Just putting this out there...

 YouTube may well pull this down, but I've seen it on other platforms by now too. This is entirely consistent with what I've heard from lots and lots of other points; that widespread fraud and cheating by the Democrats happened in the last Presidential election; so blatant that it can't be covered up anymore. Quite honestly, they've stolen who knows how many other elections over the years. Americans should be pissed.

http://hereistheevidence.com

Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 3

Bo-Katan, who was voiced by Katie Sackhoff in the animated shows, is played in live action by her in her live action debut in this new episode, and... surprisingly, she looks about perfect in the role.

This was one of the better episodes that we've had, but in some ways, it's also one of the worst, because it highlights a few things that Dave Filoni is just plain getting wrong about Star Wars, where he's bought into the wokeness garbage and injecting it into the show. Even as he's making episodes that are actually pretty good; the wokeness is mostly buried deep in the assumptions rather than hitting you over the head like it did in stupid movies like Birds of Prey or the Charlie's Angels remake or Terminator: Dark Fate, or any number of big budget and high profile major flops of 2018-9 or so that flopped specifically because of their wokeness. But it is nonetheless very built into the assumptions, and it was a major difference between Clone Wars and Rebels; the level to which those assumptions dominated the way the show rolled out.

Rebels also suffered, of course, from having thoroughly unlikable principle characters, for the most part, who were defined by their whinyness, entitlement, and Mary Sue-edness, although this was not unrelated to the wokeness. Because what is wokeness other than resentment, envy, covetousness, bitterness and spite? That's basically the definition of wokeness entirely right there, except that they lie to themselves and to others to try desperately to make it seem justified and vindicated. Although they don't really deny in any meaningful way that they aren't exactly all of those adjectives, because it's so obvious that that's exactly what they are.

Anyway, what in the world happened to the Mandalore that they showed in the Clone Wars, where the population was homogenous, and it was clear that the Mandalorians had a very Nordic, specifically Finnish look to them (one of their world's is named Kalevala, which is why I specifically say Finnish as opposed to, say, Swedish.) Din Djaron, the titular character, doesn't ever show his face except for a very brief moment, but the actor is a Chilean communist who fled as a child when Allende was ousted, because his parents were embedded in his corrupt and evil administration. But he's supposed to be a Foundling, so him not being an ethnic Mandalorian is OK. Bo-Katan is played by Katie Sackhoff who isn't Finnish, but is at least an American of traditional American descent. Her two companion Mandolorians are played by a Hispanic woman and a Greek man respectively. In fact, the only people who look like they could be Mandalorians (other than Katie Sackhoff) are in fact the Imperials who don't wear stormtrooper helmets. That's OK, they look traditionally British, which the Imperials have always been, but again; in the first Star Wars, the Rebels were heritage Americans against the Imperial British. What woke Star Wars has evolved to is women and the Pox (peoples of color) fighting against white men. Why that bit of underlying woke messaging, especially in a show who's fanbase was traditionally heavily slanted towards white men goes unremarked on has always seemed very odd to me. It's a deliberate insult to the fans.

In a related bit of wokeness assumptions, I've once pointed out on a Youtube video's comments (a The Quartering video, actually) that although it's become quite mainstream, it's actually quite evil to present women as interchangeable with men in action movies, because it's contributed to the monstrous evil of thinking that women in actual, real combat roles in real life in the military is a good idea. It should be excised from our fiction because 1) it promotes the worst kind of dis-civilizational behavior imaginable among Americans, and 2) it's biologically and psychologically nonsensical, and most normal people find it a bit off-putting to see it all of the time. The Quartering, which positions itself in the market as an advocate of free speech and anti-wokeness who constantly like to bang the drum about cancel culture deleted my comment within minutes; in fact, I was editing it to add another clause and when I hit approve it was already gone. (Needless to say, I decided to unfollow the Quartering immediately. I'd already found that I'd gotten a bit tired of his repetitive schtick, and that was the final straw.)

