#important note: if literally any single one of you tries to harass this individual in literally ANY way

[flagellant]

tagging slurs for people i care about who dont want to see them doesnt make either one of us less of a fag please stop feeding this divisive bullshit discourse and go outside. (with love (genuine))

cool! so you're able to comprehend there's a difference between "sanitizing myself and my space for random strangers' entitlement, leading to enforced silence of my identity" and what you're talking about, yes?

because--and i do genuinely mean this with respect and good intent, because you actually put your name on this and that is something that i will never not respect and take genuinely--you can say this is stated with genuine love all you want, but the fact remains that you are a completely random stranger who i've never seen or spoken to before, demanding me to sanitize myself and my space for your entitlement.

tldr: no, i'm gonna actually keep doing what i'm doing rather than feed into the idea that random strangers telling me to stop using or censor my identity for their sakes will not just lead to bigots going "oh cool so based on this if i word it right i can just make all these queer faggots go shove themselves in a hole/closet and die quietly about it", you know, like TERFs openly admit to doing with the whole queer-is-a-slur thing,

[prorevenge]

Bully me for months? I'll hit you where it hurts the most, literally.

I want to preface this by saying I'm not proud of what I've done here. To the casual observer, what I did might seem like justice, but, really, I wish it didn't have to go as far as it did. I want my story to be a cautionary tale of what happens when bullying isn't taken seriously. I don't want this story to inspire you to do what I did, but as to what happens when people don't make the right choices the first time. Also, TL;DR at the bottom, the quotes aren't exact, and apologies if this seems a little all over the place. It's not easy for me to bring up stories like this, but I felt maybe I'd do some good by sharing it.

For as long as I can remember, I had a habit of bottling up my emotions. My single father is a staunch believer in traditional masculinity, including the idea that men and boys shouldn't cry. By my early to mid teens, I succumbed to this outdated idea, and accepted my fate as a quiet, stoic drone that just took orders, respected authority, and did hard work (especially manual labor.)

Enter my high school, which had a huge problem with bullying. The worst kids by far were the trashy "gangsta" kids (their words, not mine) from the inner city who targeted anybody they considered weaker than them. I was a pretty muscular 15 year old, but that didn't stop them from saying things like "Dude, you're so fat," or "Wassamatta, fattie? Lose your Twinkies on the way over?" In class, it was mostly petty annoyance: taking my pencil, sticking gum in my hair, insults. They got physical when the teachers weren't looking. Tripping me in the hall and pretending it was an accident; slamming my head against the locker, hitting me with footballs or soccer balls and saying a fake "whoops, sorry!" By themselves, it didn't seem that bad, but enough grains of sand add up to a huge pile, and, at that point, I was up to my waist in it.

Of course, the school didn't do anything about it. Teachers would either tell me "I'll take care of it," and then nothing ever changed, or I'd get something stupid like "I didn't see it. There's nothing I can do" or "You know, if I stopped class every time a kid was acting up, we'd never get anything done." Sure, and if a tree falls in the forest, it didn't make a sound because you didn't hear it. My father wasn't any help either. He'd tell me things like "there's gonna be people like that everywhere you go," or "if you're crying about this, you'll never make it in life," basically telling me to go suck it up because there are worse things out there. As a kid, I was hurt by this, but I was 15, so my self-esteem had been run over by a Combine a few times by now. For months, I just kept ignoring and waiting, hoping my teachers would keep their word about dealing with this problem. Sadly, it seemed they'd rather prioritize pep rallies and Career Aptitude Tests than do their job in keeping kids safe.

By around Spring, I'd had enough. By now, my sadness and annoyance had transmuted into boiling rage that I'd been keeping in me for far too long. If nobody was going to fight for me, I'd do it for myself, literally. I devoted the majority of my weekend to prepping for a showdown on Monday.

One of the few good things about my father is that how knowledgeable he is in self-defense. He believed it was important for a man to learn to fight, so he had me take several different kinds of martial art classes. If I was gonna fight a bully, I had to make it a proper fight. I then researched about Krav Maga, a branch of martial arts that's basically a military-style form of self defense, meant to train you how to fight if you were ever in danger "outside the arena." No rules, no balanced teams, no referees; just you and your need for survival. One of the components of Krav Maga is knowing the body's biggest "weak spots," ones that maximize the most amount of pain when hurt. Things like the groin, toes, and eyes were obvious, but you could also hit the knees, solar plexus, and even the spine. Since my classes didn't teach Krav Maga (you had to be 16 at the time,) I watched many online videos, making mental notes of the techniques used. It was almost always the same kid or group of kids that bullied me, so I already knew what they looked like, and, more importantly, where to strike.

On Monday, I waited for the next chance to come for the bullies to attack. To my surprise, they kept quiet for the most part. Maybe this was one of my lucky days where I'd actually get some work done. Then, while I was crunching for an exam during lunch, one of the bullies, a regular, spilled my water all over my textbook, and saying, "Whoops, sorry!" As he and his pals started walking away laughing, I got a good look at the back of the guy's neck. I raised my fist, aiming for the middle where I'd likely hit his spinal column.

WHAM! I knocked the guy over to the ground. That's when all Hell broke lose. His friends tried tackling me away, and I tried remembering to hit all their weak points: eyes, throat, groin, and jaw. It was fairly sloppy attempt at Krav Maga given my inexperience, and the other kids trying to fight back, but it got the effect I wanted. Of course, I didn't come out unscathed. I got punched in the jaw, a bloody nose, a bruise to the forehead, and more than a few kicks in the family jewels. The other kids noticed us fighting, with some going to get a teacher while others watched in a mix of shock and excitement. Eventually, the principal and a few other teachers pulled us apart, and sent us to the office, after our injuries were treated.

The principal talked with us individually while the assistant principal called all our parents. When it was my turn, I explained what happened. At some point, the principal said, "Why didn't you tell the teacher?" At that moment, I just snapped, somehow managing to sound even angrier than when I was fighting a few minutes ago. "I ALREADY TOLD THE DAMNED TEACHERS, LIKE A MILLION FUCKING TIMES, BUT NOBODY WAS DOING SHIT ABOUT IT! NOBODY! YOU TELL ME OVER AND OVER 'I'LL TAKE CARE OF IT, I'LL TAKE CARE OF IT,' BUT NOBODY EVER FUCKING DOES! I WOULDN'T HAVE FELT LIKE I HAD TO DO THIS OF SOMEBODY HERE ACTUALLY DID THEIR DAMNED JOB FOR ONCE!" I got an extra week of suspension for yelling.

Much to my surprise, my father was rather quiet about the whole thing. Normally, my father had the temperament of a dragon, but maybe this whole fight touched his inner "macho man" that made him go easier on me.

On the car ride home, he said calmly, but firmly, "What happened? And tell me the truth." I told him, "They wouldn't stop picking on me, so I defended myself." I waited to hear my father make some snide remark about hurt feelings, but he just said, "Were you in danger?" I paused for a moment, and said, "...Yes." I knew I was exaggerating, but maybe this could open my father's eyes to see how much I was hurting. He was quiet for a minute, and then said, "I can't judge on your situation 'cause I wasn't there, but it's in a boy's nature to be aggressive sometimes, and it sounds like those bullies were just using it for harm. I also know you well enough t'know you wouldn't lay a finger on somebody unless you felt like you had to." I nodded, holding back tears. "Next time you're ever in that kinda danger, call me. Don't wait for the teachers to fail you again. I'll give 'em Hell." I was stunned, and, once I realized what'd just happened, I smiled. That's one of the few redeeming qualities about my father. As toxic and narcissistic as he was, he was an expert on bringing vengeance to those who deserved it.

During my suspension, one of the bullies' parents wanted to press assault charges on me, but my father threatened to counter-sue the school AND the parents for letting the bullying go on for so long. Thankfully, nobody had to go to court as the bullies' credibility sank faster than the Titanic. Once word got around that I fought back to stop the bullying (rather than the strong, quiet guy going psycho,) more kids decided to come forward to the principal about their experience being bullied, too, and how they also went to the teachers for help. This included a few girls who were being sexually harassed by these kids. This was a PR nightmare for the school that left a permanent stain on their reputation among the locals. In the end, the bullies got expelled, some faced charges for sexual harassment, and I got transferred to a different high school. I guess I'm a little proud that I inspired some other troubled kids to come forward, but I really didn't like violence. I'm built for self-defense, but I don't like hurting anybody unless it's to protect those I love. I would've much preferred if teachers actually did their job, and "took care of it" before I had to.

I did get a gift certificate for summer classes in Krav Maga for my Sweet 16. Thankfully, I've never had to use it yet.

