#even though the only evidence for that is the twitter takeovers

[sonknuxadow]

Twitter takeovers should either have the rule that no ships are canon or ALL ships are canon, either we all win or we all lose no in-between.

Not like it matters, Twitter takeovers are dubiously canon at best.

ehh my problem isnt "nooo theyre teasing ships i dont like instead of the ships i do like".. i mean yeah i Dont like knuxouge and thats part of the reason i found that answer annoying but the main reason is i just dont like it when they bring up ships or intentionally hint at ships in general. its annoying and unnecessary especially if m/f pairings are gonna get stuff like "the gang teases knuckles about how he may or may not have a crush on rouge" and the only mentions of a gay ship ever were just "EWWWW sonadow is so GROSS!!!!!!!!!" which is just... weird.

[laylawatermelon]

Now that I'm thinking about it I wanna theorize/call for action outside of buddie (don't worry i WILL return with a vengeance) but now I'm on a bit of an Eddie Diaz kind of run.

I'm reading a fanfic now of Eddie's sisters which kind of spawned me to think about his relationship with them and kind of think about his family dynamics and expectations and what's coming up for his storyline.

Now they mentioned bringing his family in, specifically his sisters, and i think this storyline ties into Marisol (noname i swear this drives me crazy when i think about it?!??! PLEASE if you want me to care/be invested gimme a last name!) and his Catholic guilt/sense of responsibility/man of the house complex.

They've introduced how his upbringing brought him a lot of guilt and a sense of duty (to serve and protect amirite? Dang religion can be a perfect line to how modern society works but lemme save that for a thesis or something this is about 911 on abc🤣)

Back on topic though, there's a really nice post talking about how he's military family and how that affected his and Shannon's relationship. (x)

Reading that helped me to appreciate the writing and details.

I also want to talk about the beautiful work being done on Twitter and Tumblr about the Miami Vice costume theory and coincidences.

(heh throwback Tuesday and takeover thursday came in clutch with finding these x )

Yes i do ship buddie, but if I look at it not just as a romantic things but as they are written as kind of parallel soulmates who run along the same line of development.

One always spurs the next to grow and change and are heavily involved in some way even if that way it's just being themselves.

Buck being open with his sexuality will trigger something in Eddie. What it is can vary.

I think if we look at it with non shipper glasses, Buck's freedom will lead to Eddie's freedom. What I mean by that is since Eddie had came to the 118 Ryan mentioned how each year he was there the more he learned about himself and other people.

I think what Eddie would be at free from the image/expectations of what a family should look like/be.

He knows what a family could look like in a queer/unconventional way. Bathena's unit, Chimney and Maddie's family (let's say cause they're not currently married with a toddler church would pass out), and HenRen's family.

The could be and should be is the important part.

Eddie grew up being told what he should be and what his life should look like. Evidently his life went none of the ways it was intended to go.

He's a widower single father from a teen/young pregnancy and veteran. Sure he's a firefighter now but he has no "complete" family.

The way they're emphasizing the mother aspect throughout his story is still fascinating.

(i also thought of something hilarious as like he probably imagined/process mothers as like the Virgin Mary or something when they brought up how he can see woman as mothers but not really women at the same time)

(also Madonna whore complex was mentioned and it's also a fascinating way to look at it as he can either desire or love.)

Shannon seems to be the only exception and even that is iffy. I would also say that when she became a mother the desire kind of left? I think the mother aspect solidified for him when she left them I would say.

Yes they did have sex but that was a (very bad, horrid) form of communication between them. They both avoided stuff at some point in some (eh it's like 20/80 her and Eddie) cases.

Every other woman he has dated has kind of been a substitute, for a lack of a better word, replacement for the role of mom.

Now he knows what moms should look like in all shapes and forms. He knows what dads should look like. He's knows what his family should look like.

Granted he did get rid of some of the flaws of his father and the way he was raised which also ties into the way he is.

Eddie was parentified at an early age. (I will say as a black/poc person that there tends to be adult responsibilities placed on our communities kids from young partially because of culture but mostly because of the inherent unevenness that we have to struggle to make balance worldwide in different facets and environments.)

Once again, this is about 911 on abc, not my thesis😭.

I just imagine him standing on a stool to cook food for his sisters or some other things like laundry. Or even worse the cannon car accident with his pregnant mom. (I love to make myself cry)

Eddie had technically been a parent since he was a kid. He literally became the man of the house or the father. So i guess that entailed taking on the emotional and sometimes physical burden of the father role.

I guess when he was actually a father and not just the role he felt the weight of responsibility again and panicked. It makes sense he has a habit of running since he never had the opportunity to do so as a kid (since he never got the chance to be one).

So after Chris it was once again role of the father but now with added responsibility of bringing money to provide the household which he didn't have to do in that role.

It was hard then so it became even more difficult.

So he gave his body to the military and returned wounded in mind and body, and with a disabled son who needed insurance and stability and a wife who just needed him.

And he needed to be a man. Again and again and again.

He broke out of the loop when he got to the 118 (bless the haven that is that building) met Buck, then Carla and Bobby who offered a safe place for his kid.

He was no longer alone and had distanced himself physical from the church but mentally still shackled in his beliefs.

After this Buck and Tommy things and he's not present we're going to focus on how a family could look for him.

Last season and recently they mentioned the fact that his aunt had been divorced and he didn't know.

There was also mention of family secrets.

There was also Marisol and Chris together which I'm guessing he wasn't to happy with her but it's either or since we haven't seen them together so it's a 50/50 chance. More like 90/10 he's annoyed or feels weird about his mom being replaced). Since we touched on him repairing his relationship with his mom and subsequently girls and women/relationships he wants to be in now that may shift his image of Marisol suddenly being more present.

Slight Buddie tangent (i gotta let the beat out for a sec raaa-) but the fact that he's still hanging out with Buck pretty consistently (well we can say he's his other parent who's sadly been in his life almost longer than his mom 🥺 lemme stop I'm crying) but it might decrease due to his and Tommy's relationship. (They're two firefighters with very busy schedules ofc he's not present they got work to do chop chop!/j)

In turn this leaves Chris with one less stable parent figure and it's forced to turn to Marisol who may be overeager to please him.

This can lead Chris to probably feeling uncomfortable with the changes because he's happy his dad's happy but he's not happy because it feels like his family's changing again too fast, and what if she leaves then his dad's not happy and a whole other sleet of teenage issues and angst.

So what I predict their storyline to be going it's that Eddie tries to find his own freedom from the church and maybe even the expectations of his home community would have on him.

Buck will be radiant in himself at the wedding, so will Hen and Karen, and Marie and Chimney, and Bobby and Athena.

He'll look around and look inward.

He'll stop focusing on what his life should look like and focus on what it could.

And that life could be just as radiant as the family he's apart of now.

(and that's all i could ask for 🥹)

[neverwritewhatyouknow]

RWRB SOCIAL MEDIA TAKEOVER

I wrote stuff everyone can copy and paste to twitter so RWRB and Amazon can see that a lot of people are upset about what they did and that we aren’t going to take it quietly. Feel free to use any or all of these. They’re 140 characters or less, so they’re good to go. Also, you can say you’re own stuff too. We just have to keep making noise, because the things that went on aren’t okay.

The director & an EP @RWRBonPrime saw #antisemitic attacks on Jewish fans, the Jewish character, and the use of slurs/blood libel/threats— but blocked it all, ignored it, and stayed silent. The hate continues and the ones with power aren’t saying anything. #rwrbmovie #rwrb

#rwrb by @casey_mcquiston featured a #jewish main character. When the #rwrbmovie was adapted, they didn’t cast a Jewish actor. Even though they kept all other explicit ethnicities the same. @RWRBonPrime didn’t think Jews were important enough to be included. #Antisemitism

@RWRBonPrime from @PrimeVideo & @AmazonStudios has been allowing online #antisemitic attacks in the name of the film for months @KVHendry @GBerlanti @erinrosekelly @gsgainor @JessicaMescall @casey_mcquiston #redwhiteandroyalblue #Rwrbmovie #rwrbtwt #jewish #jewishtwitter #rwrb

@PrimeVideo / @AmazonStudios Why do you constantly produce content with non-Jews playing Jews? @RWRBonPrime had a Jewish character in the book & she’s the only character to have their explicitly stated ethnicity changed onscreen. Why are you okay with blatant Jew erasure? #rwrb

. @lpmconstable an executive producer of @RWRBonPrime saw evidence of Jew-hatred on social media, blocked the one who showed it to him, ignored it, and has stayed silent. Why will he not stand up against #antisemtism #jewish #rwrbmovie #rwrb

. @RWRBonPrime hired @erinrosekelly to cast #rwrbmovie. They found actors to accurately portray all the diverse characters from the book, except for the only Jewish character. They cast an openly non-Jewish actor. Why are #jewish #actors not good enough to play themselves?

[smallpwbbles]

Oh yeah! The theory that only Sonic can remember 06 has pretty strong evidence, but nothing from the mainline games. The closest is in TSR, but only the Japanese, where he asks Silver where the "I'm gonna defeat you" spirit was the first time they met, where Silver responds with confusion and Sonic awkwardly moves on. There's also a line from Lego Sonic where he awkwardly pretends not to remember Elise and wants to move on. And Twitter Takeover isn't really canon, but in the third one, he meantions the Elise kiss and Shadow acts surprised and says he "Doesn't like that", as if he didn't know before, even though he saw it happen in 06. And honestly the ending of 06 would imply this, him getting a feather from Elise would mean nothing if he didn't remember.

Anyway that's what you get for killing the time god

You put the tiniest slimmer of hope that somehow sonic prime addresses the 06 timeline cuz like, this is too good not to freaking come again, ever

[zeta-in-de-walls]

Hey guys. So in MCC you might have noticed that Dream got a little salty. This was a shame for me as it’s so much nicer to watch Dream whilst he’s in a good mood. For better or worse though, he’s super competitive.

Here’s a breakdown of how the event went badly for Dream and his team. It’s pretty long...

The event starts well; Skyblockle is an interesting, if stressful game, and they do pretty well for their first time. Not perfectly though and they recognise they could do better too - Dream’s already pretty hard on himself for any mistakes he makes. But it’s purely directed at himself and how he can improve - I think it’s pretty evident he holds himself to a high standard. 

Bingo is next and he kinda doesn’t know what he’d doing and wastes some time. I feel like he notes it down too much to not knowing the game but it is pretty luck-based anyway. Also this was a really quick game as so many of the items were very easy to obtain in a very short time. Anyway, they didn’t expect to do well really and Dream’s in good spirits, looking forward to the other games. 

Then Battle box comes... and it’s extremely laggy and even glitchy. The weapon choices of Wooden axes and tnt seem honestly pretty bad just in terms of gameplay and the tnt is outright gamebreaking with the lag. Despite this, Dream’s team is doing well, having won their first 4 games and they’re keen to win more. Dream’s even instructing Sylveey to wait on the wool in order to maximise kill points (you can see he’s taking this really seriously as he could sound a little nicer as she’s certainly trying to win too). 

Anyway, the game needs to be restarted - some players killed themselves outside the rounds and that’s not exactly fair. For whatever reason, reviving them is not possible. The chosen solution is to restart the entire round which regretfully seriously inconveniences Dream’s team. He’s incensed at the perceived injustices. He feels that it would be better to push on without restarting. 

The proceeding rounds don’t go nearly as well for them as the first play through. Many teams have now realised how effective rushing strats are for this map - the axe is too slow in pvp to meaningfully stop players from quickly placing down wool and the tnt is dangerous enough to scare people from the centre. It’s a legitimate strategy but feels rather unlike the traditional battle box which is usually the closest minigame to a straightforward pvp battle. While the lag is universal, it rather this strategy which goes against purple’s playstyle which includes maximised kills. Additionally, restarting gave a lot of teams the change to realise the potential of this rather cheap strategy which they may not have with only a single round of battle box as it would have been without the lag. 

It’s not really anyone’s fault that the game messed up but Dream’s ire is now directed towards the organisers and he’s lost his good spirits. 

Buildmart comes next and it’s not exactly one of Dream’s favourite games to say the least. Still, it’s long and a nice distraction from the mess that was battle box and Dream has developed some strategy with his team, even if it didn’t really work amazingly. 

