#perez had the right idea of just making him a supporting character who helped out

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Out of DC's Trinity, Wonder Woman is really the worst served when it comes to love interests. Batman gets to play around with Catwoman. Superman is married to the Lois Lane. And Wonder Woman gets... Steve Trevor, a character so boring and inessential that they effectively wrote him out of the WW comic for almost 30 years and no one really cared.

[walker-extended-universe]

Sammy Reborn, Chapter 3

Chapter 1, Chapter 2

Relationship(s): Cassie Perez & Cordell Walker, August Walker & Dean Winchester, August Walker & Cordell Walker

Tags/Warnings: Canon Divergence- Alternate Universe, Kidnapping, Drug Use, Law Enforcement, Delusion, Delusional Dean, Stockholm Syndrome

Summary: The investigation continues, August tries to escape, nothing goes the way anyone hoped

Written for @juneofdoom prompt 23: "You're doing great"

Taglist: @theladywyn, @ihavepointysticks, @klaatu51, @itsjessiegirl1, @neptunium134

---------

Cordell called the local Texarkana PD before he started driving there. He didn’t want to wait for approvals and emails. He wanted to speak to the diner staff directly and see the footage directly with his own eyes. Maybe he was being paranoid, going over the top. But his son was missing. Sue him.

Cassie sat silently in the passenger seat of his truck. She seemed to know better than to try to get him to talk, and he appreciated that.

He just needed August to be okay. The sooner they could find him, the sooner they could make sure he would be.

They spoke to the local PD first. The sheriff wasn’t happy to have them poking around their operation at first, but he softened when Cassie explained Cordell’s gruffness. “It’s just- this is his kid, you know,” she said in a hushed tone Cordell wasn’t supposed to hear. “He’s lucky our captain is even letting him work the case. We just need to look at the footage and talk to a few people, okay?”

Cordell silently thanked Cassie with an extra donut he snagged from the break room.

The sheriff’s secretary got them set up with a laptop that had access to all the footage they needed. Cordell didn’t want to spend too long looking; he and Cassie had to talk with the diner staff later that day. But this should give them a better idea of who was behind this and- hopefully- where he took August.

“Okay, she called me at 2:03pm yesterday and she said it had been about half an hour since August talked to her so we should probably be looking at around 12:50 to 1:00pm.” Cassie rewound the recordings to the right timestamps. “Once we’re sure they pulled through here and when, we can go and talk to Debbie and see what she can tell us about this ‘Dean’.”

“We’ll need to see if we can get a license plate too,” Cordell said. “The sooner we can find this crazy bastard, the better.”

“On it.” Cassie played the footage and they waited for anything interesting to happen.

Fortunately for his sanity, they didn’t have to wait too long. At about 1:05, they saw a black classic car that matched the make and model they were looking for pull into the parking lot. The passenger side was facing the camera and Cordell recognized August through the window. “That’s it.”

“Okay, now let’s see our driver.” Cassie zoomed in just as the driver of the car got out. They were able to get a much clearer shot from this camera than the one behind the Side Step.

She got a snapshot to run through facial recognition. Cordell could’ve sworn he’d seen his face before but he couldn’t quite place where.

They moved the camera to get the license plate number to see if they could get a full name, or at least a direction. After that, they waited for ‘Dean’ and August to return. It took a little over half an hour for them to leave, this time with Dean heavily supporting August. Cordell’s gut turned; just front he look on his face, he could tell August had been drugged.

Why hadn’t he just left when the waitress offered to help? Why didn’t he try to call directly? Did this Dean character scare him that much?

“Hey.” Cassie’s hand squeezed his arm. “He’s going to be okay. We’ll find him.”

“I know.” They had to find his son. There wasn’t another option.

Once they’d finished with the footage, Cordell sent request for facial recognition and license plate queries. While they waited on that, they headed to the diner to speak with Debbie.

“Do you recognize this man?” Cordell asked, showing her the snapshot they’d gotten from the camera.

“Oh, Dean? Yes, I know him. He’s a regular. Well, mostly. He comes by every couple weeks. He loved our house burger and our homemade cherry pie. Always gets at least once slice. And he’s a charmer,” she giggled. “Why are you asking me about him?”

“He’s a suspect in a kidnapping case,” Cassie said bluntly. “We got word that he was in here recently with a young boy; he may have called this boy ‘Sammy’. Does that sound familiar?”

“Oh! Yes, they were in here just yesterday. I thought that boy was just adorable. And Deanhad just been telling me a couple weeks ago how he’d been separated from his brother for a while but he wanted to see him again. I guess there must have been a custody issue…. But you said kidnapping?”

“Yes,” Cordell said bluntly. “Was this the boy he had with him yesterday?” he said, showing her a recent school picture of August.

“Yes, that was him. Such a cutie.”

“That boy’s name is actually August Walker. He was kidnapped from outside his place of work two nights ago. His family is very worried about him.” Cordell glared at Debbie, who was looking a little sheepish.

“I-I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I thought he seemed quiet but Dean said he was always like that….”

“Ma’am, we want to find this young man as soon as possible,” Cassie said. “You seem very familiar with Dean. Is there anything you can tell us about him? Where he’s from, what he does for a living, if he has any other regular hangout spots?”

“Ah, well…..” Debbie bit her lip. “He comes from Kansas, I know that. I-I can also tell you he changes his license plates often. I never thought much of it; we get all kinds of strange types through here, lots of men who prefer to stay off the radar. My husband was like that, you know. Never even let us have a computer in the house; he didn’t want any cyber spies….” She trailed off with a chuckle. “A-Anyway, I can’t tell you much else. He talked a lot, but not much about himself. Just where he’d been or where he was going next.”

Kansas was a direction at least. A vague one, but it was something. “Thank you for your time, ma’am,” he said, standing up. “We’ll let you know if we have any more questions.”

“Of course, please tell me if you do. I-I’d do anything to help find that boy.”

As they left, Cordell got a call. “Hello?”

“Ranger, we got a return on those queries you sent.”

“Great, what do we know?”

“....You might want to come into the station. This is the kind of news that’s best delivered in person. And with you sitting down.”

Cordell swallowed hard and met Cassie’s concerned eyes. “We’re on our way.”

—----------

As Dean pulled into the garage of the bunker, Sam started waking up. Dean smiled and ruffled his hair. “Come on, sleeping beauty,” he teased. “We’re home.”