TL;DR: Bullies spend months torturing me, and teachers won't do anything, so I researched and imitated an advanced martial arts to bring maximum physical pain to my bullies.

(source) story by (/u/aitacrybaby)

[automatismoateo]

In response to a question in a recent thread where someone asked me to go in-depth, here's a description of my experience in Education and teaching Science in Arkansas and why I finally quit. via /r/atheism

Submitted July 11, 2021 at 11:22PM by paxinfernum (Via reddit https://ift.tt/3ALPxPr) In response to a question in a recent thread where someone asked me to go in-depth, here's a description of my experience in Education and teaching Science in Arkansas and why I finally quit.

The only thing that matters

Here's something you need to understand first. In most rural districts, pretty much any idiot can get hired to a position and stay there as long as they don't piss off parents too much. The people hiring you don't really understand what you teach, and the parents don't understand or care what quality teaching is, but they care if you say something that offends their backward sensibilities. What that effectively means is that your ability to teach and stay on has more to do with being in sync with the community, who are usually racist and batshit paranoid. If you aren't in sync with that, you either have to keep your head down, or you will eventually get harassed into leaving due to vague complaints.

Abusive parenting is normal here

Okay. So starting with my student teaching. The woman I worked under was a total fucking psychopath. She bragged in the teachers' lounge about how she disciplined her daughter and people don't discipline their kids like that now. By discipline, I mean she told a story about how she chased her daughter down a hallway, dragged her by the hair of her head, and spanked her until she was raw. This was part of a story where she was bragging about how well behaved her daughter was due to her parenting.

If you're wondering if anyone pushed back against this, the answer is that they didn't. They were nodding their heads in affirmation. That's the problem with rural schools in a nutshell. The community hires from the community, and the community is backward as shit and filled with people who were raised in abusive conservative fundie homes. The parents, by the way, loved that teacher because she wasn't one of those soft "liberal" teachers. Parents, more than anyone else, wanted us to hit their kids and were always disappointed when they didn't get spanked. Child abuse is a way of life down here.

Teachers who are fearful of knowledge

Okay, so this woman was a science teacher. That's what I trained to teach. Science. I did so because I wasn't just one of those "science is awesome" Sagan-heads. I genuinely cared about teaching science as more than just fun facts, but as a methodology for uncovering the truth. I naively went into the field thinking that's what most science teachers would be like. I kind of hoped that I'd at least find a community of like-minded individuals in this ignorant state.

Over my entire teaching career, I literally never met another science teacher like me who was pro-science and pro-skepticism. They were overwhelmingly either just dumb and teaching rotely, or they were conspiratorial and fearful of science. This is exactly what an Arkansas school board wants out of a science teacher. They know they have to teach science, but they are afraid of science and see it as the most dangerous subject to teach in their little fundagelical minds. So they hire people who are afraid of science.

That crazy woman I trained under? She ranted about drones being used to spy on us. She told the kids GMOs were dangerous, and she told them homeopathic medicines were something she'd researched to help her friend with cancer. She wasn't unique in that regard. Every other science teacher I met in Arkansas was terrified of GMOs and had some conspiracy they wanted to rant about. One teacher's bugaboo was allergies and how he thought more people were getting allergies because of chemicals being put in the water. He brushed it off when I said it was probably due to more sensitive testing. Another teacher told their students the most horrendous and completely inaccurate facts about nuclear energy.

They're not sending us their best people

The point is these people weren't the best and brightest. Often, they weren't even adequate. One guy I worked with became a science teacher because he needed something to teach alongside coaching. He was dumb as a box of rocks and just barely passed his praxis exams after three tries. I know most people weren't going to ace these tests like I did, but the cutoff for a passing score in Arkansas is hilariously low. Yet, when he finally passed, it was only by a single point, and he recounted it to me like it was only by the grace of god.

Another teacher, a math teacher who was probably the worst speller I'd ever met, got certified in Texas, which has a lower standard for math, and he transferred his certification to Arkansas. So he only was able to teach math in Arkansas on a technicality. The way it works is that you only have to be recertified if you let your certification lapse. All that's required to recertify is doing 30 hours of PD per year, and then, every couple of years, you have to do the recertification process. But this idiot was too stupid to do that, and he let his certification expire. So then, he was teaching math without a license because he couldn't pass the Arkansas tests. (You're allowed to teach for so long as long as you're pursuing certification.)

Propaganda and Indoctrination

Half of the teachers I met might as well have been missionaries. It's illegal to push your religion or politics on students, but fuck if anyone will actually enforce that. Actually, let me step back there. Fuck if anyone will actually enforce that unless you're liberal or non-Christian. The state is an unofficial conservative theocracy so if the teacher wants to rant about gays or Jesus, there's very little chance any parent will even bother to complain. (Even liberals around here know they're outnumbered and won't win.) Even if the parent complains to the Principal, they'll only "have a word" with the teacher in question, most likely to have a chummy conversation where they eye roll about the parent and discuss ways they can continue to evangelize more subtly.

Even if the Principal is the type who takes this seriously, the teacher will only get a vague note in their file because no school board around here is going to fire a teacher for proselytizing children. They don't want the school to get burned down by an angry mob of Fox News zombies. Even if it makes it to the state ethics board, I've seen the state ethics board literally do nothing about a counselor who ignored a suicidal student, a teacher who was caught drunk driving, a superintendent who was manipulating the system to siphon more money into the school, and so many other things. The only thing the ethics board actually takes a license away for is cheating on standardized testing (got to keep our corporate donors happy) and actually fucking a student. Even if you bring a teacher up on proselytizing, they'll get a warning and be back in the classroom the next day.

So if you're a kid in a rural school, get ready for your teacher to unsubtly tell you about how Jesus is such an important part of their life or straight-up rant about the Democrats. When I was a student in Arkansas schools, I had teachers tell me: 1) All gay people should be thrown in prison 2) HIV-positive patients should be shipped to an island or burned (it was the 90s) 3) the Jews brought the holocaust on to themselves by rejecting Jesus 4) the teacher was boycotting Levis jeans because they supported gay people. That's just a sampling of shit I heard as a kid in Arkansas from freaking teachers.

While working as a teacher, I knew of teachers who latched onto kids with poor home lives and invited them over to their homes so they could do "prayer studies" with them. The kids went because they were kind to them and offered food. In case you're wondering, they got away with this because it was a husband and wife, so parents allowed it. (I'm just going to say that I'm actually quite certain this was entirely above board sex-wise. I knew the individuals, and while I despised what they were doing, I knew they were entirely sincere.)

Another teacher, a Trump supporter, went into a rant about how they needed to give all the teachers guns to fight off school shooters (because restricting guns in any way was tOtAlItArIaNiSm.) I nodded along because I was smart enough to know disagreeing publicly will get you shunned or harassed. All I could think in my head was "Dude, if they ever give you nutters guns, that's the day I quit. There will be 10 dead kids within a week." On that topic, one teacher I know of grabbed a student by the throat because they were pissed at them, and they didn't lose their job.

The history teacher, the one who wanted us to all have guns was teaching that the Civil War was about tariffs. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Hundreds of thousands of people went to war over tariffs that were at their lowest point in decades. It had nothing to do with the people they owned and shackled up like a Saw movie. The Civics teacher pushed Trump election conspiracies.

Another teacher, who had a family member who had a terminal illness and was literally only getting their medical treatment paid through Obamacare would go off on rants about Obama and transgender students.

Harassment

At one point, I was harassed by the campus cop. He found out I was in support of BLM, and literally screamed at me. Later, he transitioned to simply refusing to acknowledge my existence. Like, if I said anything to him, he would pretend he couldn't hear me. The dude was fucking insane and filled with hate. I'm pretty sure his domestic situation with his wife was abusive due to things he said. He was so angry and radicalized that it was never the students I worried would be a mass shooter. It was him. I was literally afraid he would come in one day and shoot the place up. He wasn't an oddity though. Every one of our resource officers was racist and unethical. One was running a vaping ring with students. Another took special joy in cracking down on Latino students.

Eventually, I started getting harassment from students though, and that's what led to me leaving. There are two things that led to increasing harassment. First, I had one conservative student who hated me and surmised that I must be a Clinton supporter. I never said that, but because I was one of the few teachers who didn't violate the rules about discussing religion or politics, they guess that I was a liberal atheist. So they started working to get me fired.