But then comes the audience takeover. Dream was really looking for parkour warrior - which he’s been really keen to play. He’s extremely fond of parkour and wanted to try out the new course - he and his whole team had practiced the old course a lot and were ready to crush the game. But it wasn’t one of the the options in the poll at all. Up to this point Parkour warrior hasn’t been an option at all and it is one the team has every reason to want to play. 

Regardless, they soon settle on Hole in the wall - a gamemode they’ve played before and enjoyed. And yeah, the system messes up. Rocket spleef, which was Technoblade’s choice, narrowly lost the poll but gets selected anyway due to faultiness from the twitter poll. Needless to say, Dream is pretty annoyed. Given how the resetted Battle box earlier, he is of the opinion that they should switch in to Hole in the Wall to accurately reflect the audience vote. What he doesn’t realise is that this isn’t possible and the situation is less similar to battle box which only reset itself, not the game choice. 

This is where Dream gets outright angry, even going as far to say he feels like quitting entirely. He feels like the tournament is working against him, which it kinda is, though it’s not in fact due to human design - just errors outside anyone’s control. That said, compounded with the mess that was Battle box earlier, Dream’s in a terrible mood, especially with his competitive nature, feeling like he’s losing due to circumstances outside his control rather than his own abilities. (When fans are saying rigged, I feel like many of them simply mean that the game’s working against him rather than that someone is actively sabotaging them (an incorrect definition...). It’s a minority that kicked up a large fuss as well, not that this excuses them or anything, or Dream for not realising the effect he’s having on his audience.)

His heart is simply not in Rocket Spleef, which seems to be a pretty tough game for newcomers to pick up anyway, while the other top teams, Orange and Green, both excel at this game mode. (And Krimson too maybe? I think I missed how they were doing in this game.) It’s a shame as he can’t allow himself to enjoy the game mode at all. It is an interesting one that he’s not amazing at but isn’t terrible at either, managing to survive longer than the rest of his team, who are all also doing lacklustre. Their performance has not been helped by everything that’s going on. 

Then there’s ace race. It’s a new game and pretty different from the standard minecraft experience. It’s the first time for everyone so there’s probably a few kinks to be worked out etc. and Dream and his team find it interesting but they don’t exactly love it. It’s very different from the standard minecraft experience. Their strongpoints are definitely vanilla minecraft and they’re not too confident with elytras. I feel like if they weren’t in a dour mood they would have enjoyed it tons more. Two elytra heavy games in a row is unfortunate. Still, this game acts as a breather. The one issue is that parkour warrior is finally on the board and so they’re very keen to play it. 

As the next decision dome comes up, Parkour warrior, Hole in the Wall, TGTTOS, Survival Games and Sands of time are all available. These are all probably Dream’s favourite games aside from Battle box (which obviously didn’t work out this tournament). Dream notes beforehand that the one game he’d really like to play is Parkour Warrior and the one he’d prefer to avoid at this stage is Sands of Time. 

So naturally, Sands of Time is chosen. He’s a bit irritated. Fortunately, Sands of Time is awesome and his team is great at it. Single player survival stuff is what they excel at after all and they all perform. They take risks, make a lot of coins, get far and are among the longest teams to stay in, coming in second overall with both Dream and Sapnap doing really well. This game proves to be what finally cures Dream and his team’s mood. The game is also worth a ton of points for some reason, putting them in with a (still small but possible) chance of making the finals. 

Last game and they really want Parkour warrior of course. Yeah, it’s not chosen. Instead we get hole in the wall. Some may joke that its good that the game finally got chosen but it’s obviously not the favoured choice for this team when Parkour warrior’s an option. Oh well though! They’re disappointed to miss out on it but they do like hole in the wall and they all have fun playing it, doing decently though not nearly well enough to do better than their rivals.

By this time they’ve regained their spirits and eagerly support Green Guardians in dodgebolt. It’s an intense match and they all thoroughly enjoy watching it, especially seeing Pete team clutch out the win after being down. 

At the end, Dream finds that despite everything he’s still somehow managed to obtain 3rd overall on the individual boards, the same as last time, and he’s really happy about it. His team are pretty happy too with Sapnap also managing to get 8th place in his very first event. 

Dream closes off the stream with an apology. You can see as it goes on how the frustration slowly melts away as he begins talking. At first still obviously still annoyed but soon confessing that he seriously overreacted and that he still loves the event and the team behind it and holds them to a very high standard. He offers kind words towards Technoblade and Pete too, noting that the rivalry is for show and he greatly respects both of them and encourages all his watchers to go and subscribe to them, helping Technoblade to hit 2mil. He notes that he’s really competitive and he really wanted it to go well - especially as its the only time he’ll be allowed to play with George and Sapnap and really wanted to win it with them. His sentiments feel real and he expresses interest in playing again while noting that he could see them also not inviting him back after his behaviour during this even and understands that. 

Overall, game choices and unfortunate circumstances worked against Dream and his team and left him in a bad mood but once it ended, he did bounce back. It’s easy to see the contrast from the last event where he was annoyed he didn’t win but blamed his own performance - not the event and not his teammates - reflecting on how he can improve and do better. (He got temporarily a little annoyed at buildmart admittedly but it was purely his fans who blew that out of proportion, he quickly reassured George that it was okay and that it wasn’t his fault.) Dream is always very determined to improve and succeed or fail due to his own skills. 

This turned into a long analysis of the event, wow. Dream’s perspective wasn’t that much fun to watch and it pains me to see how it all devolved. Let’s calm down and try not to blame the event, the other competitors or Dream too hard for any of this, okay? Things went wrong and it’s mostly outside of anyone’s control. I hope he’s in better spirits if he joins next tournament. 

[egg-emperor]

A couple more questions hehe: What does Eggman like to drink? Is he someone that needs caffeine to keep him going, or is he a soft drink kinda guy? Also what’s his favourite alcohol? What’s his favourite robot besides Metal Sonic? (Who is obviously his favourite) Does he have any bonds with other robots? Does Eggman keep in contact with his family? Do they ever try to talk, one way of another? I find his family history really interesting, please share any headcanons you have!! :)

1. He's been seen drinking quite a lot of soda so I think he likes cold fizzy drinks the most. He often drinks from cans and when it's in a glass he likes it to be iced. Caffeine helps him stay alert to focus on his tasks so he likes his coffee too and his favorite are iced americanos. (It was mentioned in the third Twitter Takeover, if you know why you know why dskfjdjgd) He also takes energy drinks out when he’s on the move, especially when he knows it's going to be a very busy day/night.

He likes drinks that are sweet so he also doesn’t mind soft drinks and things like fruit juice too but they're just not his first choice. When he's unwinding, he likes to drink hot cocoa, warm milk, or tea on occasion if it can help him relax when he’s stressed or unwell. He also loves milkshake, especially strawberry.

As for alcohol, he was seen drinking champagne quite a lot in the comics. I think he’d commonly drink lager, he likes to drink from cans. He takes a liking to wine as well, evident in Sonic X where he really loved the rice wine. He's not picky when he wants to have a good time though, there's a wide range that he likes and he'll always try more.

2. Egg-robos, Egg Fighters, Egg Pawns and the E 10000 series in the Riders games are some of his favorite robots for the designs! They all resemble him so they're the most like sons to him and he loves them the most. Out of the classic badniks, he has a fondness for the Motobug because he was one of his very first robots, he created the first prototype when he was much younger.

I don't feel like he's very bonded with robots besides assistants like Orbot and Cubot, also Metal but only from time to time in game canon. He'll treat some of his robots like kids and pets when they're active, but he doesn't often leave them powered on when they aren't required for a task/mission. Plus, there's so many of them that come and go so he doesn't keep track of them all.

Even Metal isn't often activated when he isn't assigned to something, he saves him for special occasions as one of his most valuable robots. Any that might wander and roam around besides his assistants are most likely security robots, or are assigned to any regular duties that his assistant bots might not be able to cover.

3. Considering my headcanon age for him, a lot of his family members aren't around anymore. Maybe some still are, but I haven't thought of specific concepts for them. I don't think he'd want anything to do with them and wouldn't know of their statuses. He doesn't desire to be in contact with them and hasn't been since he left his old home to build a life for himself decades ago.

I don’t think they would take much of a liking to him with his attitude and motivations. If any were still around, there's a big chance they'd get caught up in the collateral damage of his plans. It's not something he considers at all when he wreaks havoc that affects the entire planet, so that's another reason for them to dislike him.

As for his parents, I don't have headcanons for his mother yet but I feel like she wasn't really there or maybe even completely absent during his childhood. The most I have regarding his interactions with family is his father, he was a successful business man that also did some mechanic work on the side that Ivo learned from.

I've talked about ideas of his father here and there in the past and if Tumblr search works properly, they can be found in my #robotnik family tag. This post mentions a bunch I have involving him and Ivo! I also have this one that includes some more discussion about his family and even some what-if scenarios that you might like!

[namajague]

In February, after Johnny turned on Tommaso at TakeOver: Portland, I was asked my theory on Johnny turning heel. At the time, I didn’t really have an answer, because I’d ragequit NXT when Johnny and Tommaso turned on each other last March, and had only watched two matches over the next year. I meant to start watching again, for context on their latest attempt to wrap up a story that had already been delayed a year, but I’d fallen out of the habit and didn’t sustain the attempt.

Over the next month and a half I saw other people reacting to this newest segment of their arc, mostly... not positively. Some people are genuinely just tired of the DIY feud, and on one level I understand that perspective. Others, though wiling to engage, found the presentation wanting. For my part, I was wary, keeping track mainly through others’ gifs.

When WrestleMania was restructured because of coronavirus concerns, and TakeOver: Tampa was canceled as a result, I was devastated for them. They were supposed to have the chance to end their story last April, but Tommaso got hurt. They were supposed to end it this year, but gatherings are now banned (and unwise, even if they weren’t). Twice in a row they were denied what I feel they deserve: the chance to end their story on NXT’s biggest show of the year, in front of the fans who have been there with them every step of the way.

For some reason, I truly couldn’t tell you why, the announcement that they’ll be having their match after all - on a much smaller scale, with no fans and possibly only one camera - was what got me motivated to catch up. And so, in the space of about a week, I watched a year’s worth of - specifically - the parts of NXT that involved either of them. In the process, I found a lot more logic than I’d seen reported on.

At its best, wrestling rewards close study of one character or story. This is what allows @mith-gifs-wrestling​‘s wonderful essays on Kevin and Sami, with insights that aren't evident if you're absorbing whole shows at a time. I've found the same with DIY. If you pay attention to them, and only them, their stories are clearer, with detailed callbacks and internal references.

The following is my twitter thread with my findings, slightly restructured for tumblr’s layout. I’m trying not to freak out about Johnny retweeting it, but I’m also not above bragging by mentioning it.

So it turns out, if you backtrack to TakeOver: New York and watch nothing but the Gargano and/or Ciampa bits of NXT since then? This new arc of the feud makes perfect sense.

Tommaso consistently failed to recognize Johnny. It was downright pointed, in fact. Adam was the one who'd stolen his life, Adam was the one who'd had his title "fall into his hands", even though Adam... legitimately won the 5-way to face Johnny, and later legitimately won Goldie. He even says he got Goldie by "betting on [him]self", when in fact - as only Johnny seems to remember - he got the title via Johnny's panicked interference. He's erased Johnny in his mind, as a champion or even a pawn. Tommaso came out after Johnny won and everything was shiny and happy, and after that, he didn't so much as look at Johnny until Johnny came out to stand next to him against the Undisputed Era. Johnny had to force him to acknowledge their past.

Johnny is, of course, understandably upset that everyone has seemingly forgotten everything Tommaso put him through. Attacking him, hospitalizing him, disrespecting his marriage, manipulating him, trying to break him in body and spirit. But he's upset about something else, too.

 When Johnny attacked Aleister in the parking lot, his stated reason - and no alternative was ever given, even after his turn to the dark had been revealed as a scheme - was that Aleister had been trying to get involved in his and Tommaso's "story". Johnny has been so determined that he and Tommaso have a story, an arc, that they have to play out. And he's very clear that he's the hero. So for Tommaso to position himself as the hero of a *different* story, well, that just won't stand.

I think part of this goes back to Johnny's attempts to rebuild himself while Tommaso was out after Chicago, and Tommaso's utter destruction of his goals once he came back. If he can't have a story without Tommaso, fine: Tommaso can't have a story without him.