Sam blinked and looked around, face scrunched in confusion. “Home?”

“Yeah, Sammy, home. Come on.” He got out of the car and walked around to help Sam out. “Come on; let’s get settled in. Go to the bathroom, get a beer, konk out in front of the TV for a bit. Maybe in a few days we can go shopping and you can finally decorate your room.”

Sam huffed but followed him out of the garage. “I’m a little young for beer.”

“Eh, you’re old enough for me. It’s not like I’m gonna call the cops on you.”

Dean knew Sam would need help getting around the bunker, so he didn’t let him wander more than a few feet away for the rest of the day. Sammy seemed annoyed, especially when Dean followed him to the bathroom, but Dean was used to the bitchfaces. Besides, he couldn’t let his little brother get lost again.

Sammy seemed to appreciate the Dean Cave at least, which is more than Dean could hope for on the first day. His taste in movies hadn’t gotten much better, but he wasn’t big enough to fight for the remote yet so they watched Die Hard instead of whatever chick-flick crap Sammy had in mind.

One movie and a few beers later, Sammy was starting to nod off again, so Dean guided him to his room. “Night, Sammy. See you in the morning.”

“Yeah, night.”

Dean waited until he saw Sam get into bed before he closed the door and went to his own room down the hall. For the first time in months, he might actually get a good night’s sleep.

Sammy was home and all was well. He could relax.

Or, at least, that’s what he thought.

Just as he was about to drift off to sleep, he heard someone sneaking around the bunker. They were clearly trying to be quiet about it, but failing miserably. 

Grabbing his gun, Dean got out of bed and followed the sound of not-so-quiet footsteps. Down the hall. Past Sammy’s empty room. Past the kitchen. Past the library. Into the war room. And…. Up the stairs.

“Sam? Where are you going?”

The kid whirled around and pressed his back against the door. He was terrified.

Maybe Dean should’ve expected this. Sammy was always the curious one, always testing boundaries, never wanting to do what he was told.

“I-Uh, I was just- You can’t keep me here!”

“Sam-”

“I’m not Sam! My name is August. August Walker! I don’t know what your problem is but it’s got nothing to do with me!”

Dena grit his teeth and started up the stairs. August blanched and ran out of the door, his feet pounding on the floor of the tunnel up to the surface.

Sam was fast, but Dean was faster.

He hated to knock Sammy out again, but he had to. Poor kid was just so confused, had so much to learn. Dean just forgot Sam had to re-learn where he belonged.

He hated to keep Sammy locked up in their dungeon, but it was the safest place in the bunker. He just needed time. Once Dean knew he could be trusted, he would let Sammy out again.

—------------

Cassie rubbed her eyes and went over the report again. After they got the news that Dean Winchester was their man, everything happened all at once. They had to report the update to James, who had to call in the FBI, which brought in a whole different mess of issues.

Walker’s relationship with the FBI was strained at best, but it was steadily getting worse. Even without Tessa on board, they wanted full jurisdiction over the case since Dean Winchester was one of their most wanted. But Walker, understandably, didn’t want to be taken off the case.

Unfortunately, the FBI didn’t want to play ball. So, the Rangers were off the case except for maybe as backup later on and they would be getting more frequent updates as a courtesy. But, naturally, Walker wasn’t going to just let that slide.

Cassie knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere butting heads with the FBI though, so she’d spent the last few weeks researching alternative options. Hopefully, this time he would listen to her instead of risking his badge. Again.

“Let’s go for lunch, Walker.”

He glanced up at her but waved her off. “Go without me. I need to-”

“Let’s go for lunch, Walker. Now.”

“I- Okay.” Walker nodded and stood up robotically. “Where are we going?”

“Side Step. I’m driving.”

“O-Okay.”

Walker was wise enough not to ask any questions until they were sitting down with their food. “So, what did you drag me out of the office for?”

Cassie chewed slowly so she could think out her words. “You’re mad about being taken off August’s case. Which, I get. But butting heads with the FBI isn’t going to get you anywhere and going off on your own is only going to get you, me, and James in trouble. So, I had an idea.”

She handed him a file. “Colter Shaw is a relatively famous tracker with a 95% success rate in finding whatever is asked of him- for a price. If you want to find August without dealing with the FBI, I think he’s your best bet.”

Cordell glanced at the file and scoffed. “You think I can trust a mercenary more than the FBI? I’d be better off taking a leave of absence and doing this myself.”

“He’s not a mercenary,” Cassie said. “I’ve looked into him. Yeah, he makes money off of this but he’s actually a pretty decent human being too. Even the cops that have run into him seem to like him and that’s saying something. And… He’s the best.”

Walker closed the file. “I don’t know. I’ve never liked working with guys like that. And with his track record, I’d probably have to offer up money I can’t afford just to get in the door with him.”

“He’s not that bad,” Cassie insisted. “Just think about it, okay?”

He sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll think about it. Can we eat now?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, eat your queso.”

—-----------

When Dean first threw him in this dungeon, August had considered it a mercy. No more stares or cryptic words. He just had to wait down here until he was found. Dean wouldn’t let him starve, not so long as he wanted his “little brother” around, right?

Dad would come get him soon. He was good at his job. August wouldn’t be down here for long.

Of course, in this initial assessment, he failed to account for the fact that it was really hard to tell the passage of time while locked in an underground dungeon. He had no clock, no window, nothing. He wasn’t even sure what time it was when Dean threw him down here. The only sense he had for the passage of time was his hunger and other bodily needs.

Dean brought him meals, a different one each time. It was hard for August to parse if they were supposed to be for breakfast or lunch or a random snack.

Not that he was paying that much attention to the food when Dean came. He could barely even bring himself to eat under Dean’s judgemental gaze. The man was intimidating, especially now that August was no longer on a somewhat equal level to him. He wasn’t “Sammy”, the coveted little brother anymore. He was “Sammy”, the disappointing inmate.

When Dean delivered his food, he always tried to make conversation. He gave August “updates” on people he’d never met and asked him questions he didn’t know the answers to. Every time August tried to just tell him he didn’t know or didn’t care, Dean would get angry. Sometimes he’d just go quiet, sometimes he’d yell and break something, and sometimes he’d just look so sad.

August didn’t know what he wanted, or even if he wanted to give it to him. He just wanted to go home.