The second thing is that the Arkansas standards changed so that teaching evolution became part of my classroom standards. Just so you know, most schools in Arkansas don't actually teach evolution, even though they're supposed to. The way it works is teachers put it last on their things to teach, and oopsie, I just ran out of time at the end of the year. Some teachers know evolution is real, but they don't teach it because the backlash is too much to take. Others don't teach it because they're fundagelicals themselves, so they go along with the informal conspiracy to not teach evolution. I say informal conspiracy because it's not like they all get together in a back room and decide this. It's just the culture and incentives are all there to not teach it.

I actually taught evolution, and while I had always dealt with some degree of negativity, looking back, I have to say that was the point where I started getting a lot more. I can't emphasize enough how brainwashed these kids were. I'm not saying all of them because there were absolutely kids who believed in evolution, but they were in a minority and knew to keep their mouths shut. But it's sort of staggering to try to teach the history of the Earth and have a kid repeatedly try to prove to you that there was a global flood.

How harassment actually works in the real world

This is the thing I want people to understand. Harassment in the real world isn't usually as obvious as in a movie. No one drives by your house and throws a brick through your window. No one calls you up and leaves threatening messages. No one will ever fire you for being liberal or an atheist. Because these people are dumb as fuck, but they're also very clever at being shitty people. They know they can't walk up and say to the school board, "Fire so and so because they're teaching evolution." They know that's illegal technically.

So they just start making up vague complaints. Principals, even ones who were supportive like my last Principal, are reactive. If a parent comes to them to complain about a teacher, they're going to assume the teacher did something wrong and needs to be talked to. So the girl who found out I was a Hillary Clinton supporter suddenly decided I "made her uncomfortable" and "looked her weird." The great thing about these types of innuendos and character assaults is that you don't have to provide any real facts. It's all about how you just don't like that person. Remember that teachers are one of the few professions where you can actually be fired simply because the community doesn't like you.

So that fell flat because, like I said, my Principal was actually decent and understood how flimsy that was. So then, that girls boyfriend made a complaint about how I'd yelled at him in front of all the students. Unfortunately for him, this supposed incident happened while we were in a part of the school with cameras so it was obviously bullshit. However, parents calling in upset is still a big deal so I was told that I should try to be nicer to him in the future and win the parents over.

The point is that it's basically death by a thousand cuts from little gripes and exaggerated concerns. Another student flat-out lied and said I cussed them out in class. I know that some of this was actually instigated by a staff member who didn't like me. So they encourage students to complain about me. At one point, I know they actually set up a kid's parents to lodge a complaint against me. I know this because the language of the complaint was obviously written by them, and when I was having the parent conference, they actually stayed behind work (something they never did) and didn't leave our adjoining rooms until it was over. They apparently wanted to listen in and see how it went. This conservative teacher at various times: told me the wrong place for a meeting, got kids to say they would show up for an after school event and then not show up, convinced an entire group of students to quit a club I was sponsoring, spread rumors about me to parents.

I'm done

The final straw was covid. I tried to stick it out, but the day a kid told me he wasn't going to wear a mask because "Biden isn't the real President" was the point where I decided I was done. This came from teachers too. The biology teacher wore a mask below their nose. The staff refused to stop having potlucks throughout the entire pandemic. Some people can't be saved.

edit: I forgot to mention the English teacher I met while I was doing my student-teacher training. She was forcing her class to write essays on how Obama wasn't a real US Citizen. All throughout my teacher program, I'd been told over and over that you could get fired for talking politics in the classroom, and this bitch was literally forcing kids to write essays about how Obama was a secret Muslim. And nothing was done about it. She could get away with it because Arkansas is so white and racist. To put it into context, the county she was teaching in was 94% white and voted for Trump by 78% in 2020.

[mathewingram]

The misshapen pieces of Google’s disinformation magazine

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Jigsaw, a unit of Google previously known as Google Ideas, recently launched a digital magazine called The Current, which aims to “explore today’s digital threats and solutions.” There isn’t much exploring to be found in the inaugural edition, however. It’s mostly a cursory overview of the problem of disinformation, alongside brief descriptions of some tools that Google has used to combat the problem, gussied up with a coat of digital paint, along with two contemporary art pieces that seem only loosely relevant, and an interactive map. It’s a magazine best not read too closely. But I did anyway.

It’s unclear why Jigsaw decided to publish The Current now, but it’s probably not a coincidence that Google—and its parent company, Alphabet—is under pressure from legislators in the US and Europe to take action against misinformation. Founded in 2010 and run by Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, Jigsaw says its mandate is to “forecast and confront emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer.” The reality is not as bright. Last summer, Vice described Jigsaw as “a toxic mess”; a dozen current and former staffers complained of an environment of mismanagement and poor leadership in an organization that, “despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better.” In one case in 2018, Jigsaw set up a fake political activism site—putting political misinformation out into the world—and then hired a Russian troll factory to attack it.

The Current looks nice, at least. With a toned-down, almost monochromatic color scheme, it looks like a high-end-furniture catalog. It’s also interactive: when a user hovers over text, the mouse arrow turns into a Magic Marker icon and a pop-up window encourages readers to send in comments. But if you click on “send a message,” you see a small box with three choices: “Agree,” “Disagree,” and “Want to know more.” Your ability to weigh in, it turns out, is limited to one of three pre-programmed responses. The text of The Current’s “articles” is organized into snippets not much longer than Netflix promotional descriptions, with links inviting you to “Dive Deeper.” Click a first link, and you go to a page titled “The Problem,” which explains, for instance, that disinformation campaigns are “professional and coordinated—not unlike marketing campaigns.”

A section called Tactics has a series of graphics representing different approaches to spreading disinformation, including “brigading” (an online harassment tactic in which a group launches a coordinated attack on an individual), botnets (coordinated groups of automated accounts), and hacking. Hovering over them brings up explanations so brief as to almost be wrong—for “sock puppets,” the entry says only “online accounts run by someone masquerading as someone else.” A section called Channels has four subsections, including manipulated images, memes, and viral messages. The “Meme” section says that Russian trolls tried to use memes to influence energy markets by protesting a pipeline, a single (bad) example from a vast category of behavior. The audience for this information would presumably be someone who has literally never heard the term “meme.”

To show that at least some of the magazine is based on original Jigsaw research, a section called “Outcomes” includes a quote from a “pseudonymous white nationalist Twitter and Gab user banned from both platforms multiple times for disinformation and trolling, whom Jigsaw interviewed.” His message? That engagement is an important indicator of whether your campaign is working. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation. “Countermeasures” includes tiny text boxes with messages like: “Technology companies have adopted policies that prohibit many deceptive behaviors, such as misrepresenting identity, and enforce these policies through investigative processes.” True, but generally un-enlightening. In all, The Current has the feeling of something Google’s marketing department cooked up in a hurry. If it were a presentation for ninth-grade civics class, it would get high marks. But for something produced by a $900 billion company that purports to have high-minded goals, it’s pretty weak tea. It deserves a C+ at best.

Here’s more on Jigsaw and its new magazine:

A naive chat-bot: The penultimate section of The Current contains two art pieces that seem only tangentially related to disinformation. The first, Baby Faith, is described as a “young and naive web-based chat-bot struggling to learn how to identify human emotion,” and consists of a chat window into which a reader can post responses to questions and get responses from (bad) automated chat software. Baby Faith’s “difficulties in identifying emotion online mirror the challenges of emotionally-driven disinformation campaigns,” the description says. The second is a monologue from The Picture of Dorian Gray that has been adapted as a musical sonnet to “evoke the exhaustion in dealing with social media disinformation.” Clicking on it takes you to a separate website run by the Rhizome art collective, where a crowdsourced chorus sings the piece.

A disinfo map: The final section of The Current is a “disinformation visualizer” that links to campaigns identified by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a nonprofit that studies disinformation. The fine print notes that Alphabet “does not endorse these research findings or their characterization of disinformation campaigns.” But if Google doesn’t endorse them, why are they featured in its magazine? Each one is a couple paragraphs at most—a few short sentences outlining a disinformation campaign that was run in Ukraine by Russian trolls, for example. In most cases, the text boxes note that the information in them comes from public news reports about the campaigns in question.

Manipulation: At the same time as it launched its new magazine, Jigsaw also launched a tool designed called Assembler that is designed to help journalists and fact-checkers determine whether images have been manipulated to create disinformation. The tool is a collection of several existing techniques for detecting common manipulation methods, such as changing image brightness and using copied pixels to cover something up. It also includes a detector that spots “deepfakes” that use an algorithm called StyleGAN to generate realistic imaginary faces. These detection techniques feed into a master model that tells users how likely it is that an image has been manipulated. 

Other notable stories:

Twitter is experimenting with adding colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures, according to a leaked demo obtained by NBC News. Under this model, which Twitter said is just one possible iteration of a new policy aimed at fighting disinformation, misleading information posted by public figures would be corrected directly beneath the tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform, and possibly other users who will participate in a new “community reports” feature.