In any case, all of these changes were already given to us in Rebels. Sabine Wren as an Asian teenage girl Mandalorian who is the most irritating Mary Sueish character ever written, who's only marginally less irritating than Ezra Bridger, and never has to work or strive or anything for any of her "accomplishments" and who is smug and unlikeable about them as well. Yes, because that's what the Mandalorians need for their warrior culture; a teenaged girl who's into grafitti because it's what's popular with the SoCal hipsters for a queen. Suuuure. I hope Moff Gideon cut off her head during the Purge. He won't have, because the creators think not only that Wren is all that but that it would be a betrayal of their insane equalitarian cult to have a women actually be treated as equal to a man in similar circumstances. She has to ride in on a white horse and become the queen again without any effort, because that's what happens to women in Star Wars now.

I couldn't have explained this bizarreness to you or to myself without understanding the reality of r-selected evo-psych behavior vs. K-selected behavior, but I see all of the hallmarks of r-selection; the entitlement, the sense that you shouldn't ever need to actually work or strive for anything, because resources (up to and including the position of soverign leader of an entire nation) should be free to whomever wants to show up and take it (explains Hillary's shock and reaction to the 2016 Presidential election too, for that matter), the low threshold of disgust, and the tolerance for "Diversity™", etc. I'll refer you to the Godfather of r/K-strategist theory as it relates to politico-social ideology so you can understand it yourself, of course.

https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/

But I just have a hard time believing that the Mandalorian will ever be able to rise above mediocrity, other than a handful of brief moments here and there, because it's clear that it's saddled with wokeness assumptions. While it is wise for them to reject open wokeness preaching, like so many big flops have probably wished that they had done, and like the Star Wars sequel trilogy has been hampered with for that matter which has been disastrous for the brand, the reality is that it's still a Trojan horse and the wokeness is still there. You just can't see it as clearly from the outside because they're trying to sneak it past the gates.

SWTOR updates

With it clear that the Democrat party has attempted a massive coup via election fraud in multiple states involving millions of votes—and dubious confidance on my part that the known to be corrupted courts will do the right thing and address it satisfactorily, much less any other agency of the government, I've turned aside from following current events too closely and instead have doubled down on my playing of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Before Civil War 2.0 starts, if that indeed is what is going to happen, and I don't have leisure time, reliable internet, or anything else that would allow me to finish the game with all classes.

I've been tinkering around with post storyline stuff with my Jedi Knight; I'm almost finished with the Makeb storyline, and I've started a few other side quest stuff like the HK companion quest, the seeker droid quest, and I discovered that there was a Coruscant story quest (but not really; not sure why it was purple) related to Gree droids wanting to fix infrastructure in the lower city that I'd somehow missed and just did. I've also been doing the bounty hunter weekly event while I can, bumping up my reputation with that faction. Although I don't really love the symmetry, or lack thereof, of doing it this way, I'll probably continue to use Maark this way until I get to the place where I can sell my Heroic crates, at least. That means a fair bit of more stuff to work through; after I finish the Hutt Cartel stuff, I've got all of the Shadow of Revan stuff to do and then half of the next big story expansion. It does become a bit more scattershot, however, and there's not as much of a clear progression in this phase. While sure, there's plenty to do, the lack of a strong(ish) storyline to follow and the charismatic chemistry between characters makes it much less compelling in general; it feels much more like gameplay rather than a Star Warsian story. Although that will change once I hit the Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne stuff again, I believe.