After what felt like weeks, something snapped. Maybe Dean lost his patience or maybe August did or maybe he should’ve seen this coming. But it felt like, in an instant, everything changed.

“So I was thinking we could give Jody a visit once you’re feeling better. You’ll like you; you have the same taste in movies. Cheesy romcom shit.” Dean had said.

August, in all his wisdom, decided to be snarky. “She’s the one that's a sheriff right? Maybe we should visit her, so she can arrest you for kidnapping.”

Dean slapped him hard enough to knock him to the ground.

“Dammit, Sammy,” he hissed. “I’ve tried to be patient with you, I really have, but you- You’re just so damn stubborn. Always have been. I thought I could handle this but….” He sighed and shook his head. “Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about you.” With that, he left the room, taking August’s mostly full plate with him.

August stared after him, one hand hovering over his cheek, shocked and even more terrified than before.

The next few hours passed in scared silence. Normally, August could hear some activity from the hallway, even if Dean didn’t enter. But now, it was silent. Now, all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing and heartbeat.

Normally when his stomach started to growl, Dean would appear with food. But now, there was nothing. Now, all he had was the water jug that Dean had failed to refill earlier.

At some point, August fell asleep. When he woke up, there was no sign of Dean. No water, no food, nothing.

A different kind of fear struck him. What if he’d pushed too far, said the wrong thing, and now Dean didn’t care if he lived or died? What if being “Sammy” wasn’t enough? Would Dean leave him to starve down here? Would he ever get out and see his real family again?

“Dean….” He called out hesitantly. “Dean, I-I’m sorry. About before. I-I was just joking. You know that, right? I-I didn’t mean anything by it….”

Nothing.

Time passed. It felt like days, but it could’ve been hours. August slipped in an out of consciousness as he waited. He tried calling out to Dean, begging for another chance, for forgiveness, for a water refill, anything. But there was nothing. Just him in this empty room, sleep his only distraction from the pains wracking his body.

This is it. I’m going to die here.

If he wasn’t so dehydrated, August might cry. He wanted to call out for Dean again, but he was too tired. Instead, he closed his eyes for what might be the final time.

When he woke up, there was something lodged in his arm and he could hear that he wasn’t alone anymore.

He slowly opened his eyes and looked around. There was an IV stuck in his arm and he’d been granted a pillow. He groaned as he tried to sit up and Dean quickly filled his vision.

“Easy, Sammy,” he murmured, getting August to lie back down. “You’re okay, you’re okay….”

August groaned, following Dean’s guidance. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“I know. I’m sorry too, Sammy,” Dean whispered, stroking his hair. “I didn’t think- I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. I just- I got so angry. And you needed to learn…. You just have to learn to listen to me, Sammy.”

“I will,” August promised. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Dean gave him a small smile. “That’s all I needed to hear. Do you think you can eat something? I brought toast….”

August ate small bites of the toast and drank the warm broth. “You’re doing great,” Dean encouraged him. An unexpected warmth bloomed in his chest.

He could manage this. He just had to play along for a little while longer.

[aion-rsa]

The Suicide Squad: What’s Next for Harley Quinn in the DCEU?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains major spoilers for The Suicide Squad. We have a spoiler free review here.

The Suicide Squad might just be the best DCEU movie yet. Not only is it a sterling ensemble piece about the horrors of American imperialism but it’s also the world’s weirdest buddy comedy. And in a film full of stunning performances–Idris Elba, David Dastmalchian, and Daniela Melchior please stand up–we got another killer turn from Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. 

After kicking all kinds of ass in Birds of Prey, the Mistress of Mischief is back and better than ever. This is a truly emancipated Harley, one who hates the Joker, will kill an abusive man in a second, and who plays a huge part in saving the day after choking out a man with her thighs, of course. 

While Robbie has said she has “no current plans to reprise the role” after The Suicide Squad, we couldn’t help but think of where the DCEU’s most badass and brutal on-screen anti-hero has been and where she could go next. Thanks to the comics, cartoons, and imagination of those at DC Comics, we’ve got plenty to draw on. 

Let’s start with where Harley has been to see how it impacts her potential future…

Before the DCEU

Harley began her career in the beloved Batman: The Animated Series cartoon as a one-time henchwoman for the Joker. But that quickly changed and she soon became a core part of the show, and not long after became a fan fave character in the comic book universe. 

This iteration of Quinn was a huge influence on James Gunn in bringing her to The Suicide Squad and might explain that unforgettable animated sequence as she escapes from the palatial prison of Corto Maltese. 

It’s also important to note as until The Suicide Squad her most popular contemporary iteration was once again in a cartoon, but this time it was the DC Universe turned HBO Max smash hit adult animation series that bears her name. 

Harley Quinn in 2016’s Suicide Squad

While David Ayer’s Suicide Squad might not have been for everyone–apparently including Ayer himself–one thing stood out: Robbie as Harley Quinn. While she was mostly sexualized and used as eye candy, Robbie gave Harley depth, humor, and heart. It was the standout performance and is a huge part of why the DCEU version is so popular today. While it’s great to see Harley’s growth, we have to mention the movie where Robbie made her debut. 

Birds of Prey

Cathy Yan’s brilliant Birds of Prey let Robbie go wild with her take on Harley. This was the action heavy R-rated take that fans wanted to see. With a predominantly female creative team behind it, the film eschewed the male gaze and misogyny that Harley has sometimes had to fight through. 

Here we saw a Harley who was freed from the Joker, had her own crew, her own incredible fashion sense, and even her own burgeoning moral code. Not only was this a badass outing for Harley but it feels tonally and aesthetically in tune with the route that James Gunn went in The Suicide Squad. The emancipation of Harley Quinn began here, long may it reign! 

The Suicide Squad Sets Up What’s Next for Harley Quinn

While it’s unclear where Robbie sees the character going next, we get a good feel for Harley and her new found freedom here. The world is her oyster. She has new allies–maybe even… friends?–and a magical javelin. Basically, anything can happen as she heads into the future. 

Poison Ivy

This seems like the clearest and most popular option for more Harley Quinn. 

While it looked like it might happen in the form of the now not happening Gotham City Sirens movie (which Suicide Squad director Ayer was once attached to), there’s still legs in this partnership which has been delighting fans for decades. In both the comics and cartoons her relationship with Poison Ivy has been a key part of Harley’s lore. While they began as friends, the canon has shifted to being on-again off-again romantic partners in all mediums. So we need to see that on screen in live action… SOON! 