According to an email sent to staff, the Los Angeles Times is offering voluntary buyouts less than two years after biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the paper and promised to turn it around. The California Times, the company that owns the Los Angeles Times, announced buyout packages to employees who have worked at the company for least two years. A”separation plan” that CNN Business reviewed says “employees of California Times and its subsidiaries” are eligible for the buyout. The California Times also owns The San Diego Union-Tribune, the now-defunct Spanish-language Hoy and several small community papers.

Maria Bustillos, CJR’s public editor for MSNBC, writes about the comic-book world of political journalism as portrayed on network TV. “Heroes and villains make for entertaining and digestible television; they simplify a complicated world, and make it less frightening,” she says. “The reduction of political actors to stick figures in a story of Good vs. Evil is a key part of what makes cable news tick.” Author Neil Postman’s contention that television has turned our culture “into one vast arena for show business” is truer than ever, Bustillos writes.

Ross Barkan writes for CJR about what it was like dealing with Mike Bloomberg’s media-relations staff when he was mayor of New York City. “Bloomberg’s press office knew that befriending reporters, or creating the appearance of camaraderie, was crucial to the mission. Off-the-record chats were frequent. So were after-work beers,” he says. “Emails were always answered. As a young reporter at the bottom of the pecking order, I couldn’t claim to belong to the inner ring of these reporter-staff relationships. But I could still feel, in some way, that I knew Bloomberg’s team.”

Sources tell Bloomberg News that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has purchased the coveted advertising space at the top of the YouTube home page for early November, leading up to voting day. Two people with knowledge of the transaction told the news service that the Trump campaign has bought the top spot on the site, which can cost as much as $1 million per day. The Trump campaign bought the digital real estate nationwide, according to one of the people familiar with the deal, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The father of a reporter who was shot to death on camera in 2015 has filed a complaint against YouTube with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the Google-owned video hosting site puts the onus on users to notify it of violent content, and then often doesn’t remove it. The filing calls these practices “deceptively burdensome” and says the site “utterly fails” to follow through on promises to take down content. Reporter Alison Parker was murdered on live television, along with her cameraman, Adam Ward, in 2015 and video of the killing remains on YouTube, according to the complaint.

Political ads are flooding into Hulu, Roku and other digital streaming services because they aren’t subject to the same regulations that cover television networks and cable broadcasters, the Washington Post reports. “Nothing requires these fast-growing digital providers to disclose whom these ads targeted and who viewed them,” the paper says. “The absence of federal transparency rules stands in stark contrast with traditional TV broadcasters, such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which for decades have been required to maintain limited public files about political ads.”

Long-time media industry executive Peter Winter writes about the lessons that can be learned from the recent bankruptcy filing of the McClatchy newspaper chain. “In business, every threat masks an opportunity that should have been obvious. The Internet offered newspaper companies the rare prospect of product reinvention and economic revival,” says Winter. “But all they could see was a chance to throw away the ink and paper and sell the trucks, the same product delivered at less cost and sold as if the age of targeted and measurable advertising had never arrived.”

In the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Facebook found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory, according to a report from the Washington Post. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent. But in a meeting to decide what to do about it, Joel Kaplan — a former official in the George W. Bush White House who was the head of Facebook’s Washington office — argued that the social network couldn’t take all the pages down because doing so would “disproportionately affect conservatives,” who didn’t see it as fake news.

The New York Times writes about how the new owners of the Big Bend Sentinel newspaper in Marfa, Texas bought the building next door and have turned it into a bar and event space that is attached to the paper’s newsroom. Revenues from the space help subsidize the journalism, according to Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, two transplants from New York who bought the paper last year from previous owners Robert and Rosario Halpern, who published it for 25 years.

The misshapen pieces of Google’s disinformation magazine was originally published on mathewingram.com/work

[metawitches]

In season 6, episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD, Melinda May returns to peak fighting form after an injury sidelined her for most of season 5. She single handedly takes on EvilCoulson Sarge’s team, including the Jaco the Giant and Butterfly Snowflake the dirty street fighter. She doesn’t win the fight, but she does gather important intel, free the hostage and jog Sarge’s memory of the word “Coulson”, so it’s a win for the mission.

The other main storyline this episode is Fitz and Enoch’s big space adventure. They’ve signed on to work a long haul run with a crew of xenophobic Sivians in order to get to Naro-Adzia, the planet where cryo pods are made (Jenna was right in her prediction). Fitz disguised his eye color and Enoch taught him the language so that he could blend in with the Sivians. But Enoch forgot to share some important cultural points with Fitz, which lead to them being outed as Terrans. Fitz has to think fast in order to save himself and Enoch without allowing the rest of the crew to be killed instead.

This episode allows viewers to get to know the alien culture that Fitz is involved with better, and the one that Sarge is part of. The writers also take time to further explore Marcus Benson and Agent Keller’s characters. We find out a little more about Sarge and his crew as individuals, including the fact that some teammates are disposable, a very un-Coulson-like attitude.

Recap

Sarge and his crew begin the episode with a convenience store robbery which is part recon, part supply run, part callback to original Coulson’s exploits. They keep up a running commentary about what they think of this planet, as compared to the many other planets they’ve encountered. After examining, then rejecting, a pair of aviator sunglasses, Sarge picks up a cleanser, motor oil and duct tape.

He doesn’t have Coulson’s love of organic soaps, then.

Butterfly Snowflake knocks things off the shelves for fun and picks up a Cincinnati mug. Jaco tries a big blue Slurpee, which gives him a brainfreeze headache. He likes it, though, and hands one to Sarge. Sarge takes a sip from the straw, then leaves the Slurpee next to the cash register.

They move on to harassing the cashier. Sarge says that you can tell a lot about a planet by its currency. When he finds out that this part of Earth uses paper money, he dismissively says, “One of those. At least it’s lighter than coin.” On the other hand, they’re all excited about how much the planet has to offer.

Sarge notices the cashier looking at the gun hidden under the counter. He says, “People fantasize about doing something heroic at times like these.” He takes the gun and aims it at the cashier. “You don’t look like a hero to me.” Then he fires at one of the merchandise displays.

Snowflake gathers up the merchandise he just liberated. Sarge notes that the weapon is so primitive, that it should be easy to do what they came here to do. They each take a last minute item, then leave. Sarge takes a radio and Pax takes a map of Ohio. Jaco brought snacks. Snowflake snagged some electronics.

As they walk away, Sarge slips on the new wraparound sunglasses he chose, in Coulson’s signature move. He carries the box radio like it’s a briefcase. They drive off in the truck, and after a moment, Sarge pulls the lever to make the truck invisible.

Agent Fox is really deceased. It says so in his SHIELD file. Mack leads a memorial service for him in ops, then segues straight into handing out the assignments for the day. Runko will scan for disturbances while Keller and Yo-Yo go over the security footage from the museum. May will supervise the search for Sarge’s truck.

May questions why Mack hasn’t let the entire agency know that there’s someone out there with Coulson’s face. Mack doesn’t want to start an unnecessary panic. They won’t broadcast it until they have an explanation. She asks if he doesn’t believe her. Mack denies it, but his excuses don’t make sense.

It could take a while to identify why the being looks like Coulson. Meanwhile, one agent after another will be shocked to meet up with their beloved former boss in the form of a villain. What happened with Fox will continue to happen. It’s Mack, with his hatred of any kind of robot, alien, duplicate or fake human, who can’t handle facing what Sarge/Coulson might be. The others seem fine, and they need to know what they’re walking into.

Sarge pulls the truck into a shipping container storage yard and parks. They all congregate in the trailer, which serves as their HQ. Jaco is using a breathing apparatus, and coughing. Pax gets angry with him, annoyed by the coughs. Sarge tells him to learn to deal with it, since Jaco hasn’t had his home atmosphere in 9 years.

Snowflake shows Sarge a magazine ad, pointing out than she’ll need some new clothes in order to pass unnoticed on Earth. He promises they’ll get her some.

Sarge asks Pax to check the invisibility cloaking device to make sure it’s stable, but Pax whines that Tinker was the invisibility guy. Then he notices Snowflake looking through Tinker’s bag, and complains that she’s taking his stuff when he’s barely dead. Snowflake tells him that she looking for the PEGs. She confirms that they aren’t there, and confirms that they don’t have any more, now that Tinker turned to concrete with the stones in his pockets.