My Sith Warrior I'm only playing right now to help with the bounty hunter reputation; I'm otherwise finished with his story, and I'm not sure how excited I'm going to be to repeat all of the story I just did with another character right away (although I believe that Hutt Cartel, at least, is significantly different on the Imperial faction as opposed to Republic.) What I'm really kind of emotionally ready to do is get going on the main stories for other characters already. To that end, I was messing around with getting my smuggler set up with some outfits and credits that I mailed from my Sith to him to get him started, and I went ahead and did all of the Ord Mantell stuff with him yesterday. Sure, the first planet of the prologue is only half (if that) the size of a regular planet, so it's relatively small, but the point is, that's really what I kind of want to do. But I also want to get someone to the place where I can have all my crates opened so my other classes can have access to cooler gear that I've already earned. If I wait too long to get to that point, nobody will really get to use it for anything, because I'll be done with them by the time I've opened them!

Anyway, it looks like I'll be on an assymetrical pattern for at least a little while. I'll probably leapfrog somewhat slowly between the Jedi Knight, my Sith Warrior and my Smuggler until I get to the end of Chapter 9 of Fallen Empire, at which point I'll probably add the agent in and get him caught up to the Smuggler. I'm not necessarily slow-walking the smuggler, because I have cool equipment for him right now and I'm not really waiting for anything in particular for him to get, but my Agent only has one decent outfit (and it's a cheap and easy fleet adaptive armor vendor set at that) and there are really cool agent outfits in the crates that I'm hoping to get at least some pieces of (the Remnant Resurrected Agent jacket and headgear are the two I want the most for my agent!)

An auditor's perspective on the election...

 Normally, I don't try to use or approve of salty language, but I'm also not going to head to the fainting couches and pretend like it's the worst thing ever. So I present, without any editing, Larry Correia's perspective on the election and what we know about it so far.

The fraud was so rampant and so blatant and so amateurish that everyone who isn't in a deep, deep state of denial knows that it happened. But being in a deep state of denial is a precursor for being a Leftist (even if it's a "moderate" kind of RINO leftist) so that shouldn't be a surprise. The party that can't even manage to understand how to tell a man from a woman and other super basic biological, reality-based facts is in denial? Say it isn't so!

https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/05/the-2020-election-fuckery-is-afoot/

As an aside, I have never felt better about my decision to abandon Facebook. Granted, I still tinker a bit on Instagram, but I hardly post anything, and hardly look at anything and will likely abandon it too before long.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-takes-down-group-organizing-protests-of-vote-counting-11604603908

Ad Astra manifesto

Today is, of course, a frustrating day. Donald Trump clearly won the election, but the voter fraud operation is attempting to see how much cheating they can get away with today in a number of key counties, including, sadly, the one that I live in. This is a likely scenario for the actual election results, although it's still "conservative" in the sense that it doesn't involve investigating and overturning likely rampant voter fraud in Arizona and Virginia that would almost certainly flip the states. To say nothing of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The source is AC's page, one of those linked on the side there. But given that there's little that can be done right now about it, I'm going to attempt to not think about it too much. The reality is that although senile Biden is one of the clearest choices for evil that the American people have ever been faced with, the less clear choices have won by being more discrete and careful than Biden has been quite often, not by being less evil. A second Trump victory would likely only delay the coming collapse into chaos of the American nation by a small amount, not actually make it less likely to happen. It's almost certainly inevitable, and the cards were dealt decades ago that made that the case. It doesn't matter what I think about it, and it doesn't matter what you think about it; this is just the playing out of strategic moves that Satan took long ago that weren't blunted in time to make their conclusions and consequences avoidable.

There's simply no political will to do what would be necessary to save us anyway; massive repatriations of Fake Americans, massive clean-up of corrupt officials at all levels of government from the federal bureaucracy to your local public library board. Including tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of executions of literal traitors by a strict legal definition. The overturning of the "dual citizenship" and "birthright citizenship" frauds and most of the avenues for "legal" immigration that have been abused for decades. The abolishment of our treaties with the UN, NATO and just about every other entangling alliance that we foolishly persist in being in. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. It would almost be better in the long run for a massive economic and political collapse, which would at least encourage most of the Fake Americans to just pick up and look for greener pastures on their own, as well as the establishment of smaller, more manageable and accountable polities that aren't accountable to a massively over-reaching government body. Y'know, kind of like how the Founding Fathers envisioned and which we haven't had since the war of Lincoln's Proto-communist Revolution, otherwise known to the historically illiterate as the Civil War.