It would be really easy to take the comedic action stylings of the HBO Max Harley Quinn series which saw the pair traverse the hard realities of love in Gotham and bring that to either a longer format series–which we’d love–or a movie. Just putting these two A-listers together would be a huge selling point and if they played into the queer romance it would make huge waves. 

“Trust me, I chew their ear off about it all the time,” Robbie recently told us when we asked about the possibility of adding a live action Poison Ivy to the DCEU. “They must be sick of hearing it, but I’m like, ‘Poison Ivy, Poison Ivy. Come on, let’s do it.’ I’m very keen to see a Harley-Poison Ivy relationship on screen. It’d be so fun. So I’ll keep pestering them. Don’t worry.”

If DC decided to go a little more dramatic they could take from the pair’s comic book canon. It would make a lot of sense to explore Harley’s love life post the Joker as both of her most recent DCEU appearances have made note to mention his negative impact on her life. 

During the 2013 Harley Quinn comic series fans got to see the pair finally become official as Harley came to terms with her abusive relationship with the Joker. An easy route for the DCEU to take–either seriously or more comedically–would be to make Harley and Ivy a sort of Thelma and Louise of the DCEU, a couple of cool gals against the world… and if they have their “daughter” Cass Cain with them too we’d be very happy. 

While they broke up in the official DC Comics continuity, they are currently getting back together in Harley Quinn: The Animated Series – The Eat, Bang, Kill Tour. The hilarious sequel to the cartoon expands on their romance and plays into that more humorous angle. But simply the fact that the pair are together again in the comics means that there’s even more canon to take from here. 

Female Furies 

In spite of the sad news that Ava DuVernay’s New Gods movie is no longer in production, we might have found a silver lining. In recent years Harley has faced down against Granny Goodness and even joined her Female Furies. This has happened in both the ongoing Harley Quinn comics series and the DC Universe cartoon. It’s a really cool and out there idea for the character in the DCEU, and could be a cool way to introduce the more cosmic aspects of the universe through the lens of one of the world’s most popular comics characters. 

It would be pretty easy to do a Female Furies movie or TV show where Harley is enlisted into Apokolips’ hardcore squad of warriors. There’d be an exceedingly fun fish out of water element as well as the potential to do something totally different than we’ve seen before. 

There’s also the option to emulate the Harley Quinn TV series and follow Harley as she seeks out Granny Goodness in order to gain the nefarious power of the Motherbox, which would obviously go wrong pretty quickly. While we’ve seen elements touched on in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, DC isn’t afraid of reimagining things regularly and we’d love to see Harley on an epic cosmic adventure with Darkseid on her heels! 

Another HBO Max Spinoff? 

If the villainous Peacemaker is getting his own HBO Max show, why shouldn’t Harley? And there are a ton of incredible routes the series could go. The most obvious right now would be continuing the Harley we see in The Suicide Squad. 

Seeing as Rick Flag and Harley were clearly close, it would be very easy to intertwine the Harley show and the Peacemaker series. What if while Peacemaker was trying to “save the world,” Harley and potentially Bloodsport–he served with Rick and clearly cared about him–were hunting him down in their own series? That would be a pretty smart way to expand the radical world of The Suicide Squad while giving Robbie far more space to play with the character she’s long defined. 

Ever since Birds of Prey, fans have been wishing for a Black Canary or Harley-focused spinoff. With Peacemaker setting the precedent for solo DCEU shows, this could be another great route. We’d love to see the return of Ella Jay Basco as Cass Cain or even the return of Rosie Perez as Renee Montoya. This is a little more of an outlier but the gritty crime movie tone of Birds of Prey really fits into the current DCEU and HBO Max vibe. And in our real dreams, Cathy Yan would get the Gunn treatment and direct. 

Batgirl

We’re finishing off with what is currently the most likely of our options. The upcoming HBO Max Batgirl movie is penned by Christina Hodson. Hodson and Robbie have a close working relationship as the Bumblebee screenwriter also wrote Birds of Prey. There’s also the fact that Robbie is a huge supporter of female-led storytelling so bringing her clout and fan favorite character to Batgirl would do just that. It would be really cool to see Harley pop up here as either an antagonist or ally to Barbara Gordon. 

As this is going straight to HBO Max, there’s likely more freedom to play with canon and format. But with Robbie unsure of Harley’s future it could be more realistic to expect a brief cameo rather than a full on-screen Harley storyline when the movie hits the streamer down the line. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Suicide Squad is on HBO Max and in theaters now! 

The post The Suicide Squad: What’s Next for Harley Quinn in the DCEU? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3AhUjCZ

[nadiafm]

( camila morrone, cisfemale ) hey ! have you seen NADIA PEREZ around ? they work as a ICE SKATING INSTRUCTOR at big bear resort, but they must be off their shift by now. well, if you do see them can you let me know ? they’re 21 years old & they’ve been working here for 11 MONTHS. they tend to be +AMOROUS & +CONVIVIAL, but can also be -LICENTIOUS & -WARY. the other employees have labeled them THE ROMANTIC. thanks a lot ! gold hoops , floral mini dresses , pink lipgloss , overly dramatic eyeshadow , freckles specked across your nose , mascara running down your cheeks , tequila shots chased with salt and lime , lana del rey blasting in your headphones , mirror selfies , golden hour , glitter and rhinestones , blue raspberry dum dums , piled up books you keep forgetting to read.