Pax complains some more about Tinker’s ending. He tells Sarge the they all should have been safely in the truck, including Tinker. Sarge and Snowflake remind him that they always send a team as trailblazers to clear a path for the truck. Pax thinks it should be Jaco alone, since Jaco can survive anything (“a trail of war hammers”). Snowflake agrees that Jaco is an old soul.

An old soul who’s still wheezing into the breathing apparatus. Not looking terribly invincible right now.

Pax brings up the most recent planet they visited.

Pax: “But we have to scramble and torch the place early because she can’t keep her knife in her pants?”

Sarge: “All true so far.”

Pax: “You let her get off. We had a talker, Sarge. But she made him spill his guts, literally.”

Snowflake: “To be reincarnated.”

Pax: “And it all went to hell. And now we’re down a man.”

Sarge: “You want to do things differently?”

Pax: “No. But I certainly don’t want to go digging for PEGs again.”

Jaco shoves a newspaper with a jewelry store ad at him.

Sarge: “See, you were right, Pax. This rock has it all. Now are you good to come with me to secure the exit while these two scout the site, or should we discuss that, too?”

Pax: “No, I’m good. I’m just sorting through it. Tinker died. He was a friend.”

Sarge pats his shoulder: “That’s what friends are for.”

Mack and May check in with Dr Benson, who is examining Tinker’s body, which is still embedded in the concrete wall, a section of which has been brought to the lab for him to work on. Mack tells Benson that he’s having new evidence from a convenience store robbery in Ohio sent to the lab.

Benson says to add it to the pile. He can’t believe he traded tenure for the chance to work in this lab 24/7. He assumes the current crisis is related to one of SHIELD’s previous “mistakes”, then lists off a few of the items from the long list of mistakes: nanomasks, Inhumans, fear manifestations…

Not impressed with Benson and his crustiness so far. He probably cut back or quit drinking when he started his new job, and consequently hates the world even more than usual, since he’s going through alcohol withdrawal.

But no matter the excuse, if his reaction to reading those case files isn’t to get excited about the amazing things he never knew existed, and instead it’s to declare them all mistakes, SHIELD might not be the right place for him. Howard Stark must be spinning in his grave.

Benson brings up LMDs, and suggests that might be an explanation for Tinker and the new Coulson. He says that he wants to talk to the idiot who designed them, putting particular emphasis on the word idiot. Mack, of course, agrees with Benson about the LMDs being the worst thing ever. May says it would be difficult for him to talk to the inventor.

Cut to Fitz, who’s working as a plumber/engineer on an alien ship. He clears the goop blocking a pipe, rescuing the life support system for the ship’s population of viscous Xandarian snails, a delicacy and one of the true delights of the galaxy, as everyone knows. Everyone but Fitz. He thinks they’re digusting. He thought they were disgusting in his other incarnation in the future Lighthouse as Boshtok the Marauder, too, so it’s a consistent character trait.

His coworkers question his taste and ask where he’s from. Fitz gives the wrong answer, since the northern part of Sivos is an irradiated wasteland.  They soon ambush him, deducing that he was changing the look of his eyes with an iriscope (the device he used in episode 1). The Sivian Foreman punches Fitz, which causes his eyes to revert back to their normal look.

She wants to know what else he’s hiding, and goes to open the closet he’d been trying to get into when the Sivians found him. Enoch is waiting inside. Viro, the evil captain, has been watching, and orders Fitz and Enoch taken into custody. He’s about to have them thrown out an airlock when Fitz starts talking, telling Viro that the ship needs work and Fitz is the only one who can do it. He’s the best engineer on the ship and Enoch is the best Xandarian snail farmer.

He convinces Viro that the airlock is broken and the heat sheids are misaligned, so the ship won’t survive the next jump. Then he lists some of the repairs he’s already made. But Viro doesn’t want anything to do with Terran scum, so he still plans to throw them out of the aiirlock, until Fitz offers to work for free. Viro agrees to allow Fitz and Enoch to become his slaves, if they can make enough repairs by the time they get to Naro-Adzia.

Sarge and Pax are on top of the shipping containers, taking a look around and enjoying the fresh air, which they don’t get very often. Pax likes Earth so much that he suggests they slow down and enjoy the place for a while, “before it’s reduced to ash.”

Does anyone remember giving consent for the Earth to be reduced to ash? Who signed that contract?

Sarge thinks that stopping to enjoy where they are sounds like powering down. Pax counters that it’s more like charging up. He asks if Sarge ever just relaxed in his original past life. Sarge gives him the evil eye and Pax backs off, saying they’ll get the story of Sarge’s mysterious past eventually. Sarge doesn’t plan on it.

A security guard interrupts them. Pax tries to talk their way out of it, but it doesn’t work. Sarge shoots him, saying it was worth trying to avoid violence.

May suggests that Mack visit Keller personally, since agent Fox was from his hometown and Keller got him the interview for SHIELD. Now Keller feels responsible for Fox’s death. Mack declines, saying he thinks Yo-Yo will be doing the honors.

Keller may have someone to comfort him, but it’s not the same as a visit from the Director of SHIELD, the kind of visit Coulson would frequently make to loved ones of fallen agents. Keller told us in episode 1 how much Mack’s respect means to him.

Yo-Yo stops in to see Keller and says all the right things. She tells him to stop going over Fox’s death in his mind and trying to figure out how he could have changed the outcome. He’ll make himself crazy. Keller identifies with Fox, because their hometowns were next to each other, but Fox was 10 years younger. Elena says she’s here for Keller if he needs her.

They get an alarm telling them that there’s been a Coulson sighting near the convenience store (at the shipping yard). Mack fills in May and Elena, then makes assignments for the mission to track Sarge and Pax down. Now that someone bedsides Melinda has positvely id’d Sarge/Coulson, he’s ready to inform the rest of the agents.

Benson pokes his head out of the lab to complain that he’s feeling left out. The new department head apparently has one setting, and it’s angry conspiracy theorist, turned up to 11. I really didn’t see that coming from one of Andrew Garner’s best, most mainstream friends.

Benson says he was promised transparency, and they’re keeping him in the dark. Mack insists that Benson has access to everything they’ve got. Benson is miffed that no one mentioned Coulson’s habit of dying and coming back to life. The veteran agents are sure that this isn’t THEIR Coulson, so his previous rebirths are irrelevant. Benson is skeptical, since the LMD theory is a bust.

Benson wonders if maybe Coulson never died in the first place, and questions May’s story of Coulson’s death, suggesting she lied and even participated in a cover up of body stealing. May tells him to go back to the bar and stay there if he can’t focus on the mission at hand, which is to find a way to get rid of the entity pretending to be Coulson.

Benson has stirred up all of this ish before he’s even bothered to present the evidence he actually has. Nobody but him thought the other Coulson was an LMD, so why get so worked up that he wasn’t one? He has access to Coulson’s ~25 year long service record. Did he ask someone to go over it with him in detail? The guy had a busy life, much of it classified and likely above Benson’s clearance level. He’s going to have to be more independent than this if he’s going to survive SHIELD.

And, oh yeah, he does have some useful evidence. He just had to waste everyone’s emotional energy and time before presenting it. He was given the straw from Sarge’s Slurpee to take a DNA sample from. He was able to isolate the DNA, and it was an exact match for Phil Coulson.

But before Benson could even see the DNA, he had to strip away radiation markers he’s never seen before and foreign methyl groups that made the sample seem alien.

Methyl-groups= DNA methylation is a process that helps regulate gene expression – so basically he has the same DNA sequence, but isn’t using all of the genes in the same way.

So we have a human who’s been augmented in some way with alien genetic/chemical processing. Know whose origin story that sounds like to me? Captain Marvel. Coulson, sadly, didn’t get fused with the energy of the Tesseract. But there’s a good chance the Kree or Confederacy took our newly dead Coulson, or one from another timeline, revived him, and altered his biochemistry and memories until he didn’t even know he was human anymore, just like they did with Carol Danvers. They must have either taken him back in time for a while in order to hide him, or used a Coulson from an earlier point in a different timeline. There’s a little bit of Winter Soldier in there, too, since he seems to be on a long-term destructive mission, and now he’s been sent to kill his own people.

Jaco carefully places a metal panel against the inside wall of the truck. Sarge watches him, snacking on something in a bag. Once the panel is in place, Sarge tells Jaco to watch out for Pax. He’s acting like Tinker. Jaco replies, “They all crack sooner or later.” Sarge agrees, saying, “Might not be a bad idea to start looking for replacements.”

Sounds like Tinker’s death wasn’t quite as accidental as it seemed.

Sarge picks up an alien paint gun and paints a 6 foot oval line on the metal panel. He asks Snowflake if another machine is in working order. She thinks so, but Tinker was the expert. They just need to get the PEGs to make it sing.