So again; what can be done about this? Not a whole lot other than praying, at least by folks like you and me. At least right now. We'll see as this continues to play out over the next few days and weeks what will happen. I still hold on to a glimmer of hope that some substantial swamp draining will yet take place. (As I've been typing this, thousands more "lost Biden votes" in Michigan were "discovered" making that state now "lean Democrat." Riiiiight. Funny how these mysteriously "found" ballots always end up flipping states from Republican to Democrat, and have done so every election for years. Not enough people in jail for serious felonies, I suppose. Al Franken got away with it, so they keep doing it. Maybe Civil War 2.0 is closer than a lot of people think. This kind of obvious and blatant cheating makes sure that nobody has any confidence in the integrity of the process or the legitimacy of the government, and disenfranchises tens of millions of voters. I think people really are sick and tired of this kind of crap by now.)

So, after saying that I didn't really want to talk about that, I typed more than I intended already. Let's turn to the real meat of my intended post; a manifesto on what Ad Astra is. First off, it's also occurred to me for quite a while now that Ad Astra is a bit too obvious and over-used of a title and it probably needs a bit more to truly be unique. Rather than attempt to be clever and add more Latin, I'll probably go for something a little more down to earth, or something. Ad Astra Privateers, or something like that, since I envision this as very much like a Rafael Sabatini book set in space; a kind of Sea Hawk or Captain Blood to the stars. But I don't love that either. Suggestions welcome, otherwise, I'll keep noodling around with it on my own. But, what exactly am I trying to do with this? I've talked a little bit about it before, but that was quite a while ago, and it's probably time for an updated manifesto. Especially as I'm seriously thinking (albeit again) with doing something with this other than tinkering on the world-building side. It's long overdue for some plot and character, not just worldbuilding! It's my intention to make this post be that manifesto of sorts.

---~~~ (*) ~~~---

I was five years old when Star Wars came out. It's quite literally the first movie that I remember seeing in theaters. Nobody can deny that Star Wars was a breath of fresh air in the gloomy and cynical theatrical scene of the 70s; a kind of early harbinger of the 80s, in fact. The 80s were a decade which is defined in many ways in America by the fact that it was a prosperous and confident era in which the American people were confident and proud of their culture, and in many ways the last decade in which the American people were allowed to have their country and their culture without too much obvious meddling and interference from those who wanted to take it away from us and destroy it. The 80s were unashamedly American in America; the exact opposite of the siege mentality that grips Americans today. But in many ways the 80s, or at least these particular trends that we associate so strongly with the 80s, were really part of a 15 or so year period not just a decade, and it started in the late 70s and went a bit into the early 90s. Star Wars, as I said, was an early harbinger of it, even if George Lucas never meant it to be.

And I think some of the most interesting things about Star Wars are things that weren't necessarily intentional and which George Lucas would probably vehemently deny today (maybe with nervous looks over his shoulder, even) but which are obviously true nonetheless. Star Wars was made in a time when America was undeniably American in demographics. If you watch movies, documentaries, even news broadcasts from the 70s and 80s, you'll rarely see a minority, although if you do, it's generally unremarked on. We had them, and they were allowed the same grace that Americans were allowed, because they weren't here in enough numbers to show the ravenous ingratitude, entitlement and covetousness that they do now. We had good relationships with our minorities, because they were minorities, and weren't threatening to become majorities, nor was there any of the propaganda that is rampant today that white people and specifically white males are born with some kind of cult-like version of original sin. Star Wars was made in an era when Hollywood was an organization that made movies by white males, mostly (although often financed by Jewish interests) for an audience of white people, and starring mostly white people (with the obvious exception of the blaxploitation genre of b-movies.) On top of that, Star Wars was openly (and admittedly) imitating a number of genre elements that had fallen off the mainstream table during the 70s, but which earlier had been very mainstream; the Flash Gordon Republic Serials in particular, but the whole body of work that led up to them and followed in that same vein; Edgar Rice Burroughs and his John Carter stories, for instance, or Leigh Brackett and her Eric John Stark ones. E. E. "Doc" Smith, the so-called creator of space opera was obviously and heavily borrowed from in Star Wars, as was Frank Herbert's Dune and a host of other similar stuff like Edmond Hamilton, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl and more. 