So: it was Johnny who came out to back Tommaso up against UDE, before Finn put him on the shelf. It was Johnny who came out again to defend Tommaso against UDE, then suggested they team up against Moustache Mountain. "Just once, for old times' sake." His suggestion to team came one week after Tommaso's promo that carefully removed Johnny from the context of the title. He came out for Tommaso's title match wearing their new team shirt before attacking Tommaso, losing him the title the way he'd once helped him win it.

Because did Tommaso really think teaming up "just once, for old times' sake" would work? When they'd been living in uneasy orbit without any evidence of an apology on either side? (Yes, I'm still convinced Johnny's actions at the Dusty Classic were a betrayal.)

Johnny, for better or worse, has made Tommaso part of himself. Even after revealing his own manipulation, he continues to do his half of their joint finishing move in matches, something I have never - though I admit I may have missed it - seen Tommaso do. Even his feud with Finn came from a random external attack, a distraction from his efforts to associate himself with Tommaso again, and when he lost? He knew he *couldn't* be part of any other story, and Tommaso sure wasn't allowed to be either.

Amazingly, I'm not inherently team Johnny here. They're both flawed men. I've been saying for over a year now that Johnny never left the dark; he just became more subtle about it. Losing to Finn broke him a little more, but he's been angry and resentful and violent.

(If I were better versed in the non-Venom symbiotes, I could dissect his Portland gear here. Bare minimum: Carnage was so effective because Kasady was already twisted. Thus, I have to assume Johnny had been on this path before his match with Finn.)

And yeah, he has reason to be angry. Of course he does. Anyone seriously asking "Why?" when he attacked Tommaso hasn't been watching. But alignment isn't about motive, it's about execution, and Johnny's lied and manipulated enough that he doesn't get to be "all heart". He manipulated Tommaso into thinking they were on the same page, not once but twice, and attacked him in their team gear both times. He blatantly lied about the performance center fight, saying Tommaso dove through a door when Johnny in fact threw him through said door.

If Tommaso really understood what he had done wrong, if he were even *sorry* about it instead of taking the crowd's forgiveness at face value, he would have tried to talk to Johnny instead of attacking him for telling the truth about the last three years. He's not innocent. But by escalating the fight, attacking people who weren't Tommaso, and lying afterwards about actions that were caught on tape, Johnny doesn't come across in a great light either. He's re-weaving his story as he goes, but we still have the original text.

He's not wrong about Tommaso! He's not wrong that people were willing to forgive every horrible thing he'd done, just because he got hurt! Kayfabe is a tricky thing, and balancing shoot concern with worked hatred is beyond Full Sail's pay grade, but Johnny's always played off the fans. If the fans want him to get violent, he will. If the fans want him to team with Tommaso, he will. If the fans want Tommaso to be forgiven, even for reasons that break the fourth wall, he'll assume Tommaso has been forgiven, and react accordingly.

Johnny has within him a need to be in control, a need to be at the center, and he'll do anything to satisfy that need. At his best, that leads him to heroic acts, and even to his stubborn determination to kick out at 2.9 no matter what's thrown at him. But at his worst, when he's been traumatized and had that trauma completely ignored not only by his tormentor but by the fans and commentary he'd previously assumed were on his side, he goes... a little overboard.

Johnny has a story he wants to be part of. He wants to be at the center, and he wants it to make sense, and his life lately hasn't made sense at all. So if his story isn't going well? He'll sabotage other people's stories so that his can be told.

And now... it’s the final chapter. The “final beat” between rebel heart and blackheart. They’ve deserved this for a long time, and while I share some fans’ attitude of “Can it be over now?” it’s not because I’m tired of it. It’s because they’ve been working towards an ending for years, only for it to slip away from them time and again due to circumstances utterly beyond their control. I hope this is that ending, at least for this arc of their careers, and I hope it satisfies them.

[apartyofone]

Who is this guy?

Read in the NYT about the mayor of a medium sized town in Indiana who has announced his candidacy for Democratic Primary in 2020.

For President.

Huh?

And then I saw his uncommon name - Pete Buttigieg - and remembered this very memorable post on Medium after 2016:

Take a read. And open your mind to the crazy, longshot possibilities...

https://medium.com/@buttigieg/a-letter-from-flyover-country-5d4e9c32d2ac

A Letter From Flyover Country

Most people have trouble pronouncing my name, so they just call me “Mayor Pete.” My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father’s country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else. Dad came to America in the 1970s and became a citizen; he married my mother, an Army brat and umpteenth-generation Hoosier, and the two of them settled in South Bend, Indiana, shortly before I was born thirty-five years ago. At the age of 29, the city elected me mayor. Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it’s relatively nonpartisan — we focus on results, not ideology. Yet, precisely because of what it means to my community, I am paying closer attention than ever to national politics and the direction of my party.

The Democratic Party matters more than ever, now that a hostile takeover of the Republican Party has brought to power a thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate. Yet the party today stands at its lowest point of national and statewide influence since the 1920s, just when a robust opposition is needed most. Much will depend on whether Democrats can organize and deliver a consistent alternative — principles, proposals, and candidates — in the face of what is about to come out of Washington and various state capitals under unchecked Republican control. They will keep some of their promises and break others. Things they will do, and things they will allow, stand to hurt America and Americans. We need to be ready to put forward a better way.

Among Democrats responding to the last election and organizing for the next one, the conversation, inevitably, is moving in the direction of organizing and tactics. This is vital, but it cannot come before the fundamentals. We need to begin with the values that make us Democrats in the first place. If we don’t talk about values, many Americans will tune us out. Again.

I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.

(Emphasis is mine)

First, freedom — not just the thin idea of freedom from overregulation but the freedom to choose our destinies, not to mention our spouses. Freedom from things like crushing medical costs and student debt, from dishonest banking practices and anything else that affects the most basic of freedoms: freedom to live a life of our choosing.

Next, fairness, in the sense Democrats have always cared about deeply, fairness in access to voting and to public accommodations, fairness in the face of discrimination and privilege, fairness in our systems of distributing financial and political power. Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he correctly asserted that there is great unfairness in our economy and our democracy.

Next, family: because we are made happy or unhappy mostly by what happens in our families, because you can’t raise a family on less than an adequate wage, because shaping our families is a personal right, and because you can’t raise a family at all if your government doesn’t have your back.

And finally, the future: because the national security of our people, and the habitability of our land, almost totally depend on those we elect, their judgment and wisdom and willingness to pay attention to facts and evidence when making decisions that will have consequences for centuries.

None of this is theoretical for me. I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril. I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day. Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist. Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends. Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.

Commentators have focused on candidates and their antics as though that mattered most. But politics, for our city and for most Americans, isn’t about The Show. Its consequences don’t happen in the Beltway or on Twitter or on television. Politics happens in, and to, our homes, in the lives of the people we care about, like the people in my household, my family, and my community. That’s why this all matters so much. The process matters because of what it means to us voters as human beings, not the other way around.

At home, I ran and won, twice, by telling my blue-collar community that Studebaker was never going to come back and make cars in our city, and that it was all right, because there is a way forward. Now Democrats need to absorb the fact that winning the popular vote is not enough, see that the future trends of the electoral map alone will not save us, and know that it’s all right, because there is a way forward.

Our values are American values, and a values-led strategy (backed by a formidable organization) will prevail if we are true to it, and if we keep it close to the earth. I am not a candidate for a position in the national party, but I am watching closely to see if any of the declared candidates will articulate this message: it is time to organize our politics around the lived experience of real people, whose lives play out not in the political sphere but in the everyday, affected deeply and immediately by how well we honor our values with good policy.

With over 40 per cent of voters in my generation describing themselves as independent, our future as a party will depend on reminding people how their lives have been improved by good Democratic policies, and when a voter thinks that isn’t true in her life, we had better listen closely and try to understand why.

When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show. We need to invite individual people to assess how their individual lives changed — how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages — have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington.

Taking people seriously also means treating the constituency groups that traditionally support Democrats as more than a disconnected patchwork of interests to cater to, served by a great political salad bar of something different for everyone. The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives — not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us. Laundry lists will not inspire.

Democrats need a true turnaround, just like my city did when I ran for mayor. In the last five years, my “rust belt” city went from being described by Newsweek as one of America’s ten dying communities to seeing its fastest pace of population and investment growth in recent memory. That’s how I got re-elected with 80 percent of the vote last year, in the seat of a county that would split its vote evenly between Clinton and Trump a year later. We earned support from residents on both sides of the aisle, not by becoming ideologically conservative but by listening to people about what matters to them, facing our problems, and delivering results on the ground to earn confidence and trust. In the same way, I am convinced that, for our politics and for our nation, salvation begins with the local.

[mondofunnybooks]

MONDO FunnyBooks: Bunker Down.

Were you a recent visitor to the wonderful world of comics fandom and discussions between professionals in the business, you might have the idea that comic customers were essentially a superstitious and cowardly lot.

Current sources of outrage, retweets and outbreaks of delusional authority run riot have been ranged from the fairly embarrassing to the downright worrying. Arguments in this writers memory have been about: 'Is The Joker doing something not very nice to a human being?', 'How dare a movie studio choose to cast who they like in the film they're paying to make without consulting US first?', 'This man who draws and has been drawing people in a particular fashion has drawn this person in his particular fashion. How dare he?' We reached peak David Icke/Alex Jones levels of hilarious Othering this week when an X-Men artist referred to SJWs as 'Nazis'.

Irony and Satire have apparently given up on humanity and gone for a pint.

The usual conservative, tribal viewpoints of people who've confused an artistic medium with a constant stream of politically free distraction designed only to anatheize rather than engage and stimulate thought, then. It's more important to harass Ruby Rose for being cast as 'Batwoman' until she feels compelled to leave Twitter or be upset at the news of Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm for reasons that were absoultly nothing to do with racism but rather the...uh...misportrayal of the modern American family which defintly traditionally couldn't contain a black man. Also something something tradition or something.

When we've brought this up before, we're usually countered with something like 'Oh, you should see Harry Potter/Overwatch/Hunger Games/Fortnite fandoms, they're JUST as bad.' Which we are willing to assume is true, having seen YouTube comments, but it does seem that the entertainment industry has a bad habit of emulating the worst excesses of the comics industry.

Whether it's Empire or TV Guide running variant covers, Toy producers doing convention exclusive figures and then selling them at a premium afterwards or even, HighFather Keep Us From Laughing, the application of the words 'Limited' or 'Collectiable' to a product to imply both a scarity that requires instant purchase and a possibilty of high resale value when in fact those are words that could be applied to any physical product ever.

We can almost guarantee that there are only a limited amount of copies of 'Night Rocker' by David Hasslehoff in the world and should you decide to purchase one or more copies, you have collected them, but neither fact is hard evidence that anyone will offer you more than you paid for them ten years in the future.

This is a rather..odd state of affairs to have come about. With the exception of poetry or graffiti, Before the medium was hijacked into becoming one more vehicle to sell corporate superhero products, work like George Herriman's 'Krazy Kat' explored the nature of language via abusive animals against the unrelenting tedium of the desert. Little Nemo In Slumberland by Windsor McCay was a continous attempt to map the subconscious in a strip adaptable to any format thrown at him by publishers. Sigel and Shuster commericalised the Jewish notion of a charismatic Golem who would maintain balance against an American society that had been taught to hate them. Fly By Night publishing types would use the form to glamourise the world of true crime and vaguely condemning tales of drug abuse to create an entire sub-culture by showing a willingness to adapt to the times.

These were the early days of comics and sequential story-telling and by now there ought to be work making these masterpieces look like the plinkings of Woody Gutherie against the all out assault on the cortex that is an Atari Teenage Riot. Instead the front end of the medium seems more concerned with dotting the I's and lining the t's of it's previous output (our favourite example being Marvel's 'Secret Wars Too: A comic that explained to readers why the comic it was parodying would be late. They charged money for this, as well.)

Comics were long considered the Outlaw Artform, so capable of shaping the public psyche that the content and distribution were brought up in Congress to see if it was necessarily to regulate the avalibilty of them to children. It's a longer story than will run here but the essence of the events is that while the 1954 hearings saw Congress conclude that comics were NOT a harmful product that would negatively influence children's minds, the comics industry decided that it would be best to settle public hysteria by establishing 'The Comics Code Authority', which would impose a series of standards and regulations upon comics seeking to be distributed on the newsstands.