Sarge: “First the lock in, then we rampage.”

Why do I hear that in a Wayne’s World voice?

Fitz and Enoch make Viro’s repairs and bicker over Xandarian snails and Xenophobia. Enoch thinks it should have been obvious that Fitz should pretend to like snails. Fitz thinks Enoch could have given him a few more details on alien culture to work with. Of course, it wasn’t alien culture that exposed him, it was an alien geography blunder- he said he lived in a far northern irradiated wasteland.

Moving on, Enoch is revealed as the optimist of the pair, who’s sure they’ll get Fitz back into cryo and stop the mass extinction event (which has already been stopped). Fitz thinks their odds are slipping and he just wants to get back to Jemma (who’s also chasing him across the galaxy).

Viro calls them in to say that it took a few hours, but he finally figured out that slaves are more cost effective than paid employees, so the rest of the engineering staff will be disembarking through the airlock well before their stop. Fitz suggests he train the rest of the crew to be more efficient, but Viro really has his heart set on spacing them.

Is it me, or does Viro’s tattoo look like they took a Sharpie and drew it on?

Mack is in his office trying to get a little late night paperwork done. You have to admire his work ethic. His commitment to the job and the people are his strengths as a leader.

Benson joins him in order to engage in a little more mind f–kery. He tells Mack that he’s known for his honesty, which is strange, because he circles around everything before he gets to the truth. He’s only honest when forced, like a true alcoholic.

He wants to know who Coulson was, then he clarifies that he wants to know who Coulson was to May. Mack tells him that Coulson is a memory that’s too painful for May to revisit, but that memory is running around killing people. Benson is suddenly sympathetic and decides he needs to help stop the fake Coulson.

Sarge and the rampagers visit a jewelery store. Sarge works the saleswoman, trying to get her to show him the best stuff. But halfway through, he switches gears and tells her it’s a robbery, without missing a beat or changing his tone of voice. He gives her the same speech as he gave the store clerk about not bothering to be a hero.

Snowflake kills 2 guards and tells them they’ll come back as butterflies. Pax is annoyed with her and tells her they don’t all come back. Sarge tells the saleswoman he didn’t think this would be that violent. He notices that she tripped the silent alarm, but promises not to kill her, since they need her help to get into the vault.

May and Yo-Yo investigate the shipping yard to figure out what Sarge was defending. May asks Yo-Yo if she and Keller are already involved. She tells Yo-Yo that Mack already knows, and to be careful. Yo-Yo is exasperated, because May just told her yesterday to go for it and not worry too much about Mack.

Now May has her own personal workplace romance coming back to haunt her, bigtime.

Mack radios that Sarge and co have been spotted at the jewelry store.

The jewelry saleswoman, Dana, gets the aliens into the vault. Snowflake quickly puts a knife to her throat, lovingly telling her that death is just the beginning. Sarge grumpily tells her she doesn’t have to kill everyone. Some people might be useful later. Then he uses the alien paint gun to make a red oval on the vault wall.

Pax puts a device that looks like an LED puck light on the wall and the matter inside the red circle disappears, revealing the inside of the truck and Jaco, who smiles and waves. The metal panel, red paint and puck device combine to make portable portals. Sarge tells them to stop wasting time.

Meanwhile, out in space, the other engineers are being herded toward their deaths. Fitz can’t stand to sit and watch that happen without trying to stop it. If he did, he couldn’t look Jemma in the eye afterward. He wants to at least try to fight.

Enoch informs Fitz that he’s not that kind of Chronicom. Enoch doesn’t think fighting will work. Fitz might as well go straight to the airlock. Fitz agrees, that’s a good plan.

The SHIELD team, including May, Yo-Yo and Keller, reach the jewelry store. They’re confused that the aliens locked themselves in the vault without an exit strategy. It’s extremely un-Coulson-like. May uses a scanner and discovers an extra person in the vault. They realize the aliens have some kind of tech they use to escape. For lack of a better plan, they work to break into the vault through the door and locks.

The aliens are frustrated by all of the diamonds, gold and jewels they’re finding. Earth people have no sense of value, with their paper money and jewelry made from lumps of carbon. Sarge and his gang need PEGs. (= PiezoElectric Gems= Crystals that are naturally polarized and can generate an electric charge under applied mechanical pressure.)

Dana points them to the cheap quartz and topaz in the bottom drawer. The aliens stock up.

May goes back to the shipping yard to see if they missed something. She notices tire tracks that just disappear. When she throws dirt at the spot where the tracks stop, it forms the outline of a truck. She uses that as her rough guide to climb inside.

Fitz stands near the airlock and bravely, but ineffectually, holds up his wrench, trying to stop Viro from killing everyone else. Viro doesn’t even take him seriously. Fitz steps into the airlock with the other engineers. Viro decides that everyone is replaceable and throws the switch to open the airlock. Enoch and Fitz nod to each other.

Fitz tries one more time to stop Viro from what he’s about to do, but Viro is unmoving. Enoch grabs hold of something as Viro flips the switch and the main cabin loses pressure. Everyone who wasn’t in the airlock is sucked out into space, except Enoch. The female engineer who caught him out, thanks Fitz for his help. He tells the engineers they’re safe now.

Enoch tells Fitz that he was right to assume Viro would be the worst and choose the most violent option available. Fitz says, “There’s a part of me that knows how uncompromising hateful men can be.” He looks haunted as he says it.

Coulson steps outside with the machine they’re planning to use, whatever it is. It looks a lot like a supersized tesseract laser gun/leaf blower. He says he’ll get it powered up.

I can’t be the only one thinking about that giant gun he used when he confronted Loki in Avengers, just before Loki killed him the first time. Hopefully he understands what this one does.

Pax is going through quartz crystals. He tells Jaco to take everything in the vault, since they can sell it all.

May politely knocks on the truck door. When Pax opens up, she punches him in the face and asks where Coulson is. May fights Pax and beats him easily. Jaco the giant is next. He’s about 3 times the size of May, so she gets to show off her skills, but she still beats him. Then it’s a brief tussle with with Snowflake to free the hostages and close the portal with Snowflake isolated in the vault.

May is in the truck, and it’s time for round 2 with Jaco after his break. He sends her to the foor, then lets Snowflake out of the vault. Snowflake never wants to be left out of the killing, and those 2 are best buds.

Dana the hostage runs past Sarge, screaming her head off, even though they’re in the middle of nowhere. Sarge just watches. His day has gotten out of control. He heads back into the truck, where May is taking on Snowflake and Jaco by herself, and holding her own.

The Cavalry is back in town.

Sarge steps into the truck and makes a dry comment about their inabilty to function without him for 3 minutes. May has momentarily subdued her adversaries, so she stops and stares at him, saying, “Coulson?”

That gives Snowflake time to grab the portal panel and put it on the floor behind May, where it still has an opening into the vault. Snowflake shoves the panel against May’s heels so that she falls backwards through the portal. Sarge reaches into the vault and grabs the puck device. As soon as the device clears the vault, the portal closes.

Why do I feel like it’s not the first time they’ve used that trick, including the part where Sarge causes a distraction? Coulson always did have that side of him that loved a good con.

But, wow, Pax is useless. Placing my bet now that Sarge decides he wants May as one of the replacements on the team.

Anyhow, the rest of the team finally get through the door just after the portal closes. They’re surprised to find May alone in the vault. Yo-Yo asks her, “What happened?” May tells her, “I lost.” She has some of her old fire inside when she says it.

Sarge and Jaco drive the truck away. Jaco accuses Sarge of freezing when May said the word Coulson. Jaco asks what it means. Sarge says he doesn’t know, but it sounds familiar. He looks pensive.

Benson calls Mack down to the lab to show him the footage he found on Tinker’s biochip. He pours Mack a drink, and says he’ll need it.

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On the video, Jaco watches as streams on pure black bat-birds, it’s hard to tell which, fill the sky on an alien planet. After a moment, it becomes clear that everything on the planet is becoming a bat-bird- the mountains, plants, rocks, the entire planet. Sarge walks over and calmly looks at what’s happening, with his giant gun on his shoulder. He tells Jaco and whoever is working the camera that it’s the end of the line for this planet, they need to “get out while we still can.”

The distance shots are very reminiscent of the ashes after Thanos’ snap, which can’t be an accident. Maybe something in the mechanism/magic is the same. We also saw these bat-birds last week when the basketball turned to glass and shattered just before the portal through the cement wall opened.

Are they bats or are they birds? These seem to be birds.