One thing that you may notice, in spite of the shrieking harpies who shriek such things about diversity, inclusion and The Force is Female and stuff like that is that there certainly is a type of cultural homogeniety to the creators of space opera. About the closest thing to diversity is the fact that Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore were female, although that seems to have had little impact on their writing compared to their male counterparts, and they certainly weren't inserting feminist identity politics into their stories. To be honest, this is one of the things I miss most about space opera. The entire genre, up to and including Star Wars, was written by Americans about Americans and for Americans—although the characters weren't as overtly American in the sense that they were called Americans, they obviously and clearly always were Americans in culture and genetics nonetheless. It's our genre, or at least one of our genres. Which is exactly why seeing entitled, screeching hordes of the creatively bankrupt militantly brownwashing, blackwashing, and pinkwashing our genre entries rather than simply making their own entries, or better yet their own genres, is so offensive. It's narcissistic and sociopathic. Seeing "the Force is Female" and movies stocked with minority Mary Sues while white males only relegated to being able to be the cartoonishly idiotic villains is a mockery of the genre, and a deliberate one. It's mean-spirited and petty, meant to humiliate the creators and the fans openly.

Star Wars used to be, and should be again but isn't likely to be, a story primarily about white, American heroes carrying on swashbuckling, chivalric romances with white, American love interests. If minorities are truly to be believed, and they can't relate to stories that don't have protagonists that "look like them" on the screen (in spite of the success of Star Wars across the world in the late 70s, which would obviously tend to make that claim untenable) then I claim the same privilege. I want stories that are about people like me, written for people like me, by people like me. The failure of Star Wars in recent years can be blamed, in large part, on its embrace of the biologically and psychologically ludicrous notion that people are all the same regardless of their genetics and biology. Women are not just men in a woman's body. Black people are different than white people who are different than Hispanic people who are different from Asian people who are different from MENAs, and so on and so forth. 

And white, male American fans of space opera, which remains the largest group of fans of the genre, as near as I can tell, deserve the right to have stories for them. Especially now when the zeitgeist in America is to attack all things American by the resentful, the covetous, the envious, the nihilistic, the narcissistic. 

Of course, the other major problem with Star Wars is one of execution. Regardless of whether or not the concepts behind more recent Star Wars entries are good ones or not (mostly they're not) even the good ideas are marred by poor execution. Poorly written stories with unlikeable and uncharismatic characters, with missed opportunities for tension, suspense, or anything else that makes a story good and entertaining to watch are par for the course for the franchise these days. Because of these problems, Star Wars fans are actually pretty starved for entertaining content, and often greedily gobble up even mediocre content because at least it doesn't too actively insult them. This is the secret to the Clone Wars series and The Mandalorian, both are which aren't really great, but because they aren't terrible, Star Wars fans love them. Truthfully, we deserve quite a bit better, but it seems unlikely that we'll get it. 