Ironically, one of the people on the earlier incarnations of the board that would make up The CCA would be John Goldwater, one of many who takes credit for the creation of Archie Andrews'.. This writer likes to think Mr Goldwater was probably a little resentful of EC Comics's Archie parody 'STARCHIE!' (MAD Magazine Issue 12. Remains funny but now also looks like any episode of 'Riverdale'.) and was more than happy to choose the phrasing of a code that also happened to regulate the key words in EC Comic's top selling comics out of publication. All the resentful little men in comics complaining about being mocked are 'Happy Days''s Howard Cunningham wearing his Grand Poobah hat in our head.

We say 'ironically', because the current Ickeian theory is that comic sales in the direct market are so low due to Marvel and DC 'giving in' to the demands of the 'SJWs'. What with their unreasonable demands for more realistic representation in mainstream comics, we can see how 'Could you produce more comics we'd be willing to buy?' would definetly be an agenda designed to bring down the entire comics industry.

Because we are given to facts, we can't dispute a lot of the problems the new comics industry faces. Sales on New Comics to The Direct Market ARE down.

It would take the same sort of mind that blames Barack Obama for his Presidential inaction during Hurricane Katrina to think that the problems of new comics are the work of those damned SJWs, though. Not unless Heidi MacDonald has a time machine.

Unless Laurie Penny staged a hostile takeover of The Marvel Editorial Summit and said 'Right. Here's what we want: Please keep raising the prices of your comics by roughly about a dollar every few years, do more $150 crossovers that will have no significance in about 4 years or so. Please spin off as many comics as possible from one of your prime brands. Make sure your top staff behave like Obnoxious King Nerds on social media whenever possible.Instead of focusing your sales team on promoting the comic as a good read, keep pitching your comics as must buy investment issues aimed at speculators who won't be back for the next issue. As soon as your readership have begun to settle into a book, it's direction and it's creative team, that's probably the best time to relaunch your titles.

Be sure to confuse readers and retailers by pretending each relaunch is a 'Season' without ever referring to which season is currently published in advertising or trade dress. Come up with any justification whatsover to publish an anniversary issue that's triple the price of a regular comic as frequently as possible. Try to devalue the contribution and sales cache of your creative team over the amount of variant covers offered to retailers. Have your top writers actively and vocally hostile to the notion of second printings and finally publish no comics that even vaguely resemble the TV and Movie versions of your characters so new readers can come into a shop after seeing "Avengers Assemble" and be offered 7 books called "Avengers" but they'll mainly be about some men chatting at a table.'....then the reasons why new comics are failing aren't at the hands of SJWs.

They're at the hands of the publishers. The above list is the main reason for the decline in sales of new comics in specialist shops that we saw in our days behind the till. All things we were saying over a decade ago at retailer meetings with Marvel and DC. We were brushed off in order to try and wave shiny new 3D variants back then.

A few years later, when it was apparent that the law of diminishing returns was in full effect, was when finally The Big Two turned to the 'gimmick' of appealling to a wider audience. When oddly, that half-hearted effort to win over a new readership by publishing the books in the same venues as usual didn't work,with little support from their publicity and advertising departments both Marvel and DC quickly threw these efforts under the bus as proof that trying to expand your salesbase beyond a Wednesday crowd was a waste of time.

Except that''s nonsense of course. Any analysis of pre-order charts will tell you that the sales have been in heavy decline since 2007's 'Civil War' from Marvel. The constant attempts to repeat that success in that format are the problem. Marvel and DC trying the 'Social Justice' route and it's subsequent failure is a shameless attempt to rewrite history for the benefit of an agenda of tired Poobahs scared of time and their limited views of the comic medium making them irrelevant.

In fact, Marvel's recent attempt to appeal to Muslims,AND teenagers (imagine.) at once was quite late in the game with 2013's 'Ms Marvel' while the 'Feminazi Bible' Mockingbird wouldn't begin threatening Poobah Egos until around late 2016. Meanwhile, Archie Comics had smelled which way the wind was blowing several years earlier....

Archie Comics were always smarter than the ongoing superhero titles because they never set themselves up to tell an ongoing story, but rather worked like an extended cartoon strip. If you read three random issues of any Archie comics, you were probably as clued up on the cast of Riverdale as you were going to need to be to understand the dynamics of what was going on. Archie was perptually out of sync with the world around him, Betty was goal driven and meant well, Moose wasn't quite sure what day it was but loved Midge more than anything, etc. etc. All you had to do was set up a situation, add two or more of the characters and let the rest play out.

Even better, since the characters weren't obliged to be a certain age given the backstory (Peter Parker can't be worrying about teenage problems since he's been around long enough to get married, be a lecturer, etc.) the backgrounds and fashions could simply be updated to reflect the times of publication.

So no awkward retcons such as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm starting off as veterans of World War 2 and suddenly having gone through The Gulf War instead, prompting questions like 'Which comics have and haven't happened, then, because The Avengers definitely went to Saigon in the 70's but the existence of The FF precedes The Original Avengers finding Captain America in the block of ice and Cap turned out to be fighting Richard Nixon during The Secret Empire Saga so...argh!'

Archie managed to stay on the newsstands long after the self absorbed and inside baseball nature of superhero comics rendered them unsaleable in your average W.H.Smith's or Wal-Mart, since any issue of Betty & Veronica could be read by anyone with no need to check out previous issues. It was very rare that any one tale would run more than one comic and the few times it did, it was with fantastic results. We'll get to that.

In 2010, Marvel was wasting everyone's time and money on 'Siege; or 'What If Asgard wasn't in space but in Oklahoma instead?' while DC insisted on spreading the myth that people who grew up in Liverpool talk like they're from Shoreditch by adding John Constantine to the line up of 'Brightest Day'.

During the same year, Archie dragged mainstream comics kicking and screaming into the future with 'Kevin Keller', a comic featuring an openly gay male lead out in the real world and everything. This annoyed some American Mary Whitehouse wannabes called 'One Million Moms!'. They campaigned against the title being sold in children friendly areas such as Toys R Us but only really proved their basic inability to count to 1 million.

In the same year they published covers featuring Archie kissing Valerie, the black bassist from Josie & The Pussycats. If this doesn't strike you as a big deal for a comic being published in the mid-west of America, well, you might be one of those guys suggesting that there's always been adequate representation in comics.

They didn't sell as many comics in specialist shops, but while The Big Two continued to tread water, Archie kept moving forward, kept looking to crossover with big name brands, parodied the biggest comic crossovers, featured the likes of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, paid homage to EC Comics and got Adam Hughes to draw covers. They even explored exactly what WOULD happen if Archie finally chose Betty. And Veronica. And heartbreakingly, how deep Archie's love for his fellow man ran in the conclusion to the marriage stories in 'The Death Of Archie.' Oh, and he also met the Predator.

Then they stepped everything into higher gear with our second favourite horror comic of the 21st Century with Afterlife With Archie. It was a book we'd recommend to new readers as a good alternative to the horrendously overpriced, badly drawn horror or just too boring to be scary books glutting the market with 'Torture Porn Variants'. AWA would feature at least one chilling moment per issue likely to stay with you long after you finished reading. One issue of tie-in book 'Sabrina The Teenage Witch; is worth 3 or 4 'Walking Dead' trade paperbacks in terms of actual horror instead of people talking around a trailer park.

If you had been a fan of the Archie world before and hadn't read it for a while, though, our glee would be magnified. While the horror/jump scare bits of AWA are genuinely well done and actually quite intense, the bits between undead assault are where the real horror lies as relationships between all the characters are twisted forever, new angles and revealations would stop you ever being able to see Midge, Cheryl, Reggie and more in quite the same light.

This moving with the times meant that the Archie readership were quite capable of seeing the characters they loved for so many decades in different modes of storytelling and art styles laid the groundwork for two things: The relaunch of the line in 2015 with high profile creators such as Mark Waid, Fiona Staples, Chip Zdarsky and Adam Hughes doing new and interesting takes on a universe we all knew so well (A bit like The Ultimate Universe but with a point and a plan.) and also the hit show 'Riverdale'.

It will not surprise many of you to learn that the Grand Poobahs Of Comics (TM MONDO FunnyBooks 2018) hated 'Riverdale' and frequently grumbled 'Not MY Archie.' but then, by folding their arms and threatening to hold their breath until the artform of comics goes back to being what THEY want, they've proven time and again that they're constantly wanting to find a straw man to blame for the world moving on without them. These were the same people who moaned about 'Archie Vs Punisher' for not taking Frank Castle seriously enough and thought the parody crossover 'Love Showdown' (Which promised that Archie would finally choose a permanent girlfriend) would break the Archieverse once and for all.

There are lots of ways to improve the state of comics. Indulging the whinging of grumpy old men and refusing to believe the rest of the world might be interested in comics are not on that list of ways.

And as a wise man once said 'The people want BeBop. And who I am to tell them that BeBop is wrong?'

[pwrestlingxpress]

Reddit Article about Golden☆Lovers History

Found this interesting column by WrestlingisJay on reddit.com about Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi’s history in which I felt compelled to share it here on the Pro Wrestling Express.  You can click here for comments on the article and if you a member, log in and make your own comment.  Anyway here is what WrestlingisJay had to say about the reunion of the Golden☆Lovers that occurred back on January 28, 2018 at New Beginning in Sapporo Night Two and remember, I take no credit in this.  The credit for this should go to WrestlingisJay on reddit:

Hello, I’m u/WrestlingIsJay! You may remember me from such walls of text as this post or this other post. Today I’m here to invite you to come with me on a journey… a Golden☆ journey! A lot of stuff has already been written on the greatest relationship in pro-wrestling, and I always make sure to send people looking for a quick fill-in to this excellent post from a while ago or this more recent Uproxx article, but what I really wanted to do was to create a place to also include all those little details and bump on the road that obviously often get overlooked for the sake of brevity in those kind of summaries but that I really think make up the soul of this amazing story. All the Small Things, basically (thank you Tom DeLonge). I’ll try my best and I hope people will come up with all those other things I’ll probably leave out in the comments, so to make this more and more complete. Let’s start, shall we?

2008-2012: Beginnings.

I guess pretty much everyone knows how it started at this point, so I’ll be quick: Kenny has a unique vision for pro-wrestling that sets him apart from most of his north American colleagues, finds a clip of Kota Ibushi having DDT-style matches on YouTube and immediately thinks that this guy from across the Ocean must thinks the same way he does, so he sets on a quest to face him no matter the odds. He films himself doing a crazy DDT-styled “Anywhere match to appease to them, cuts a promo on Ibushi and manages to get himself to become the one and only gaijin in DDT for quite a while. They have the match (DDT Universe link, it’s 9$ a month, first month is free), and it’s a rough sketch of everything Omega and Ibushi have in store for pro-wrestling: a perfect blend in of comedy, crazy high spots, unique storytelling and unparalleled athleticism. It ends up winning a MOTY trophy earning Omega his stay… the rest, as they say, is history.

I think one of the best “Small Things” about this is the way Kenny Omega retells it during his appearance on “Japanophiles”, a TV Show about foreigners living in Japan which dedicated an episode to him, in a somewhat-shoot interview he did while he was still in DDT (timestamped link) which really drives home how much of real life anime characters these two are: “I felt that my destiny, if there is such a thing, was to come out here and fight Kota Ibushi”.

He will later say that his first match with Ibushi was also the first time he cried after a match during a 2016 NJPW interview but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. They have the match and clearly immediately develop a strong friendship as early pictures and statements from Michael Nakazawa, a huge friend of both and basically the third unofficial member of their team (kind like a proto-Elite), attests. (shout out to @archaicbro by the way, who put together a most useful Twitter-sized recollections of their story). They join forces instead of facing each other again, as DDT originally had planned, and hit one homerun after the other: they even get a MOTY in New Japan in 2010 which, as Kenny recalled in the Edge & Christian Podcast, it’s something Jr. Tag Teams just “don’t do”. Their shenanigans both inside and outside the ring really depicts one hell of a great time for both of them, and Japan loves them as well.

Their peak probably comes in 2012 when, as many will already know, they main evented DDT’s most important show of the year, Peter Pan at the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo. There the “sketch” that was their first match together gets refined and they put up one of the greatest matches of all time (here’s another DDT Universe link) battling over the KO-D Openweight Championship, DDT’s top singles belt. One very interesting note: Kota Ibushi wins the match after having kicked out at 2 from a One Winged Angel in the center of the ring, the only wrestler to ever having done so without interferences or rope breaks.