Fitz and Enoch look out the spaceship window at Naro-Adzia, their destination. Fitz asks if they’ll be safe if they stop there now. Enoch tells him they’ll have a hard time hiding that they’re the ones who killed the Controller. The rest of the crew will receive the death sentence as mutineers. Enoch begins to hatch a plan to save himself and Fitz by hiding in the snail tanks, but, besides requiring Fitz to get in the snail tank, it doesn’t protect the rest of the crew, so Fitz vetos it.

Enoch suggests an alternate plan of taking the crew to the planet of Kitson, where they should be able to find new jobs easily. The ship has just enough fuel to make it there.

I’m sure absolutely nothing will go wrong on the way to Kitson.

Fitz decides to put off going into cryo in order to become captain of his own ship and take the engineering refugees to Kitson. He tells Enoch that he’s got time before he needs to go into cryo. Is this the beginning of Fitz becoming the Dread Pirate Roberts   Marauder Boshtok? I need space pirate Fitz, okay? I probably need 10 seasons of space pirates Daisy, Fitz and Simmons.

Enoch and Fitz fly their ship off into the sunset toward Kitson. As they fade from view, the Zephyr jumps out of Hyperdrive or whatever we’re calling it. Simmons and Fitz missed each other at Naro-Adzia by 5 minutes.

Daisy is still stunned, and asks Simmons what she just did. Simmons says, “He’s here, I can feel it.” She pulls out Fitz’s wedding ring, which she’s wearing on a chain around her neck, presumably until she can give it to him again.

Commentary

Prediction: Agent Fox will be “reincarnated” as a replacement for Tinker or Pax. I remember thinking last season that the Kree/Confederacy could easily be taking the bodies of Earth’s newly dead and reviving them to use as slaves.

If the Kree also wipe their memories and send them to a different time period, you get the Chronos storyline from Legends of Tomorrow, in which Mick Rory/Heatwave appeared to be abandoned on an isolated planet, so the evil Time Masters kidnapped him, did some Matrix-style wiping and retraining, then sent him out into the timestream as a bounty hunter for several hundred years before eventually sending him after his old teammates. By that time, the only thing he remembered about them was his hatred of them for leaving him behind.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Phil Coulson in a similar storyline.

Benson is mighty critical for a SHIELD newby. Is he going to be AoS’s General Ross, picking apart every mission and deciding it was flawed for out of context reasons? Surely they could have found some other hotshot scientist to bring in. There have to be some out of work SHIELD and HYDRA scientists left floating around. Last season, Mack’s friend the Candyman had a whole list.

We all know Sarge didn’t shoot at the end because it was May. They set up the excuse that he only kills people when necessary, but May has caused way more trouble for him than Fox.

That’s What Friends Are For: What Does Sarge & Pax’s Conversation Really Mean?

There are several interesting bits in this conversation. Sarge’s crew had to evacuate from their last planet in a hurry because Snowflake let her bloodthirstiness get out of control and killed someone too early, which ruined their plan and caused them to destroy “the place” earlier than they’d planned>>> They’d planned on “torching” the place.

Based on the video that Benson eventually shows Mack, it looks like they torched the planet by turning it into black birds. From a distance, the effect looks similar to the way living things killed by the snaps disintegrated into large pieces of dust, but this includes everything, even the mountains. The birds could be an illusion, rather than being alive. That actually makes more sense. The video also implies that Sarge’s giant gun shoots the deathwave that causes planetary demolecularization.

Sarge has no problem with most forms of murder and mayhem, as long as it doesn’t distract from the mission, and sometimes even when it does. Jaco and Snowflake are his two loyal, longstanding teammates, who he’ll defend and take care of. Tinker and Pax, not so much. Sarge saw Tinker as disposable. He’ll forgive Jaco and Snowflake more easily, and is unapologetic about playing favorites. Pax isn’t smart enough to have figured out yet that he’s on the disposable side of the line as well.

On their last planet they were interrogating someone, who was giving them good information, until Snowflake killed him. To me, this calls Snowflake’s loyalties into question (is she a double agent for someone?) and brings up the question of what they’re questioning people about.

Are they hunting a powerful fugitive who’s hunting them back? Are they fugitives looking for justice and revenge? Are they part of some nihilistic death cult? Snowflake’s beliefs suggest that she’s on a crusade to set the sinners free from this life, so they can try again in their next life/reincarnation. Are they attempting to provide this service on a planetwide basis, and maybe being paid to do so?

In this timeline, is Thanos in love with Death and sending her gifts, like in the comics? Is that who Sarge and co work for?

How cool would it be if the MCU did both storylines?

Setting souls free so they can do better in the next life would be thematically simliar to Thanos’ reasons for the snap, and would fit the pattern AoS has developed of matching the film side of the MCU thematically rather than in specific details. Endgame was as much about watching the people who were left behind try to reinvent themselves in order to move forward with their lives as it was about undoing the snap. Metaphorical and real reincarnation was explored throughout the film, and will probably continue to be explored in the next several films.

AoS has explored metaphorical and real reincarnation many times before, starting with Coulson and the TAHITI Project, and coming full circle in season 5 with Yo-Yo encountering another version of herself, who told her about other versions of the rest of the team, from different timelines. The word reincarnation was never used, but it’s one way to look at it. Season 5 also brought back the Kree version of the TAHITI method, which was used to bring Tess back to life. She was another reincarnation of herself.

Both Tess and Yo-Yo came back somewhat changed, after the trauma they went through in dying and being revived. Unlike Coulson, their memories weren’t wiped, so they were left angry, bitter and hopeless about the future. Could this partially explain the difference between our Coulson and Sarge?

The female member of Sarge’s team seems to be named Snowflake this week, even though IMDb had her as Butterfly last week. The actress has confirmed it’s Snowflake.

https://twitter.com/brookeofficial_/status/1129799740747440128

Both are interesting, in terms of her obsession with killing to facilitate reincarnation.. Butterflies go through metamorphosis and change from worms to flying creatures. Snowflakes are unique and ephemeral, but are part of the water cycle, so their essence is never lost. Butterflies reincarnate as themselves, with a new, if altered body, while snowflakes join the cosmic consciousness and reincarnate as a small part of that whole.

Sarge is annoyed by Pax’s minor grumblings, but not by Snowflake’s continuous need to send others back to the cosmic consciousness or the next stage of evolution. Is this how they get their replacements? Does Snowflake assassinate potentials until one feels right and s/he gets revived/reincarnated and stays with them?

Snowflake could be AoS’s variation on comic book character Layla Miller, a mutant with the code name Butterfly, who has the power to reanimate the newly dead. She does not have the power to give them their souls back, so they lack compassionate and their personalities are changed. Layla can also see through distortions in reality, allowing her to retain her true memories when reality has been changed and able to restore the memories of others.

She’s a fighter with increased durability, speed and strength. She also studied magic with Victor Von Doom. In the comics, Daisy Johnson asks her to join the Secret Warriors to help Nick Fury prepare for the Skrull Invasion.

There are enough connections between Layla/Butterfly/Snowflake and the MCU/AoS to make the elements of her story worth kieeping in mind. Agents of SHIELD never lifts a character or plot directly from the comics. But we know that the Skrulls and the Kree have already been here.

This episode is not the first time we’ve seen Clark Gregg in a convenience store:

  Time travel explained, in a very long video- The part that pertains to Agents of SHIELD starts at about 9 minutes.

  Video summary of the Chronos story line:

      Photo Outakes:

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Agents of SHIELD Season 6 Episode 2: Window of Opportunity Recap In season 6, episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD, Melinda May returns to peak fighting form after an injury sidelined her for most of season 5.

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Falz Moral Instruction Album Review

Falz Moral Instruction album amidst much controversy is released. Falz highly anticipated album was released on the 15th of January 2019 with the hashtag #moralinstruction rolling on social media.

One of the notable figures that greatly influenced Nigerian music is Fela Anikulapo Kuti, professionally known as Fela Kuti, or Fela.

Fela was a talented musician, composer, pioneer of afrobeat and he played multiple instruments.

He was known to be a staunch activist as he stood up for the people and resisted oppression back in his time.

There were multiple cases of him being persecuted for his beliefs and what he stood for.

In a particular instance, he was jailed for 20months but still, he pushed on and stood his ground.

Over time, the music industry in Nigeria has evolved and experienced tremendous progress and changes.

Different artists have contributed to the gallery of music and the number keeps increasing by the hundreds every day.

Many artists have been called Fela because they have tried to emulate Fela as regards his style of music and activism.

Artists like Wizkid, Burnaboy and a host of others have been labeled the new Fela.