hey y’all !! i’m so excited for this wow. i’m sam, i’m 22, and i live in pst !! i’m a sucker for cooking shows and dogs and candles. but more importantly...this is my freaking baby nadia, an absolute idiot with a heart of gold ! i already know this intro is going to be too long but bare with me i will include a tldr at the bottom i promise. also hmu on discord to plot ! capricornmom#1278

here is nadia’s pinterest & here is her playlist

aesthetics : gold hoops , floral mini dresses , pink lipgloss , overly dramatic eyeshadow , freckles specked across your nose , mascara running down your cheeks , tequila shots chased with salt and lime , lana del rey blasting in your headphones , mirror selfies , golden hour , glitter and rhinestones , blue raspberry dum dums , piled up books you keep forgetting to read

character parallels : jackie burkhart ( that 70′s show ) rachel green ( friends ) , cassie howard ( euphoria ) , brooke davis ( one tree hill ) , bianca stratford ( 10 things i hate about you ) , april ( palo alto ) , erica vandross ( flower ) , gigi & triple a ( booksmart ) , snooki ( jersey shore ) , jessica day ( new girl )

full name : nadia paloma perez

birthday : july 23, 1998

zodiac : cancer sun , pisces moon , pisces rising . god help this emotional ass girl

nationality : american 

religion : roman catholic

sexual & romantic orientation : bisexual , biromantic

hometown : aventura , florida ( 20 minutes outside of miami )

languages spoken : english ( fluent ) , spanish ( fluent ) , french ( still learning , takes it in school , somewhat conversational )

likes : candy ( sour punch straws , lollipops ) , watching soccer games ( messi stan till she dies ) , rex orange county , writing , magazines , making empanadas with her abuela , romantic comedies ( her fav is how to lose a guy in 10 days ) , tequila sodas , sex , lana del rey , chipotle burritos , iced chai lattes with almond milk from starbucks , gossip girl , craft beer , margaret atwood

dislikes : quinoa , nuts in things like salad or cookies , star wars , watching golf , oatmeal , church , screamo music , california ( a grudge ) , spoiled rich kids , condescending business majors , quentin tarantino ( and his avid fans )

BACKGROUND

Born and raised in South Florida, a little aways from Miami ! Her mother, Paloma, was an Adventura native while her father, Santiago, was an immigrant from Argentina. Her parents met in college when Paloma was studying abroad in Argentina. They fell in love, rather quickly, and the rest was history. They had planned on moving back to America together, but Santiago’s visa was denied. So, after only four months of knowing each other and 2.5 months of dating, they got married. 

Turns out sometimes you should know your partner better before getting married !! shocker right. It wasn’t so bad at first, though. They were young and in love and their honeymoon phase seemed to last forever, until it didn’t. 

By the time Nadia was born, they’d already begun to realize each other’s faults and flaws. Santiago was a good looking guy, and with his thick Argentine accent, he tended to come off as overly friendly and at times overtly flirty. Paloma was jealous and needy. It never seemed to mesh well when she thought her husband was flirting with every other mom in the neighborhood. 

So, for the majority of Nadia’s childhood, all she remembered from her parent’s marriage was them fighting. She had a close relationship with the both of them, though, and she was particularly close with her father. He was her biggest supporter !! Always hyping her up. He was the one signing her up for sports like soccer (they’re a huge soccer family, the only time her parents weren’t fighting was during Argentina games), gymnastics, dance, and ice skating. Her favorite was soccer, and her for most of her adolescent years, her dad coached her team. They formed a really close bond because of it. 

The marriage was sort of non exinsistant at this point, but in some sort of last attempt to salvage any love they might have had for each other, Santiago and Paloma had a baby. It was more Paloma’s idea than anything. Santiago, at that point, was only sticking around for Paloma. She was seven when her little sister was born, Caterina, and Nadia absolutely adored her. They may have been seven years a part, but they were the best of friends. 

When Nadia was twelve, she woke up with a note on her bed side table. It was from her father, and it read: “Nads, I’m so sorry I couldn’t say goodbye to your face. I wish I was stronger. I am so proud of you and I promise I will be in touch. Te amo. Papa” He hadn’t left anybody else a note, and not even a word to her mother. As close as she was to her mother and sister, she couldn’t help but blame them for her father leaving. Still, she was pretty certain she’d hear from him soon. That he’d come back once he cleared his head. Only, he didn’t. 

Word spread pretty fast around school about what had happened. Suddenly, Nadia was a charity case. PTA moms were coming up to her and offering to bring her lunch or dinner, if she needed it. She was the girl who’s dad left them high and dry. It didn’t help that on top of that, her body was going through changes much more rapidly than any of her friends. She already had gotten her period, and by the time she was in seventh grade she was wearing a D cup bra. So in addition to the sudden spotlight as the girl without a dad, boys started treating her differently. Boys that had never talked to her previously suddenly wanted to be her friend. In eighth grade, Hayden Walker rolled up a small piece of paper and shot it like a basketball into her cleavage. He high-fived his friends after and thanked her for the backboard.  

So middle school was rough. And while Nadia had had one or two boyfriends during that time, she’d never gone past kissing them. That’s not how the rumors went, though. That was the part that hurt the most. The things people said, especially the things girls said about her. Girls she thought were her friends. 

At the end of eighth grade, during the summer before high school, she got a text from her dad. The first one in 2 years! She’d idolized him her whole life, so obviously she was ready to forgive him as soon as she heard from him. He told her he was living in California and Nadia was like, I’m sold! Let’s go! Only her mother was like...are you fucking insane you are not going to California to visit that man. Long story short, she found a cheap cross country bus ticket and essentially ran away from home to see her dad! He was shocked she had come at all, despite his text message leading her to believe he wanted to see her. Apparently it was more of a courtesy text, a text so he could let go of the guilt of leaving an entire family behind. Because in the two years he’d been gone, he managed to start a new one. He had a new wife, and two newborn twins. 

Nadia was pretty furious, but she stayed the summer anyways. She had full intentions of starting high school in California and not going home to Florida. Things were tense at her father’s, though. Her “step mother” obviously didn’t like having her around, and though her bond with her father was slowly rekindling, there was still a sort of distance between them. But they were trying to make it work, at the very least. 

Then came the end of the summer. Nadia had made a few friends around the neighborhood, and was invited to an end of summer kickback with a bunch of high schoolers. Naturally, she lied about her age at the party. She was 14, but told everyone she was 16, and everyone seemed to overlook her baby face thanks to her ass and tits. At the end of the night, a boy drove her home, and the two ended up hooking up in the car. Apparently she had misjudged how much her father actually cared, because he’d waited up for her to come home, and after seeing car headlights out front, he’d stormed outside to find her in the car with a high school boy, half naked. After allowing her to gather her bearings, he essentially humiliated her right there on the front lawn, screaming about how irresponsible she was amongst other things. The majority of the conversation has since been blacked out from her mind, but she’ll never forget the look on her dad’s face when he said, “you’re nothing, you’re just like your mother, and i don’t want you anywhere near my family.”  whew !! ya girl was hurt.  