But, when I was a kid in the very late 70s, I'd play my own games with my Star Wars action figures—supplemented by G.I Joe and Adventure People stuff from the same scale, and rubber dinosaurs and other stuff from different scales. I renamed my characters, and just used the elements that I had, like a Boba Fett action figure, a TIE fighter, a submarine, a T. rex-sized tiger, Clawtron, and who knows what else. Regardless of what Star Wars was doing with these elements, I did my own thing. As Nick Cole once said in a podcast, this was pretty much the genesis of the Galaxy's Edge series that he wrote with Jason Anspach. In a discussion the two of them were having after some kind of writer meetup or get-together or something like that, Nick asked Jason what he really wanted to write, and he said Star Wars stuff. What Nick said to him was that, look—the elements of Star Wars are all scenes-a-faire, and Lucas himself borrowed them from somewhere else in almost all cases anyway. How about just make a Fake Star Wars that has the same feel, but is made up of your own take on the elements rather than Star Wars' specific take? He also likened it to playing with your Star Wars action figures out in the lawn, doing your own thing with them, which is how they see Galaxy's Edge. It's kind of like, what if I had made Star Wars the way that I'd have wanted it to be? It's deliberately pastiche, but there's nothing wrong with good pastiche. Good pastiche can sometimes be better than the original. You can certainly make a case, for example, that Flash Gordon has had more of a mainstream impact on science fiction than John Carter, and yet Flash Gordon was deliberately created as a pastiche when King Syndicates wanted to compete directly and head to head with the popular Buck Rogers comic strip but couldn't get the rights to Barsoom. 

So to me, this is what AD ASTRA is, or at least what I hope it will become. What Star Wars should have been. Or to be really nitpicky, what Star Wars briefly was but then mostly lost. Just like Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon when he couldn't write John Carter stories so he could write stories pretty much just like John Carter in his own setting, and George Lucas created Star Wars when he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon so he could write stories pretty much just like Flash Gordon in his own setting, and Jason Anspach and Nick Cole couldn't write Star Wars stories, so they created Galaxy's Edge to write stories pretty much just like Star Wars in their own setting, AD ASTRA is doing the same thing. Borrowing from the vast body of space opera work, probably even hearkening back to more old fashioned, red-blooded American takes on the genre even than original Star Wars did, keeping to the swashbuckling, space western vibe rather than the overtly military action story take that Anspach and Cole kind of ended up doing. My own take on it, naturally, and one that avoids the many pitfalls that I believe that Star Wars has fallen into. So specifically, what makes it different than Star Wars?

Obviously, based on my earlier paragraphs, you can infer that my setting and my characters will largely be heavily influenced by classical space opera American cultural tropes. I doubt anything culturally that post-dates the hippies will really have any influences on the stories I intend to tell, unless they are specifically one of the villains of the piece. (Note that this includes the fascination with Indian Buddhism and other exotic gurus that gripped the hippies in the late 60s and 70s and was a huge influence on the Force and the Jedi. To say nothing of Lucas' Japanophilia with regards to starting out the Jedi as space samurai. Was there something wrong with Western tradition knights in space?) I also intend to rigorously pursue story arcs that cater to biologically and psychologically normal people. I refuse to have women who act like fake men; women, to be desireable and attractive need to be feminine and men need to be masculine in classical, biologically relevent senses of both words. I expect the plots and characters of my stories to more closely resemble a hybrid of swashbuckling romances, classical noir stories, or old school westerns than anything else more modern. Expect more of a Edgar Rice Burroughs meets Rafael Sabatini and Sir Walter Scott meets Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler meets Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour with a heavy dash of James Bond too. In space, of course, with a cold war between galactic superpowers heavily featuring in the region that I'll set it. There'll be plenty of magic and fantasy, but none of the childish and absurd light side dark side fake morality that marred the execution of Star Wars over time.

---~~ (*) ~~---

The following custom figurine sculpts for Star Wars reimagined are pretty close to the "vibe" I'm kinda looking for. Very old-school pulp, in most respects.

Once Upon a Time in Space 

Serial Wars

And here's an interesting video. Make of it what you will. I suspect that even if the rumor isn't factually correct in its numbers that it's generally correct in the gist of what it's saying.