At this point, life couldn’t be better for them, as Kenny himself will say to Meltzer in an interview in 2017 that he felt his career had peaked at that point, having gone all out at such a legendary arena, within a company he helped grow, with Ibushi. Despite that though, unfortunately trouble was brewing not so far on the horizon…

2014-2017: Paradise Lost?

2014 comes, and with it the biggest turn in Kenny Omega’s career arrives. He signs a contract of exclusivity with New Japan Pro-Wrestling and decides to stay a Jr. Heavyweight for the time being: with Kota already a Heavyweight in New Japan, this effectively breaks up their team and sends them separate ways. After an emotional (and pretty crazy) farewell match (rutube link as I couldn’t seem to find the match on DDT Universe), Kenny’s conference with NJPW is unusually cold when he talks about the fact that he will stay separated from Ibushi going forward: whether something happened behind the scenes or Kenny’s just preparing to become the evil Cleaner, we may never know, but the Golden☆Lovers are no more.

This is where turbulent times start for Kenny, and this is where the “Small Things” really shine. You’d be hard pressed to find an interview without a shout out, a quick hint or a monologue of the Cleaner towards his former tag partner, and what it all adds up to is a compelling depiction of someone clearly dealing with a lot of unwanted thoughts in his head. Kenny’s constant wandering with his mind towards Ibushi is so powerful, so humane that the lines between reality and kayfabe gets very blurred, and it’s astounding.

The first big crack in the “wall” Kenny put up to forget about his past obviously comes at Invasion Attack 2015, when in a wonderfully put-together segment wanted by all three involved, Kenny finds himself between a rock and a hard place when he has to help AJ Styles retain his IWGP Heavyweight Championship against Kota. He doesn’t go all out in helping his Bullet Club brother, but the split second hesitation he causes in Ibushi is enough for AJ to turn his Phoenix Splash into a Styles Clash for the 1, 2, 3. After the match, Omega is definitely not thrilled about the outcome and his part in it. Some say this even started (in kayfabe) his path towards the inevitable takeover of the Bullet Club against AJ Styles: even when they just graze each other, Ibushi always has a huge impact on Kenny’s psyche and career.

They will stay apart for all of 2016, the true breakthrough year for the Cleaner, and this seem to weigh in deeply on Omega. After winning the G1, he states to having finally surpassed Kota, but he’s also clearly hurt at his disappearance at such a pivotal moment for him. He will start antagonizing him more and more, building up basically a feud with Kota’s shadow that will accompany him throughout all of 2016 and shape his interactions with him when Ibushi will finally return to New Japan later (as himself, although Kenny didn’t refrain from throwing shade at him with a couple of ironic comments on Twitter about Tiger Mask W’s performances being “a little green”). One important moment comes almost six months later, in March 2017, when TV Asahi hosts a ceremony to make a list of the greatest wrestlers in history and Kenny Omega, ranking #15, ends up standing in front of Kota who is amongst the judges. The look Kenny gives Kota here speaks for himself, but he also doubles down on Twitter, truly opening up for the first time in a while.

Keep in mind what he says here, as it’s one of the greatest details of this whole thing: Kenny clearly sees standing in the ring with Kota as the only way to truly be able to communicate with him after all this time. He doesn’t know how to tell him all the things he would like to, and he doesn’t even know if he would be able to, but he knows damn well how to wrestle, so that’s how he wants to speak to Ibushi – by fighting him. He will say this again later, and he will ultimately state as much after the reunion. But once again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

WrestleKingdom 11 comes and goes, and Omega becomes the hottest topic in the world of pro-wrestling, but he doesn’t forget Ibushi, not even after his war with Okada: in an exclusive interview he states that the WK11 main event brought him to a ”magical [state of mind] where wrestling didn’t hurt”, something he only felt one other time in his career, ”when I was still in a tag team with… an old friend of mine”. Whatever happens, Ibushi is still there, always lingering in the back of his mind. This becomes evident when the rumors get more and more loud until yes, it’s revealed that Kota Ibushi will indeed be a part of the 27th edition of the G1. Kenny doesn’t hide his intentions: he will take part in the G1 because he wants, because he needs to be in the ring with Kota again. Maybe it’s because he really wants to prove himself he can surpass him, but mostly it’s because he’s aching for that chance to talk to his old friend in the only language he would be able to – that of professional wrestling.

Countless “Small Things” are littered among the interviews, tweets and shoot Q&As Kenny did around this time, but two of the most intense statements can be easily found on New Japan World. The first happens during a Skype interview Kenny did to promote the G1 USA Special. At the 22:53 mark, he gets asked about Kota being in the G1 and cuts a short, but awesome promo. I’ll transcribe here some of the best lines for those unwilling to click the link, as I believe it’s one of Omega’s best mic work I’ve ever heard:

“Look… Ibushi. Yeah, I’ll say his name, Ibushi. It’s been a while. I was waiting… I wondered what it would take. […] after I’ve won the G1 I thought for sure, you would come back to me. After I had the greatest match of all time at the Tokyo Dome, something you could never do, I thought you’d come back. What makes you come back now? What makes you want to challenge the G1 after everything we’ve been through. Is it something that you’re doing for yourself? Are you trying to challenge me? […] Questions that are running through my head. You know… I could always call you, I could always contact you, but I wouldn’t know what to say. […] Let’s do the talking in the ring. I want you to promise me… be a man of your word, promise me Ibushi, that you would make it to the finals. It’s the only way we can meet. Show me how much you’ve grown, and I’ll show you how much I’ve grown. You’re not the man anymore… I’m so much more than what you are now, and I can’t wait to show you the difference in that power.”

This is enough to make the situation look even more like a real-life anime rivalry than already is, but Omega wasn’t finished yet. During his appearance at a NJPW World’s one-hour show called Wonderland (it’s on their streaming service but the clip itself is free, so you can watch it without having to pay the monthly fee), where he was asked to go through all his adversaries for the upcoming G1, he stated multiple times that the only reason he was joining the tournament was Ibushi. In the end, around the 55:00 mark, he addresses Kota directly and cuts another gem:

”A-Block? There’s only one… there’s only one. […] There’s only one I want to beat, there’s only one I want to meet. And It’s you Ibushi. It’s a different world, and I saw your training video. You can’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to win the G1’! It isn’t that easy… but Ibushi, somewhere in there, I know you have it in you. [If it’s] really is your time, take it. Because I never stopped after you left. After you left me all alone, to fend for myself, I never stopped training, I never stopped sacrificing, I never stopped feeling the pain. I never ran away like you did. If you can make it to the final, that’s where I’ll be waiting. And then finally I’ll make you feel the pain Ibushi, and I’ll show you through my actions everything that I felt while you were away, after you threw me away.”

After these two pieces of work, hype was through the roof, but alas, Ibushi didn’t manage to reach the G1 Finals, and the Golden☆Lovers seemed destined to stay apart… for a little longer.

2017-2018: Reunion.

The finals arrived, and after them, the unexpected happened: a beaten Omega clad in gear that was an homage to his former partner met Ibushi backstage, even if the encounter lasted only for a few, seemingly misunderstood, seconds. A failed connection if there ever was one, for sure. But despise that, things kept moving and Kenny kept going there: in an interview with Kevin Kelly (another free one!) months later, when he was about to defend his IWGP US title against Juice Robinson, he reiterated that his only regret for the G1 Finals was the opponent. He wanted Ibushi, he needed to meet him in that ring, and that need was still there, clear as day. A need that would have been answered months later, in a truly unexpected fashion, amidst the snows of Sapporo.

…and here we are, at last, at the final reunion. At that single shocking moment, ten years in the making. With some unrequested help from the villainous Cody, Omega and Ibushi are standing face to face in the same ring again. It’s nothing like Kenny had thought, there are no wrestling moves involved, no fighting. It’s just his old friend, lending a helping hand, and for him it’s his whole world coming down hard. There’s no more feigning indignation, or hatred, or masquerading the pain of having been left alone. It’s all thrown in his face and the Cleaner’s metallic exterior gets shredded by the events. Underneath, the “real” Kenny resurfaces and after some hesitation, he gives in to a liberating hug. The Golden☆Lovers are back.

Again, click on the link (or here if confused) above to comment on this very interesting article from reddit by WrestlingisJay. 

[girlsbtrs]

Opinion: Respect the Fangirl

The internet was buckwild last week as Halloween, the beginnings of Mercury Retrograde and the fall officially hit. Between My Chemical Romance coming back, more impeachment inquiries and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announcing Twitter would no longer be promoting political ads, there were plenty of trending topics to be paying attention to.

However, one trending topic stood out amongst the rest. At roughly 3 AM PST, international Kpop boy band Monsta X’s Wohno announced an extremely shocking and swift departure. The details of the departure are due to a series of alleged scandals that you can find research into outside of this article.

For us, it’s what happened after that counts. Monsta X’s fanbase, dubbed “Monbebe” -- a combination of Monsta X’s name and “baby”-- immediately sprung into action. Trending topics were made, a petition for his return came, other large Kpop fandoms like BTS’ Army, iKON’s iKonics, NCT’s NCTzens, Got7’s Aghases, Exo’s EXO-L, BlackPink’s Blink, Twice’s Once and many more banded together to support not just Wohno but their fellow Kpop fans who felt the lose reminiscent of that fateful day in March 2015 when Zayn Malik announced his untimely departure from One Direction.

Within 15 hours, the petition had almost 300k signatures, Monobes had two different hashtags trend worldwide with over 1 million tweets each, and, as this is being written, it looks as though they have no signs of stopping. At time of publication, Monbebes have effectively run through a new hashtag every twelve hours to remain on the Top Trending Worldwide Count, and they continued to protest in South Korea outside Starship Entertainment, with some international fans flying in to join their Korean sisters.

Over the years, fandoms online have become increasingly engaged within their communities. They have become politically and socially engaged, they have grown to understand and ask for accountability from their “problematic faves” and have begun to have the fledgling conversations of nuance for what is a “cancellable” offense and what or whom can be redeemed. There’s a movement amongst fandoms on the internet, and it aligns with a lot of the movements we are seeing of the youth in 2019. “We’re here, we know what we want, and we’re not going anywhere.”

To break down the phenom that can create such dedication and a riot online, we need to go back to the pre-internet music industry days. To days of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the days the Beatles first touched down on U.S. soil. While we often herald The Beatles as the greatest group of all time -- rightfully so -- the context of who put them there is glossed over in conversations of their technical contributions to music.

In every Beatles documentary you watch, there’s always a slew of camera clips of them running from young female fans, of fans jumping on their getaway cars, crowding the airports, passing out just looking at them. The fans’ arms are full of albums, they’re crying over how much the music means to them, and they’re forming friendships, relationships and bonds over music that set the tone for the first intense wave of fandom success. And while the Beatles’ male fanbase wasn’t lacking, it’s not hard to see who put them on the charts, and who kept them coming back.

Young women’s influence on music has often been thrown aside as a “fangirl mentality.” Where women like music for two reasons: the first being they have more interest in the members than they do the music, and the second being that the music can’t be that good if it’s only young women listening to it. As we strive to break fangirl stereotypes, we see the efforts of these fandoms that have created some of the biggest artists in the world ignored.

Most obvious in this ignorance was a recent Pitchfork article accrediting Kanye West with the success of musicians going viral on Twitter. This claim ignored the early days of Bieber fans -- you know, before Justin tried to start his own social app (RIP Shots) --, Swifties -- who largely began their crusade online after the infamous incident--, Directioners -- arguably the first fanbase to truly use Twitter to its fullest extent--, and more. The cultural and social significance of the fangirl doesn’t even have proper documentation. There is so little academic study into the passion of young women and how they form the grassroots of and self-market artists, who go on to have the kind of cultural impact to swing elections. It’s disappointing.