So, Folarin Falana, popularly known as “Falz theBahdGuy”, a rapper, released a 9-track album titled Moral Instruction.

Falz extensively and outrightly expressed his dissatisfaction at the state of things in Nigeria.

Falz has always been vocal about the state of things in the country maybe because of the activist blood running in his veins.

Prior to the release of the Moral Instruction album, he released songs like Child of the world, which is a story of a moral upright girl that got corrupted when she got raped by an uncle and eventually, she became a sex worker and ultimately, she changed and became a new person.

Social media went agog when the song was released with different individuals voicing out their opinion.

Falz has always expressed his dislike for girls that place a value on sex and internet fraudsters popularly known as Yahoo-Yahoo boys.

Last year, Falz also released a controversial video, This is Nigeria.

The video depicted the current state of the nation including, the Fulani killings, the snake swallowing 36-million-naira scandal, the sorry state of Nigerian politics, the harassment of citizens by FSARS and a host of other issues in the country.

All these conveniently paved ways for the new album Moral Instruction.

Falz Moral Instruction Album Review

Moral Instruction Album Review – Falz

Falz channeled the spirit of Fela’s activism and this was outrightly visible from the album art as designed by the talented designer, Lemi Ghariokwu who designed many of the cover images for the recordings of Fela.

He teamed up with producers like Sess, Chillz, Willis, and TMXO to create this beautiful body of work. It is important to also note that he sampled some of Fela’s songs in the album.

Each country in the world has an artist or group of artists considered to be the G.O.A.T (not the pepper soup type, G.O.A.T stands for Greatest Of All Time) for that country.

In America, most believe this is Tupac Shakur, while some think Michael Jackson or Elton John should have that title-depending on who you ask; Jamaica has Bob Marley, Ghana is fortunate enough to have a living G.O.A.T in the person of Sarkodie and so on.

In Nigeria however, the greatest artist of all time is without any doubt FELA KUTI.

In a country with divisions in tribe and religion and even subdivisions within the aforementioned groups, it is very surprising that FELA’S title of G.O.A.T goes unchallenged.

To many Nigerians, Fela is a physical embodiment of fearlessness.

He spoke the truth everybody knew but were too scared to speak, he fought for the weak, he challenged the oppressors of Nigeria at the risk of his own personal safety and the safety of his family.

This is why to say an artist is “like Fela” or “is the Fela of our generation” is the highest compliment that can be paid to a Nigerian musician.

Falz theBahdGuy is the latest artist in a long list of artists currently contending for that spot and many feels he has earned it with this new album #moralinstruction.

His album talks about every single thing wrong with Nigeria.

He literally “dragged” the whole country-pastors, church members, politicians, citizens, sex workers, child abusers, everybody in Nigeria was dragged and this is the major reason why the album is on everybody’s lips.

Since everybody was mentioned on that album it means every single Nigerian relates to at least one song on the album with majority of Nigerians relating to all the songs.

Track by Track breakdown of the Fela Moral Instruction Album

Johnny

The first track on the album contains samples of Fela’s song “Johnny just drop”.

TMXO infused a hip hop beat into the afrobeat song. I think Falz used this track to start a chain reaction and set the pace for the remaining tracks.

This song transports the listener back to 1980 with the Fela type of instrumental.

Falz tackles the issue of police brutality by telling a short story about a Nigerian youth – Johnny, who just completed his youth service and was shot when he went out to celebrate with friends.

On the track, Falz talked about the alarming rate of insecurity in Nigeria.

He stated the different levels of insecurity in the country ranging from the cultural and religious killings in different parts of the country.

He questions the lack of punishment for the officers involved in the act and is baffled that the government thinks an apology is enough to sate the bereaved parents of the deceased.

It depicts the savagery and recklessness of the Nigerian police force as different reports of “trigger-happy cops” fill the headlines every day.

He ended the song with the Yoruba words, “if Johnny continues to drop, eyanmelo lo maku, eyanmelo lo maku” which means, how many people will die and how many people will be left.

Follow Follow

This track is based on Fela’s Zombie, and Sess smoothly blended it into a hip-hop groove. This immediately reminds the listener of the popular Fela song “zombie” and the message is very clear.

Fela sang the original song which talks about how soldiers are bound to follow orders.

Falz built on this with how he likened the enslavement of people by social media to people being zombies.

The song addresses people that are ready to do anything for validation, people who don’t have any goals of their own and people who jump on wagons simply because other people are doing it.

Different individuals try to be what they are not and imitate what they see on social media.

He talks about how people have lost their self-identity and caved into peer pressure.

The song emphasizes the craziness and the extent people go, to please other people and also get likes and followers on social media.

Hypocrite

This particular track is one of my favorite tracks on the album. The song started with piano chords which transitioned into a groovy beat.

Falz teamed up with Demmie Vee who delivered a sonorous hook to the verses of the song.

The first verse started out with Falz singing a little bit before he went hardcore and the second verse, the same way.

The song addresses the hypocrisy in the society ranging from the government to the common man.

Falz theBahdGuy in his usual bar spitting nature dissected matters affecting Nigeria (fake pastors, overzealous Muslims, child marriage, pedophiles in the church and politicians that starve their fellow citizens to their purses).

He talked about how people have two faces; the face they put on the outside and the real one.

Talk

This track was released a few days before the album was released and it is also about all the ills in society.

The song slowly progressed in a call and response manner until Falz went on a spree of another marvelous spits of bars.

“Anything I talk make you talk am again”

Addressed the situation of MURIC suing him, stating that they didn’t show up at court.

Falz TheBahdGuy didn’t hold back in this particular track as he rapped about a wide range of things including transactional sex, late payment of salaries by the government and the bad situation of things in Nigeria.

The song ended by him taking responsibility of the words spoken and he said, “na me talk am o”.

Amen

This particular one was built on the track “Coffin for Head of state” by Fela.

Falz has made it clear over and over again that hypocrisy in religion upsets him.

Amen attacks religious leaders that have successfully commercialized religion, he laughs at the irony of religious leaders using the money of their followers to build a university that the followers cannot afford to go to.

This song is a plea to the listener to open his eyes, mind and to think for his/her self.

Brother’s keeper

The family is very precious to Nigerians; Fathers kill for their daughters, sons go to war for their Mothers.

If we thought of all our neighbors as brothers would there still be hate in the country?

Would we still be divided because of ethnic and religious differences? These are the question’s this song is trying to ask.

Falz talks about individuals at different levels not looking out for each other and emphasized what he has been saying on the previous tracks.

He believes love is the answer; if you love your neighbor like your brother you cannot cheat him, you cannot seek to do him harm.

Sess did justice to the track as both the producer and the singer of the hook.

I also love the fact that the backup vocals sound like a choir singing giving the track a very unique vibe.

The song has one message for its listener-be your brother’s keeper.

Paper

What’s money worth? The breaker of tables once again comes with his hammer to do an honest day’s work. 

He condemns parents giving out underage children because of money, he expresses disappointment at ritualists, drug smugglers and politicians who are ready to do anything to get money.

This particular track is an extension of the previous tracks.

In his own words, they commit all these crimes all because of “just paper”.

E no finish

Here he questions the purpose of speaking out about the injustice in the society when the issues that Fela talked about are still not resolved till today.

Fela talked, people applauded him and continued wallowing in their filth.

He tries to let the listener know just how bad the situation is in the country if we are still trying and failing to work out the same problems since independence.

It ended with Lemi Ghariokwu saying few words about the state of things in Nigeria.

After all said and done

In this short poem, Falz theBahdGuy admits that he knows he has no right to throw blame around, admitting his own faults and weaknesses, since he is also a human with flaws of his own.

The track is in form of a poetry rendition.

He believes everybody is guilty – through action or inaction and only by accepting our guilt and striving to be better can we move forward as a country, together.

He finally encouraged people to be conscious and not keep quiet about the happenings in our society.

In conclusion

Falz may have dropped what promises to be the most controversial album of the year but regardless of your opinion about the Falz Moral Instruction album you have to admit that all he said is nothing but the gospel truth.

It’s great to see an artiste devote a whole album to talk about the state of affairs in Nigeria and taking the path of activism and walk in Fela’s footsteps.

Fela has become more than a person. Fela has become more of an ideology and a way of life.

I think anyone that decides to stand for what is right and stare into the face of adversity can be called “A Fela”.

It is safe to say Falz theBahdGuy is “A Fela”.

The greatest criticism of the album is that the lyrics became monotonous at some point but a good message cannot be overheard and we don’t even care about the critics and criticism.

Falz took a stand with this album and I hope he does not deviate from this path.

Written By Leon Chuks and Moyo Oluwatuyi