So, obviously, she was back on the way to mom’s ! Honestly at that point her mom wasn’t even mad at her for leaving she was just thankful she was back. 

GODDD okay this is getting long so I need to wrap this up. I haven’t even gotten to personality KJSHG Okay let’s wrap up high school in one bullet point. Basically she sub consciously searched for every man’s approval because she lacked the approval she needed from her father! This meant lots of boyfriends and never saying no. In her four years of high school, she was maybe single for a total of like ... seven months. not seven consecutive months lmao, 7 months in between relationships. 

one of those boys was connor perch, her first official boyfriend freshman year ! they were really sweet n young and nadia really thought she was in love. but then she gave him a blowjob and this mf recorded it ! and nadia found out after the fact, asked him to delete it, he said it was just for himself to look at, only to find out he’d sent it to his friends a few days later. so that basically set the precedent for how she’d be treated the next four years of high school ! she tried to act like it didn’t bother her but dang. high schoolers can be very mean !

oh my god i seriously have to wrap up okay this will be quick. basically when she was a senior in high school she went on a ski trip to big bear and met a boy named ethan, who she like fell in love with so fast like literally a week give it a rest girl. he was from Colorado but when she left they kept in touch and basically talked every day for the rest of the school year and throughout the summer. She’d decided to apply to Boulder University to be closer to him because this time it really felt like the real thing ! SURPRISE AGAIN ! She got to school and found out he had a girlfriend. She was really mf heartbroken over that. But did she learn her lesson? No. Does she still fall in love with anyone who looks in her direction? Yes. 

Okay and lastly she has been working all sorts of jobs throughout college because her mom is helping her pay for tuition and rent so she’s gotta cover spending money ! She ended up getting a job at Big Bear Resort during her last winter break as an ice skating instructor because she used to do ice skating back in the day. Now she works at Big Bear during her school breaks and on some weekends ! 

TLDR/Tidbits

Hopeless romantic with major daddy issues

Will overanalyze every interaction she has with anyone because she thinks they might like her

EXTREMELY GULLIBLE 

Probably will have a crush if you are even remotely nice to her 

Really dumb but means well. Literally no common sense. Complete bimbo

Cries A LOT. Complete crybaby. Happy or sad she’s probably crying

Heart of gold!! She really always means well even when she fucks up so bad I SWEAR her heart was in the right place 

Can outdrink anyone. She would drink a 6ft5in, 200 pound man under the table any day

Tequila is her choice of drink, but vodka is for her #sadgirlhours

Obsessed with Rosalía, Lana Del Rey, & Rex Orange County. And also 2010 bangers. Anything she can shake her ass to !

She pretty much used to exclusively wear mini dresses because when she realized everyone was just gonna sexualize her anyway, she was like FUCK IT, i’ll show my ass n titties n legs. Except it’s fucking like negative degrees in Colorado so she can’t do that ! Bummer. (she’ll still probably find ways to wear mini dresses)

Obsessed with makeup!! She loves doing adventurous things with eyeshadows and lipsticks  like ok euphoria 

Kinda crazy. Major crackhead vibes especially when she’s drunk! She loves going out, she’ll go out on a Tuesday, she just likes to have fun ok and dance on tables and make out with cute people

She’ll have a one night stand but just know for HER she’ll probably get attached. I’m so sorry it won’t last that long but she’ll pine for at least a week

ok that is all i’m so sorry for this shit show of an intro but here is a messy list of wc !

[batmenplayingpoker]

DC Rebirth volume 1 TPBs reviews, part 1

Oh the glory of Hoopla, which has allowed me to get back in touch with the DC universe in a big way. If you’re not familiar with Hoopla, it’s a digital service available through some libraries, where you’re able to check out X amount of titles per month, with no wait (unlike, say, Overdrive, where there is a limited number of “copies” your library can loan out). They have books, movies, TV shows, and comics (well, trade paperbacks). Lots of NEW comics, including DC’s Rebirth titles. I haven’t felt this plugged into the DCU since before the New 52 (and in fact that were several years there where I was not reading any current DC titles). And now I’m currently subscribed to several series on Comixology; it’s nowhere near the heyday where my pullbox contained a small stack every week, but for me it’s a step in the right direction. 

So with that said, I’ve been able to read a wide swath of the first volumes of various Rebirth titles. And without further adieu, I shall now provide my assessment of them both as separate entities and on their potential as a series going forward. I was originally going to rank them, but basically they fall into two piles: excellent and meh. There may (probably will) be spoilers ahead. This post will be broken up into several pieces, for size.

First, let me say that, in general, I think Rebirth has been very good. I think the creative vision of the new 52 was severely misguided: characters rolled back, characters disappeared, marriages axed, and some truly ugly costume designs. Regarding the first point, superhero comics of the Big Two always hew close to the status quo, or return to it, but the way it was done was sloppy at best. But that’s the topic of another post.

Titans -- Dan Abnett (writer). WALLY! Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of the wa--WALLLLLY! Wally is easily one of my favorite DC characters, and my antipathy for the new 52 in large part has to do with the fact that Barry Allen (the greatest supervillain of the DCU) erased him from existence. Barry Allen is an insufferable, selfish character and I could go on and on about how he should’ve stayed dead, but that’s a topic for another time. Titans sees Wally returned to form. There is, of course, another Wally running around (I have yet to read any comics with him, waiting for the Teen Titans tpb to release), but he has none of Wally’s history with the Titans, with his family, and so he’s basically just another character with the same name. The character I missed was Wally West, BFF to Dick Grayson and husband to Linda Park-West, and with the advent of Rebirth, that Wally has been restored--sort of.

But this series suffers from two fundamental flaws. The first is the art: I hate Brett Booth’s art, it is so ugly and to my dismay his niche seems to be Titans titles, which means I either have to learn to endure it or forgo the title. In the past, I’ve opted to forgo (and with Lobdell writing, it was no real loss), but in this I must endure, because Wally.

The second fundamental flaw is that even with Wally’s restoration, it’s still unclear how much of the Titans’ past is canon. They had forgotten him and now remember him, great, but just how much of Wolfman and Perez’s NTT run is canon? Any of it? I’m guessing not, which is partly a function of the PTB’s insistence on kicking Cyborg upstairs to the JLA where he doesn’t belong. Because so much is still up in the air, I have a hard time connecting with any of them or feeling invested in them as a group. The original Teen Titans were a casualty of the new 52, and they’ve attempted to cobble together a solution, but it only partially works, and the seams still show. 