Even more recently, The Hollywood Reporter released an interview with Kpop mold-breaking sensation BTS that was nothing short of disappointing for long-term fans and a band who sold out the Rose Bowl twice in minutes. The lack of awareness from one of the biggest entertainment editorial structures in the U.S. speaks volumes about just how irrelevant cis-white-male-centric-run publications claim young women to be. When the writer Seth Ambrovitch was critiqued by both fans and journalists alike for his poor misuse of precious time with some of the most sought after musicians in the world, he claimed he was doing them a favor, that 99.99% of the population didn’t know who BTS is yet, and that he was bringing BTS to the attention of the general public. Nevermind the sold-out U.S. stadium tour - One Direction, Beyonce nor Taylor Swift sold out the Rose Bowl - or the fact that since BTS’ breakout moment and their hard work to help credit the validity of the Kpop industry in the west has allowed multiple other bands like Monsta X, NCT 127, Super M and more receive well-deserved credibility here. Seth just didn’t seem to care. Because 99.99% of his immediate population didn’t know BTS, he didn’t bother to do his research and realize that young women -- fangirls -- around the world have risen BTS to an international household name, one that you would have to live under a very specific bubble to ignore.

So what makes a fangirl? The definition is broad, but it’s mostly applied to young people -- mostly young women/nonbinary individuals who are incredibly passionate about musicians they listen to. It’s a term that’s been weaponized, attempted to be recaptured, and forced on a lot of people who make that delicate transition from female fan to female music industry professional.

In 2015, Zayn Malik left One Direction, and the internet had a field day. Directioners were one of the first massive young female fanbases to overtake Twitter, constantly winning 1D fan-voted awards, pushing every single thing the band did, and creating fan accounts that accumulated mass amounts of followers in short amounts of time. And yet, on the day Zayn Malik left, and Directioners were grieving on a platform they largely helped grow, they were mocked, meme’d and, again, not taken seriously. But it was hard on these young women. They invested, they voted, they fought for the legitimacy of One Direction. They bought tickets to tour dates all over the world, they cried to their music, had their first kisses, first drinks, graduations, first loves, friendships, break-ups and lives soundtracked by five boys from the U.K.

The internet allowed them to connect across the world with people they would have never otherwise known. It created a safe-haven online for people to discuss the real problems teen girls face, open their eyes to the issues of other young women around the world, and it took a lot of them to different countries they would have never seen. When 1D, the Jonas Brothers, Bieber and many other male-centric fandoms were suffering from a unique drought, the Beyhive, Swifties, Selenators and Arianators were there to offer community. Where you were a fangirl once, even with a broken heart, you could find love again.

Two years before 1D broke up across the world, Kpop band BTS debuted under the small company Big Hit Entertainment. As is standard with Kpop bands, they were promoted around Korea, did various variety shows, performances, etc. But BTS also did something different: they began to utilize western social media more interactively with their base. With the decline of One Direction and no main boy band in sight, there was a missing stage from the U.S. Market, and it didn’t take long before BTS was rightfully filling that role. With their first world tour taking place in 2015, the hype quickly began to build with their social media presence and fan interaction.

Rightfully dubbed ARMY, BTS’ fanbase weaponized the internet in a Swiftie/Beyhive-like takeover, and before you knew it, not a single tweet could be found without a Kpop fancam under it. BTS grew exponentially and routinely received millions of likes on single posts on Twitter, making them one of the most interacted with Twitter accounts on the platform.

Fast-forward to 2019, where Harry Styles is accrediting his success largely to his female fanbase, BTS sold out two nights at the Rose Bowl in minutes, Taylor Swift is being honored as Artist of the Decade at the AMA’s and Selena Gomez took two days to garner enough streams to debut on the Billboard Charts. It’s evident and clear that as long as social media is a prevalent part of music, the fangirls yield power. As they learn these lessons about nuance, start banding together more often as fanbases, and demanding accountability, there’s truly no telling what young women are capable of in this industry.

At time of press, Harry Styles announced his new album Fine Line will be released on December 13th, and the internet and young women he’s so long accredited with being the key to his success responded in kind. Four of the top worldwide trends are currently about Harry Styles, Monsta X and BTS, with multiple tweets crossing fandoms, once again reminding us of the significant power that stan twitter and its fangirls have.

As far as we go, we’re investing in them in the long-haul. We’re watching them teach themselves how to video edit, use photoshop, optimize analytics, control trends, outsmart algorithms and even create movements within themselves. We’re hoping to help all those brilliant young women who have found a home in a smooth melody and an intense emotional connection to find career paths in the things that make them passionate and happy.

And while we are on the side of the Monbebe’s, and we hope Wohno returns to Monsta X happy and healthy, we are proud of these young fans for standing up for what they believe is right, supporting one another, having honest conversations about accountability, but mostly inspiring change. We’re hoping to see more fanbases coming together as human rights violations take a world stage in the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections. We’re hoping to see the power these young women hold continue to transfer into the parts of their lives that have been fighting for equality and justice.

All in all, it’s time we #RespectTheFangirl, and we’d love to hear your favorite fangirl stories.

- article by Shelby Chargin

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/science/in-a-switch-some-republicans-start-citing-climate-change-as-driving-their-policies/

In a Switch, Some Republicans Start Citing Climate Change as Driving Their Policies

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WASHINGTON — When John Barrasso, a Republican from oil and uranium-rich Wyoming who has spent years blocking climate change legislation introduced a bill this year to promote nuclear energy, he added a twist: a desire to tackle global warming.

Mr. Barrasso’s remarks — “If we are serious about climate change, we must be serious about expanding our use of nuclear energy” — were hardly a clarion call to action. Still they were highly unusual for the lawmaker who, despite decades of support for nuclear power and other policies that would reduce planet-warming emissions, has until recently avoided talking about them in the context of climate change.

The comments represent an important shift among Republicans in Congress. Driven by polls showing that voters in both parties — particularly younger Americans — are increasingly concerned about a warming planet, and prodded by the new Democratic majority in the House shining a spotlight on the issue, a growing number of Republicans are now openly discussing climate change and proposing what they call conservative solutions.

“Denying the basic existence of climate change is no longer a credible position,” said Whit Ayers, a Republican political consultant, pointing out the growing climate concern among millennials as well as centrist voters — two groups the G.O.P. will need in the future.

It is at least partly opportunism, given that some lawmakers are simply reframing longstanding policies or priorities as “climate” policy. Still it is a significant shift, indicating that at least a few prominent Republicans see an advantage to breaking from right-wing orthodoxy that has long dismissed or openly derided concerns about the climate.

In recent weeks Senator John Cornyn of Texas — an oil state where climate denial runs deep — said he is helping write legislation to reduce emissions through “energy innovation.” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said he wants to create a “Manhattan Project” for clean energy funding. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is exploring bipartisan plans to curb emissions from her position as chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. And Representative Matthew Gaetz of Florida, who once called to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, introduced legislation to tackle climate change by encouraging nuclear energy and hydropower, as well as “carbon capture” technology, which aims to pull planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

There are subtler signs of this G.O.P. shift as well. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis this year, Republican leaders tapped Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana as the panel’s ranking member. Though he hails from a region dependent on oil and gas, Mr. Graves has struck a bipartisan tone and made a point of noting the deleterious effect sea level rise will have on his state’s economy.

But Republicans also are walking a tightrope. In the Trump administration, G.O.P. party orthodoxy has shifted strongly toward denying or dismissing the threat of climate change. Veering away from it could cause a lawmaker to lose campaign contributions and key political support.

“There’s a hesitancy I think on the part of Republicans to jump into a major policy without getting the cues from elites within the party and society as a whole that they’re going in the right direction,” said Steven Valk, a spokesman for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which organizes to bring Republicans and Democrats together on market-based solutions to global warming.

In almost all of the cases in which conservative politicians are cautiously staking out territory on climate change, they still do not acknowledge the extent of man’s responsibility for causing it. Putting a price on emitting carbon into the atmosphere is verboten. And they insist solutions do not need to include eliminating or even curbing the use of oil, coal and other dirty energy sources primarily responsible for heating the planet.

“If we can find strategies that allow us to reduce emissions while continuing to use fossil fuels, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing,” Mr. Graves said in a recent interview.

Likewise, Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma won praise when he took over as the new top Republican on the House Science Committee this year, and said that climate change has intensified droughts and storms. But in an interview Mr. Lucas also said reducing the use of coal, oil and gas is not a solution.

“I don’t believe that you create mandates for fossil fuels,” he said. “But if we work hard, we can create the alternatives that will cause the market to move toward them.”

And Mr. Barrasso, even as he promotes nuclear and other policies that he frames as climate friendly, characterizes Democrats as taking “drastic” positions. “What began as a conversation about cleaner energy, has transformed into punishing global agreements, and now full government economic takeover,” he said in a statement.

The result, political analysts said, is a fitful conservative effort. It is heavily reliant on funding for clean energy research and development, but could yet result in meaningful legislative action given the right political alchemy.

“I would say there’s an emerging consensus that the climate conversation this time around is real, and the interest of the public has caught up with the interest of the experts,” said Scott Segal, a fossil fuel lobbyist in Washington. “You never know how lightning will strike. There’s even a possibility that you can have action in a presidential year, though it’s not a particularly high percentage.”

On Thursday, Republican positions on climate change will face a test when the House votes on a measure to block President Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, the landmark 2015 pact among nations to cut global warming emissions. President Trump has said he is abandoning the accord.

In many ways the G.O.P.’s swing follows poll results. A record number of Americans now accept that climate change is real and a serious threat, though Republicans and Democrats still disagree on the cause. And a survey last year by Yale and George Mason universities of 1,067 registered voters found that majorities in both parties do agree that the government must address the problem.

Among Republicans, younger voters in particular are more likely to embrace climate action.

A new Pew Research Center poll found more than a third of Millennial Republicans agree that Earth is “warming mostly due to human activity,” compared with 18 percent of older Republicans. And nearly half of millennial Republicans say the government is not doing enough to “reduce the effects of climate change,” compared with 27 percent of older ones. (By contrast, 89 percent of Democrats say the government should do more).

The Green New Deal has played a role as well. The nonbinding congressional resolution calling for a 10-year mobilization to end fossil fuel use has unified Republicans against it. But the attention paid to it also has forced Republicans to offer their own solutions.

“You can’t beat something with nothing. And having a center right alternative to the Green New Deal makes sense,” said Mr. Ayers, the Republican political strategist.

Of course, climate denial is also alive and well among Republicans.

President Trump, who routinely mocks climate science, is preparing to announce a federal advisory panel to cast doubt on the overwhelming body of evidence that climate change is a threat. At a recent hearing at which former Secretary of State John Kerry testified on climate change, Representative Tom Massie, a Kentucky Republican, floated long-debunked theories that offer alternative explanations for warming other than human activity.

Democrats, for their part, said they are skeptical of new calls for compromise. Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, who sponsored the Green New Deal along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, accused Republicans of rebranding “tired and inadequate proposals from the past” like nuclear and carbon-capture funding.

“We’ll know the Republicans are sincere when they step forward for permanent tax breaks for wind and solar and electric vehicles and battery technologies and clean building technologies. Because we can deploy those technologies right now. But they only continue to talk about research on technologies that will not be deployed for a decade,” Mr. Markey said.

Still, the handful of Republicans who have long looked for ways to tackle the rise of planet-warming emissions urged Democrats to seize the opportunity to find at least some common ground.

“Republicans who used to deny climate change as a real problem just to avoid the issue are now confronting it,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican carbon tax supporter who lost his Florida House seat last year. “It’s still early, but I think it’s important to recognize that clearly it’s now a debate about solutions.”

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

[deadboxprime]

Who’s Manipulating The American Political Left?

“A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants.”                                                                -Variously attributed

Imagine two neighboring countries. Country A wants something of Country B, and sends  special forces and insurgent agents into Country B surreptitiously to destabilize Country B. Country A then uses this destabilization as justification for military intervention.

It’s an old story, and has happened many times throughout history. I’m sure you can find examples on your own.

It’s happening here in the US, though in a slightly different manner.

Over the past five years or so, intakes of juvenile offenders have dropped dramatically. An “intake” is basically the referral of a juvenile to the juvenile or family court. Often the judge orders probation or some other service. Some hail the decrease in intakes as evidence of effective policy.

The problem is that it is a lie. Defenders of the lie will point to statistics and numbers to prove that there has in fact been a decrease. This is not the part that is a lie. The lie is that this is a natural, organic occurrence. It is not. It is the result of changes to the system. It results from jurisdictions implementing measures to address Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC), and from the proliferation of diversion programs.

Where disproportionate minority contact is occurring due to institutionalized racism, it is appropriate that it be addressed. However, in most cases, the institutionalized racism is assumed rather than proven.

