanders vs HRC are eerily similar to what he wrote in '08 about Obama vs HRC. I'd say it even has a touch of Attlee vs Churchill in it. Winston was bound to win the election in '45, beyond any doubt, so Attlee decided not to pretend to be Churchill light, but went all in with socialist ideas. NHS, largescale nationalisation incl the BoE, free secondary education, massive public housing, a focus on full employment, social security, etc -- ten times more radical than anything Sanders even proposed.

48% to 36% - a landslide victory, thank you very much.

@Asmo

You ought to be careful about accusing others of ignorance when you have to resort to googling "islam homogenous" and spamming us with the first links you find. Oh my, talk about making a fool of yourself.

All the PhDs in the world can't alter reality; personally I'd be suspicious of the intellectual credentials of anyone who wasted their career on so vacuous and puerile a subject. Every widespead philosophy will inevitably factionalise to some extent; this is hardly relevant where the objections are to its core tenets and universal beliefs. Remind me, which of the major sects is the good one?

Incidentally, I skipped over this before but the claim that there are 1.5 billion muslims in the world is an outright lie. Most of that number are muslim in the same sense that winston smith is a loyal supporter of ingsoc.

It's tedious to have to continually restate the case against islam in every discussion where the lazy and dishonest leap to the defence of an ideology they've failed to adequately research. Suffice to say that any liberal, modern thinker who had, say, read the qur'an, or looked into the life and character of mohammed, or talked to muslims about what they actually believe, which is never what they reveal to unsympathetic ears; would hesitate before condemning all anti-islamic sentiment as bigotry.

Another great source from ChaosEngine's link. This actually has a drop down menu that allows you to select any part of the scientific report, or a simplified summary for non-technical people.

There is an absolute wealth of clear and hard scientific information in there. If you find a problem with any of the science then i highly recommend you write your own paper about the problem and submit to have it peer reviewed. I think it would be a great lesson for @A-Winston and @lantern53 both to go through the peer review process and see how easy/hard it is to submit incorrect science. And also to see how bad science is treated - not with insults, or rage like the internet community, but with simple facts and evidence like a professional community.

Please don't call them skeptics. They're not. Skepicism is the questioning of ideas or beliefs until presented with evidence that supports them, and it's a Good Thing(tm).

With climate change, there is overwhelming evidence to show that it's real, it's happening now and it's man made.

The people that don't accept it aren't skpetics, they're in denial. We don't call creationists "evolution skeptics", don't give AGW deniers a more elevated position.

Oh, and @A-Winston, you won't believe Nye because he's "only a mechanical engineer" (ignoring the 97% of actual climate scientists that agree with him) but you're perfectly happy to believe an author (someone who makes up stories for a living!) and whose book is full of

flawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book, including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the urban heat island effect, satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming, and controversies over sea level rise estimates