But WALLY!

Justice League -- Bryan Hitch (writer). This series was pretty forgettable. Honestly, I can’t think of much to say about it. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible. Team books often seem to suffer from too zoomed out a picture, trying to focus on everyone at once. And a new colossal threat just makes the stakes feel low; I know Superman’s not seriously in danger of dying, they’re not going to kill him off in the opening arc of a comic that isn’t even his, so why are they trying to sell me on that danger? How much better if they were to take the Justice League Unlimited approach by focusing on a small number (or even just one!) Leaguer with each issue/arc. Just because you have an entire box of toys doesn’t mean you have to play with them all at once.

Batgirl -- Hope Larson (writer). Average. I think it was a mistake for Babs’ opening arc to take her to Japan. If this is supposed to be a jumping on point for new readers, you need to introduce those new readers to the supporting cast. I haven’t yet read Batgirl of Burnside, and I tuned out pretty quickly early in Simone’s lackluster New 52 run, so I had no idea who this “Frankie” that Babs was talking to until they finally showed her. In solo titles, a strong supporting cast helps to carry the load and can make or break the series, but for this first arc we’ve got Barbara wandering around Asia alone. But perhaps the most puzzling thing for me is the fact that Barbara is now upholding the masquerade by claiming that Batgirl is some sort of personal bodyguard, a la early Iron Man? 

Again, I am ignorant of any developments to Barbara’s character in the past couple years, but you truly expect me to believe that Kai doesn’t recognize Batgirl as Barbara? Look at that hair! I know this is a debate as old as the genre, but we’re not talking about someone recognizing Clark Kent on the street as Superman, who saved them from a burning building. We’re talking about two characters so tightly tied together that at one point Kai, locked in a bathroom, shouts “Batgirl?!” only for the door to open and there’s Barbara. I mean, come on. Tony Stark as Iron Man was locked in a giant tin can. The only thing that separates Barbara from Batgirl is some leather and a bat symbol.

I’ve also never been a fan of Barbara’s de-aging and de-maturation. Putting her back in the Bat costume--fine. I think her evolution into Oracle was monumental and I think it was a mistake to put her back in costume, but it is what it is. What’s harder for me to accept is her being written like she’s eighteen years old. I miss my slightly battle-hardened hacker.

Birds of Prey -- Benson and Benson (writers). I have a hard time recalling the actual plot because the artwork was just so jarringly bad. In a comic that revolves around three female heroes you have someone who cannot. draw. women. This is not to suggest that I’m advocate of the pornified comics artist; I like that Dinah, Helena, and Barbara are not objectified, but they’re blocky and same-faced, and there was at least one panel where I was briefly under the impression that Batgirl was not Babs but rather a guy cosplaying as her. What happened here? There was some guy calling himself Oracle. And Dinah’s ass cheeks are kinda-sorta hanging out. That’s basically all I remember.

[idontneedasymbol]

12x14 The Raid

Agh.  While there were some things to like about this ep (both the boys were looking more gorgeous than ever) there was a lot I didn’t care for. Under a cut for those who want to stay positive!

I don’t understand what the show is doing with the BMOL. Eps like this make me think we’re meant to think of them as potential allies, as maybe having some good ideas. But we’ve seen them do such evil things, it’s pretty much impossible to trust them. In particular, there’s no way to get over “First Blood.” Ketch slaughtered innocent humans, with Mick’s awareness/permission, for no reason except they could’ve been a hassle for Sam & Dean (and law enforcement was never more than a hassle.)

And no, neither Mary nor the boys know about that. But they do know about a lot of other things. The BMOL’s methods are sketchy as hell, but the show isn’t treating it that way at all. The vampires are being massacred, and we’ve met good vampires before -- Lenore, Benny, the poor sheriff in “Hibbing 911.” But the show doesn’t mention this, hasn’t raised it as a point. I wasn’t sure if the vampires were meant to be at all sympathetic -- the scene with the vamp woman who’d lost her nest, that was set up to be sympathetic in appearance, but then they were stressing she was being given a mug of human blood, so maybe it was meant to be ironic/black comedy with monsters aping humanity, but we’re supposed to want them dead. But not beaten, apparently?

But if the show isn’t intending the monsters to be sympathetic, and the audience is supposed to think that maybe Mary and now Sam are right to choose to work with the BMOL...why were we already given such strong evidence that they’re bad news? Is there actually conflict in the writers’ room of how to handle this? Or is it just clumsy storytelling?

More than the BMOL, though, I didn’t like either of the boys in this episode. Sam got to be badass, yeah. And his deciding to side with the BMOL at the end was not exactly unexpected -- they (unwittingly?) played to his weakness; he wants so badly to help, and that they needed him to survive here, were dependent on him, makes him want to save them. But his “Good” at that hunter being taken off and (implied) tortured -- wow WTF? If the BMOL just executed the guy, I could maybe see Sam approving. But to have Sam, with all his history of torture, be glad to see it happen to someone else...even someone who hurt his mom...seems really unpleasantly OOC. Mary saying “good” was disturbing, too, but Sam especially.

...Especially because the BMOL didn’t say, he betrayed us/got us killed -- Ketch says “We have ways of dealing with hunters who go rogue” -- like they’re policing hunters. Toni was torturing Sam because he’d ‘gone rogue’ -- and Sam is okay with this? Really?

(If Sam is trying to infiltrate the BMOL, if he’s suspicious of them but trying to get on their good side, then it works fine. But I really don’t think that’s where this season is going, as much as I want it to be.)

(OTOH “You’re changing the world, I want to be part of it,” is a really ambiguous line, so maybe...?)

Meanwhile Dean has been so freaking one-note this season. He gets angry with the people he loves, then he realizes he’s in the wrong and apologizes. In this case it was extra obnoxious, because they changed the course of the argument from one ep to the next. And I don’t believe I’m saying this, but it was better in BuckLemming’s ep. Sam and Dean at the end of last ep were both expressing anger, disappointment, betrayal with Mary. And then, as if the show realized that it was hard to dig Mary out of this one, they switched Dean to sulking about Mary not acting like a mother to them/him. Which is not what this fight should have been about. Mary’s not at fault here because she’s not tucking them in at night; she lied to them, put them in danger, nearly got Cas killed, got a hunter killed. These aren’t unforgivable actions; the boys have both done worse, in their day. But the show isn’t addressing what she’s actually doing wrong; instead it’s having Dean be childish and immature and then eventually get over it and acknowledge his mom as her own person.