Diversion programs are also a political scam. Diversion has become a category, and the slick administrators of these programs have named them something other than “diversion.” Why? Because when you send a youth through a program not named diversion and they re-offend or fail to complete, you can then send them through the formal diversion, hence double-dipping.

By changing definitions and generating false numbers, you can then use the false numbers as justification for your agenda, whether it is invading a neighboring country or changing the juvenile system. The current language for this takeover is “transformation of the juvenile system.”

Probations officers, court workers and service providers across the nation know that this is a lie, and can usually point to numbers of their own in private. They do not speak up because it could cost them their paycheck, and “One Johnny Rocko more or less isn’t worth dying for.”

I have written of this before but I am now starting to recognize a pattern in American politics, one in which definitions are changed and the resultant data used to justify an agenda.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reverse-racism-isnt-a-thing_us_55d60a91e4b07addcb45da97

This post from 2015 illustrates what I mean. “Black people can’t be racist. Prejudiced yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist because we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.” Yes, the author actually used a movie as evidence illustrating her point.

The trouble is that this is a new definition of racism. Check your dictionary, online or traditional. Check Wikipedia (granted, not the best source, but a good starting point). The only place you’ll find this type of definition is on pages and documents supporting the idea that only white people can be racist. If those who hold this view are Social Justice Warriors, then this is a militarized definition of racism.

Unfortunately, many people actually fuel this fire by engaging in the myths cited by the article. I should like to point out however, that “white” is not a race or a culture. That does not mean that aspects of various cultures included as “white” cannot be appropriated.

The important thing here is not the absurdity of what the article (and the many similar ones like it – google “can someone be racist towards white people”), but the tactics. Change the definition, use the resulting data to justify your attack. This pattern is emerging across our country. From juvenile justice to race and even gender, this tactic is used over and over again. I believe that the American political left is being manipulated. The pattern is the footprint of a unseen actor. Cry “conspiracy theory” if you choose, but the wildest theories are the ones most often to be correct. Watergate started as a conspiracy theory. What is unclear is the motive, and that scares me most of all.

There are more examples, but this post is long enough. Look at the world around you. Don’t swallow the lies that either side of our political spectrum is always wrong, and question definitions.

©2017 Deadbox Prime. All opinions expressed on this blog are property of the author and may not be used or reproduced without permission. Limited permission is granted, retroactively, for reblogging or link posting for personal, not-for-profit use. Permission does not apply to material found at any page listed as a reference, nor should it be in any way misconstrued to give permission to use the work of another without citing it as such. Receive post notifications on Twitter, and between post commentary on Facebook. Comments welcome.

[newstfionline]

How Hackers Hijacked A Bank’s Entire Online Operation

Andy Greenberg, Wired, April 4, 2017

The traditional model of hacking a bank isn’t so different from the old-fashioned method of robbing one. Thieves get in, get the goods, and get out. But one enterprising group of hackers targeting a Brazilian bank seems to have taken a more comprehensive and devious approach: One weekend afternoon, they rerouted all of the bank’s online customers to perfectly reconstructed fakes of the bank’s properties, where the marks obediently handed over their account information.

Researchers at the security firm Kaspersky on Tuesday described an unprecedented case of wholesale bank fraud, one that essentially hijacked a bank’s entire internet footprint. At 1 pm on October 22 of last year, the researchers say, hackers changed the Domain Name System registrations of all 36 of the bank’s online properties, commandeering the bank’s desktop and mobile website domains to take users to phishing sites. In practice, that meant the hackers could steal login credentials at sites hosted at the bank’s legitimate web addresses. Kaspersky researchers believe the hackers may have even simultaneously redirected all transactions at ATMs or point-of-sale systems to their own servers, collecting the credit card details of anyone who used their card that Saturday afternoon.

“Absolutely all of the bank’s online operations were under the attackers’ control for five to six hours,” says Dmitry Bestuzhev, one of the Kaspersky researchers who analyzed the attack in real time after seeing malware infecting customers from what appeared to be the bank’s fully valid domain. From the hackers’ point of view, as Bestuzhev puts it, the DNS attack meant that “you become the bank. Everything belongs to you now.”

Kaspersky isn’t releasing the name of the bank that was targeted in the DNS redirect attack. But the firm says it’s a major Brazilian financial company with hundreds of branches, operations in the US and the Cayman Islands, 5 million customers, and more than $27 billion in assets. And though Kaspersky says it doesn’t know the full extent of the damage caused by the takeover, it should serve as a warning to banks everywhere to consider how the insecurity of their DNS might enable a nightmarish loss of control of their core digital assets. “This is a known threat to the internet,” Bestuzhev says. “But we’ve never seen it exploited in the wild on such a big scale.”

The Domain Name System, or DNS, serves as a crucial protocol running under the hood of the internet: It translates domain names in alphanumeric characters (like Google.com) to IP addresses (like 74.125.236.195) that represent the actual locations of the computers hosting websites or other services on those machines. But attacking those records can take down sites or, worse, redirect them to a destination of the hacker’s choosing.

In 2013, for instance, the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group altered the DNS registration of The New York Times to redirect visitors to a page with their logo. More recently, the Mirai botnet attack on the DNS provider Dyn knocked a major chunk of the web offline, including Amazon, Twitter, and Reddit.

But the Brazilian bank attackers exploited their victim’s DNS in a more focused and profit-driven way. Kaspersky believes the attackers compromised the bank’s account at Registro.br. That’s the domain registration service of NIC.br, the registrar for sites ending in the Brazilian .br top-level domain, which they say also managed the DNS for the bank. With that access, the researchers believe, the attackers were able to change the registration simultaneously for all of the bank’s domains, redirecting them to servers the attackers had set up on Google’s Cloud Platform.2

With that domain hijacking in place, anyone visiting the bank’s website URLs were redirected to lookalike sites. And those sites even had valid HTTPS certificates issued in the name of the bank, so that visitors’ browsers would show a green lock and the bank’s name, just as they would with the real sites. Kaspersky found that the certificates had been issued six months earlier by Let’s Encrypt, the non-profit certificate authority that’s made obtaining an HTTPS certificate easier in the hopes of increasing HTTPS adoption.

“If an entity gained control of DNS, and thus gained effective control over a domain, it may be possible for that entity to get a certificate from us,” says Let’s Encrypt founder Josh Aas. “Such issuance would not constitute mis-issuance on our part, because the entity receiving the certificate would have been able to properly demonstrate control over the domain.”

Ultimately, the hijack was so complete that the bank wasn’t even able to send email. “They couldn’t even communicate with customers to send them an alert,” Bestuzhev says. “If your DNS is under the control of cybercriminals, you’re basically screwed.”

Aside from mere phishing, the spoofed sites also infected victims with a malware download that disguised itself as an update to the Trusteer browser security plug-in that the Brazilian bank offered customers. According to Kaspersky’s analysis, the malware harvests not just banking logins--from the Brazilian banks as well as eight others--but also email and FTP credentials, as well as contact lists from Outlook and Exchange, all of which went to a command-and-control server hosted in Canada. The Trojan also included a function meant to disable antivirus software; for infected victims, it may have persisted far beyond the five-hour window when the attack occurred. And the malware included scraps of Portuguese language, hinting that the attackers may have themselves been Brazilian.

After around five hours, Kaspersky’s researchers believe, the bank regained control of its domains, likely by calling up NIC.br and convincing it to correct the DNS registrations. But just how many of the bank’s millions of customers were caught up in the DNS attack remains a mystery. Kaspersky says the bank hasn’t shared that information with the security firm, nor has it publicly disclosed the attack. But the firm says it’s possible that the attackers could have harvested hundreds of thousands or millions of customers’ account details not only from their phishing scheme and malware but also from redirecting ATM and point-of-sale transactions to infrastructure they controlled. “We really don’t know what was the biggest harm: malware, phishing, point-of-sale, or ATMs,” Bestuzhev says.

And just how would NIC.br have lost control of the bank’s domains so catastrophically in the first place? Kaspersky points to a January blog post from NIC.br that admitted to a vulnerability in its website that would have in some circumstances allowed changes to clients’ settings. But NIC.br noted in its post that it had no evidence that the attack had been used. The post also refers vaguely to “recent episodes of major repercussions involving DNS server changes,” but attributes them to “social engineering attacks.”

In a phone call, NIC.br’s technology director, Frederico Neves, disputed Kaspersky’s claim that all 36 of the bank’s domains had been hijacked. “I can assure that the numbers Kaspersky is putting out are speculation,” Neves said. He denied that NIC.br had been “hacked.” But he conceded that accounts may have been altered due to phishing or via customers’ compromised email, adding that “any registry the size of ours has compromises of user accounts regularly.”

[newseveryhourly]

As Kenosha, Wisconsin, continues to reel from the police shooting of Jacob Blake, residents are increasingly turning their anger to so-called outside agitators who some say invaded the city to sow chaos amongst the protests—and even kill demonstrators.“They [outsiders] tore up our neighborhood, this is our neighborhood, this is where we shop at. These are not Kenosha people,” Lonnie Stewart, 60, told The Daily Beast. “They’re coming to Kenosha, Wisconsin to destroy our city.”Immediately after a Kenosha police officer shot 29-year-old Blake in the back several times as he tried to get into a van with his kids on Sunday, the Wisconsin city descended into fiery unrest against police brutality. Buildings burned, and cars were razed as activists decried yet another act of police violence against a person of color.That alone provided new fodder for the “outside agitator” narrative—that rogues from out of town have used protests across America over wanton killings by cops as an excuse to riot or incite violence. Those claims haven’t always been baseless, though they are most often used as a premise to crack down on activists. This week, they were also in keeping with the be-very-afraid spirit of the Republican National Convention, which has ignored police violence except to dunk on the unrest that follows it.But after two nights of tense altercations between police in tactical gear and residents and regional activists who defied citywide curfews, hoards of heavily-armed counter-protesters arrived in Kenosha to murderous effect on Tuesday. Police say 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a Blue Lives Matter fanatic carrying a military-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two people and injured a third after traveling from Illinois to co-mingle with other armed vigilantes looking to protect the city. Prosecutors filed five felony charges against him on Thursday, including first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide—as well as a misdemeanor charge of possession of a deadly weapon.Residents say not all “outside agitators” are created equal—and they want the far-right hordes who have taken to cheering on Rittenhouse as some kind of hero to know that.Here Are the Athletes and Teams Boycotting Games to Protest the Shooting of Jacob Blake“I was terrified when I heard that news and I really had hoped it was just talk and that they wouldn’t actually do anything,” Angie Aker, a 41-year-old Kenosha native, said of armed groups. “Kenosha is a peaceful place. It still has a small-town feel to it—almost everybody knows everyone or is only like one or two degrees of separation. There isn’t usually any of this widespread chaos.”Right-wing media have predictably emerged as staunch defenders of the teenager, even justifying his deadly alleged actions as a necessary evil. “Kenosha has devolved into anarchy, the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Wednesday night. “People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and watched Kenosha burn.”“So are we really surprised this looting and arson accelerated to murder?” he continued. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone can see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour.”Rittenhouse appeared on multiple videos taken throughout the night as the peaceful demonstration veered toward something more sinister. The Lake County Public Defender’s Office, which is listed as representing the teenager, declined to comment. Attorney Lin Wood, who represented Covington Catholic graduate Nick Sandmann, had a team gearing up to provide support to Rittenhouse, his assistant told The Daily Beast. The lawyers have also established a defense fund on the teenager’s behalf.In one gut-wrenching video, an armed man matching Rittenhouse’s description tripped over on a street before firing at people who seemed to be making an attempt to disarm him. During the exchange, one person was shot in the head and another in the chest around 11:45 p.m. and never got up. Another video appears to show the teenager firing several shots—before getting up and walking toward police vehicles with his hands up in apparent surrender. A third video appears to show him running away and holding his rifle, where he is heard apparently uttering into his phone, “I just killed somebody.” While authorities have not yet released any names, family and friends have identified Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake, and Joseph “Jojo” Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha as the two who were killed, according to several local media outlets. Friends also say Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, was shot in the arm during the incident and was expected to survive. Grosskreutz was in Kenosha with the social justice reform group the People's Revolution Movement of Milwaukee, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast.“I had to watch my friend die on Facebook, I had to watch my city burn down,” Marcus Starks, a 35-year-old Kenosha native, and friend of Huber, previously told The Daily Beast. He proceeded to turn his ire to Rittenhouse, the new vigilante prince of the far-right.“That boy had no business being here, let alone with open carry,” Starks told The Daily Beast, adding, “If you’re gonna close this town, close it all the way down.”Officer Rusten Sheskey Identified as Cop Who Shot Jacob BlakeIn a separate video seemingly shot at the boarded-up gas station where Rittenhouse appeared in a Daily Caller video, an individual resembling Rittenhouse is seen chatting with police officers and other vigilante guards. Rittenhouse, whose social media accounts are rife with support for pro-police causes and his affinity for guns, also was interviewed by a Daily Caller reporter before the shootings. “So people are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” Rittenhouse replies in the video posted on Twitter after being asked what he’s doing at the protest. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself obviously. I also have my med kit.”The Kenosha Police Department said Friday nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct on Aug. 26 after officers received a tip about “suspicious” vehicles with out-of-state license plates meeting up in a remote parking lot. Cops followed the vehicles—which included a black school bus, a break truck, and a tan minivan—to a gas station where some people were attempting “to fill multiple fuel cans.” The vehicles contained items like helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks, and suspected controlled substances, cops said.A Facebook spokesperson said Thursday that none of Rittenhouse’s accounts were reported prior to the shooting. Nor did the company find any evidence that suggested the teenager followed a self-declared militia group, the Kenosha Guard, on the platform—nor was he invited to their event for Tuesday evening, according to Facebook.Still, he seemed to establish himself quickly on the scene. And while outsiders often show up at BLM protests purporting to keep peace, they have also shown a remarkable capacity for—deliberately or otherwise—inciting violence.One of the first prominent instances of property damage tied to George Floyd-era protests, in which a masked man smashed windows in Minneapolis in late May, appears to have been the work of a white supremacist disguised as an anti-fascist, investigators later claimed in an affidavit. Meanwhile, even as initial reports suggested most or all arrests at the Minneapolis-area chaos were from out of state, nearly all of those people were later revealed to be locals. This week, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was one of the first on the far right to fervently defend Rittenhouse, stating on his show Infowars Wednesday that the violence was just an act of self-preservation against what he described as “a community overthrow of the country.” “I told you they’re going to ratchet this up toward the election and try to make the whole thing racial. But it’s not—it’s about a globalist takeover,” Jones said.Jones was among several right-wing pundits defending Rittenhouse’s actions. The Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog, wrote multiple articles based on the extremely graphic videos, seemingly justifying Rittenhouses’s actions as self-defense.In a post now taken-down by Twitter, Ann Coulter declared Rittenhouse should be her president. A contributor for Turning Point USA, a right-wing pro-Trump student organization founded by Charlie Kirk, defended the actions as a “justified shooting,” while former Major League Baseball player Aubrey Huff tweeted on Thursday that Rittenhouse is a “national treasure.”Unrest in Kenosha was also an implicit theme during the third night of the Republican National Convention—even if no one appeared to explicitly embrace Rittenhouse’s alleged actions. Vice President Mike Pence condemned "the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country.”“The violence must stop whether in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha too,” he added. Even Donald Trump Jr. has inched toward Rittenhouse's defense: The president’s son on Thursday liked a tweet from far-right conspiracy-theorist Mike Cernovich about the teenager’s “Mostly Peaceful Self Defense Initiative.”Aker, the Kenosha native, said even “pockets of libertarians” in the city were defending Rittenhouse. “In their minds, and the way I’ve seen them talking about it, they’re hailing Rittenhouse as a hero,” she told The Daily Beast. “I think the armed militia agitators, while they don’t represent a lot of Kenosha, showed the world the cooperation that is going on between white racist citizens, the children they’re grooming for violence and hate, and law enforcement,” she added. “It’s been more under the surface until this situation, and this really forced it into plain view. It’s probably a good thing that we’re talking about it and seeing it for what it is now. That’s the only good thing to come out of all this.” Officials on Wednesday were already anticipating—if also perhaps inviting—more chaos with a different kind of outsider: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced National Guard troops from Arizona, Michigan, and Alabama, were being deployed to assist local law enforcement as a city-wide curfew remains in place.“Our town not finna be the same no more,” Elicia Pavlovich, a 29-year-old Kenosha native, told The Daily Beast. “It’s never been like this. Never. Seeing this sight, it just hurts me.”—With reporting by Grace Del VecchioRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[bigbirdgladiator]

As Kenosha, Wisconsin, continues to reel from the police shooting of Jacob Blake, residents are increasingly turning their anger to so-called outside agitators who some say invaded the city to sow chaos amongst the protests—and even kill demonstrators.“They [outsiders] tore up our neighborhood, this is our neighborhood, this is where we shop at. These are not Kenosha people,” Lonnie Stewart, 60, told The Daily Beast. “They’re coming to Kenosha, Wisconsin to destroy our city.”Immediately after a Kenosha police officer shot 29-year-old Blake in the back several times as he tried to get into a van with his kids on Sunday, the Wisconsin city descended into fiery unrest against police brutality. Buildings burned, and cars were razed as activists decried yet another act of police violence against a person of color.That alone provided new fodder for the “outside agitator” narrative—that rogues from out of town have used protests across America over wanton killings by cops as an excuse to riot or incite violence. Those claims haven’t always been baseless, though they are most often used as a premise to crack down on activists. This week, they were also in keeping with the be-very-afraid spirit of the Republican National Convention, which has ignored police violence except to dunk on the unrest that follows it.But after two nights of tense altercations between police in tactical gear and residents and regional activists who defied citywide curfews, hoards of heavily-armed counter-protesters arrived in Kenosha to murderous effect on Tuesday. Police say 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a Blue Lives Matter fanatic carrying a military-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two people and injured a third after traveling from Illinois to co-mingle with other armed vigilantes looking to protect the city. Prosecutors filed five felony charges against him on Thursday, including first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide—as well as a misdemeanor charge of possession of a deadly weapon.Residents say not all “outside agitators” are created equal—and they want the far-right hordes who have taken to cheering on Rittenhouse as some kind of hero to know that.Here Are the Athletes and Teams Boycotting Games to Protest the Shooting of Jacob Blake“I was terrified when I heard that news and I really had hoped it was just talk and that they wouldn’t actually do anything,” Angie Aker, a 41-year-old Kenosha native, said of armed groups. “Kenosha is a peaceful place. It still has a small-town feel to it—almost everybody knows everyone or is only like one or two degrees of separation. There isn’t usually any of this widespread chaos.”Right-wing media have predictably emerged as staunch defenders of the teenager, even justifying his deadly alleged actions as a necessary evil. “Kenosha has devolved into anarchy, the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Wednesday night. “People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and watched Kenosha burn.”“So are we really surprised this looting and arson accelerated to murder?” he continued. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone can see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour.”Rittenhouse appeared on multiple videos taken throughout the night as the peaceful demonstration veered toward something more sinister. The Lake County Public Defender’s Office, which is listed as representing the teenager, declined to comment. Attorney Lin Wood, who represented Covington Catholic graduate Nick Sandmann, had a team gearing up to provide support to Rittenhouse, his assistant told The Daily Beast. The lawyers have also established a defense fund on the teenager’s behalf.In one gut-wrenching video, an armed man matching Rittenhouse’s description tripped over on a street before firing at people who seemed to be making an attempt to disarm him. During the exchange, one person was shot in the head and another in the chest around 11:45 p.m. and never got up. Another video appears to show the teenager firing several shots—before getting up and walking toward police vehicles with his hands up in apparent surrender. A third video appears to show him running away and holding his rifle, where he is heard apparently uttering into his phone, “I just killed somebody.” While authorities have not yet released any names, family and friends have identified Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake, and Joseph “Jojo” Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha as the two who were killed, according to several local media outlets. Friends also say Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, was shot in the arm during the incident and was expected to survive. Grosskreutz was in Kenosha with the social justice reform group the People's Revolution Movement of Milwaukee, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast.“I had to watch my friend die on Facebook, I had to watch my city burn down,” Marcus Starks, a 35-year-old Kenosha native, and friend of Huber, previously told The Daily Beast. He proceeded to turn his ire to Rittenhouse, the new vigilante prince of the far-right.“That boy had no business being here, let alone with open carry,” Starks told The Daily Beast, adding, “If you’re gonna close this town, close it all the way down.”Officer Rusten Sheskey Identified as Cop Who Shot Jacob BlakeIn a separate video seemingly shot at the boarded-up gas station where Rittenhouse appeared in a Daily Caller video, an individual resembling Rittenhouse is seen chatting with police officers and other vigilante guards. Rittenhouse, whose social media accounts are rife with support for pro-police causes and his affinity for guns, also was interviewed by a Daily Caller reporter before the shootings. “So people are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” Rittenhouse replies in the video posted on Twitter after being asked what he’s doing at the protest. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself obviously. I also have my med kit.”The Kenosha Police Department said Friday nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct on Aug. 26 after officers received a tip about “suspicious” vehicles with out-of-state license plates meeting up in a remote parking lot. Cops followed the vehicles—which included a black school bus, a break truck, and a tan minivan—to a gas station where some people were attempting “to fill multiple fuel cans.” The vehicles contained items like helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks, and suspected controlled substances, cops said.A Facebook spokesperson said Thursday that none of Rittenhouse’s accounts were reported prior to the shooting. Nor did the company find any evidence that suggested the teenager followed a self-declared militia group, the Kenosha Guard, on the platform—nor was he invited to their event for Tuesday evening, according to Facebook.Still, he seemed to establish himself quickly on the scene. And while outsiders often show up at BLM protests purporting to keep peace, they have also shown a remarkable capacity for—deliberately or otherwise—inciting violence.One of the first prominent instances of property damage tied to George Floyd-era protests, in which a masked man smashed windows in Minneapolis in late May, appears to have been the work of a white supremacist disguised as an anti-fascist, investigators later claimed in an affidavit. Meanwhile, even as initial reports suggested most or all arrests at the Minneapolis-area chaos were from out of state, nearly all of those people were later revealed to be locals. This week, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was one of the first on the far right to fervently defend Rittenhouse, stating on his show Infowars Wednesday that the violence was just an act of self-preservation against what he described as “a community overthrow of the country.” “I told you they’re going to ratchet this up toward the election and try to make the whole thing racial. But it’s not—it’s about a globalist takeover,” Jones said.Jones was among several right-wing pundits defending Rittenhouse’s actions. The Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog, wrote multiple articles based on the extremely graphic videos, seemingly justifying Rittenhouses’s actions as self-defense.In a post now taken-down by Twitter, Ann Coulter declared Rittenhouse should be her president. A contributor for Turning Point USA, a right-wing pro-Trump student organization founded by Charlie Kirk, defended the actions as a “justified shooting,” while former Major League Baseball player Aubrey Huff tweeted on Thursday that Rittenhouse is a “national treasure.”Unrest in Kenosha was also an implicit theme during the third night of the Republican National Convention—even if no one appeared to explicitly embrace Rittenhouse’s alleged actions. Vice President Mike Pence condemned "the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country.”“The violence must stop whether in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha too,” he added. Even Donald Trump Jr. has inched toward Rittenhouse's defense: The president’s son on Thursday liked a tweet from far-right conspiracy-theorist Mike Cernovich about the teenager’s “Mostly Peaceful Self Defense Initiative.”Aker, the Kenosha native, said even “pockets of libertarians” in the city were defending Rittenhouse. “In their minds, and the way I’ve seen them talking about it, they’re hailing Rittenhouse as a hero,” she told The Daily Beast. “I think the armed militia agitators, while they don’t represent a lot of Kenosha, showed the world the cooperation that is going on between white racist citizens, the children they’re grooming for violence and hate, and law enforcement,” she added. “It’s been more under the surface until this situation, and this really forced it into plain view. It’s probably a good thing that we’re talking about it and seeing it for what it is now. That’s the only good thing to come out of all this.” Officials on Wednesday were already anticipating—if also perhaps inviting—more chaos with a different kind of outsider: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced National Guard troops from Arizona, Michigan, and Alabama, were being deployed to assist local law enforcement as a city-wide curfew remains in place.“Our town not finna be the same no more,” Elicia Pavlovich, a 29-year-old Kenosha native, told The Daily Beast. “It’s never been like this. Never. Seeing this sight, it just hurts me.”—With reporting by Grace Del VecchioRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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