Which is a theme I’m kind of getting tired with. There’s been emphasis placed on Dean specifically having to accept that the people he loves are still individuals who have the right and responsibility to make their own choices. And yes it’s a lesson he really needs to learn. But in doing this it’s severing any sense of relationship -- that the decisions you make do affect those close to you, and therefore you should take them into account. You shouldn’t let someone else dictate your decisions, obviously. But the lesson being played out here is that if your decisions hurt your family then that’s entirely their problem. Which is the opposite of a major theme of the show all before this.

The ep also did a thing it’s been doing all season, that Dean is just there at the end, and we don’t see him arrive, don’t see him finding out Sam was in trouble. It makes a specific point that he didn’t know Sam was there, to emphasize that he was entirely concerned about Mary, and that’s fine and all (though yeah, I’m annoyed that Dean is being written as so simplistic that it takes her being in danger for him to realize he’s being a dick; I thought he might’ve finally grown up a little but apparently not.) But it means that again, we don’t get any moment of caring between the brothers. Rather than supporting each other through this trial, they’re -- not even fighting, really, which would lead to the opportunity for cathartic reunion, a la Carver era; instead they’re just not working together as real partners. They argue a bit at the beginning, but then it’s put aside in favor of Dean with Mary and Sam with the BMOL.

And it’s frustrating, because I want to like Mary, and I don’t want to feel like she’s taking away the brother’s bond (or at least taking away the show’s focus on it)...but that’s what seems to be happening and it’s hard not to resent that, when it’s my favorite part of the show.

Annoyingly, they didn’t need to do this; Mary came across pretty good in this episode otherwise. It was confirmed she’s doing this because she’s trying to make the world safe for her boys, to get them out of this life. It might not be what they want, but wanting to do what you think is best for your loved ones even if they disagree is the Winchester way. And her not being as bothered by vampire genocide makes more sense in her case; she was raised as a hunter, and as far as we know has never met a ‘good monster’ (since she sees angels as something else -- she hasn’t met any bad angels?) Her reaction to Crowley is a case in point -- she sees monsters as monsters, to be killed, as Dean thought for a long time (and Sam never did, which is what’s making his being okay with the BMOL now so weird and OOC.)

And while it seemed like she was a disappointingly bad judge of character, to fall for the BMOL’s schtick, now that it’s looking like Sam (and probably Dean eventually?) is falling for it, too, that doesn’t reflect as badly on her.

It’s also unfair to Sam’s character -- he had a whole episode with Mary and he didn’t really advance his relationship with her much at all -- Mary got to mention that she knows he tried to leave hunting, but Sam as usual for s12 doesn’t really get to express much of his own feelings about that or anything else.

What I’m trying to figure out now is where this season is going. Right now they’ve set it up that while the BMOL have some disagreeable traits, they are effective -- they’re basically making the last eleven seasons of hunting look bad and incompetent. Since it seems unlike that the show is actually going to eliminate the supernatural and let the boys retire, the BMOL are going to have to be proved to be evil -- so evil that it taints their methods such that they can’t be applied in the future (at least not on this scale). And while that scale could be seen as evil in itself -- they’re going for genocide -- so far the show hasn’t been pointing that out. Maybe it will? But it would’ve been better to set it up sooner.

Finally, bringing the Alpha vamp back, just to kill him...boo. Abrupt end to an awesome villain. And yet another character of color biting the dust, oh SPN, why you gotta be so racist. Also partway through I had the thought that the BMOL had set up all of this to get the Alpha vamp out and kill him, but no, they weren’t that clever. I’d much prefer competent evil to incompetent...whatever the BMOL are meant to be.

(And what happened to the Colt anyway? Did Sam really leave it in the BMOL’s hands?)

Well, we’ll see where it’s going. I do hope Sam doesn’t lie to Dean about working for the BMOL. And I hope that eventually the show will acknowledge the BMOL’s sins and have the Winchesters (all three) react with the appropriate disapproval. Until then, just hope there’s something good between the boys in the next ep. Davy Perez’s last two eps were great; please don’t let us down!)

[theconservativebrief]

If the migrant caravan didn’t exist, President Donald Trump might have needed to invent it.

The existence of a massive group of Central Americans pushing toward the US without papers — even if they are still hundreds of miles away — seems like something Trump’s GOP might create in a lab to unleash on the eve of the midterms.

But the caravan is real. The migrants in it — mostly Hondurans (with some Guatemalans), half of whom are girls and women, many intending to seek asylum in the US — are real people.

They made the decision to leave their home countries, assessing that the danger of leaving was outstripped by the danger of facing gang death threats or feeding a family on $5 per day. And they made the decision to go together, joining the caravan as it progressed, instead of alone like tens of thousands of their fellow Guatemalans and Hondurans (and Salvadorans) do every year.

The caravan has provided an irresistible visual for Republican closing arguments about immigration. In Trump’s first TV ad of the presidential primary in 2015, he used an image of a mass of immigrants; fact-checkers revealed the picture was in fact taken in Morocco. Now, as he nears the midterm elections, Trump has the image he wanted all along.

The decision about 160 Honduran migrants made to travel as a group in the open to the US — and the decision thousands have made to join them en route — is the result of a situation that predates Trump. The United States and Mexico have worked to make the journey to the US less appealing to Central Americans, but many residents of the Northern Triangle find the prospect of eventual asylum in the US — however difficult it is to get there — more appealing than the insecurity they’re facing at home.

The current wave of Northern Triangle migration raises hard questions about the distinction between economic and humanitarian migration, the US’s ability to process asylum seekers, and the role Mexico plays in the region. Those are emphatically not the questions that are coming up in the Trump-driven conversation about the caravan — which is using the sheer fact of a mass of people traveling northward to activate fears of an invasion by unknowable foreigners.

Over the past decade, there’s been a rise in the number of unaccompanied children and families crossing the US-Mexico border. Increasingly, they are people fleeing violence and insecurity, coming from the Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, Honduras, and Central America.

Meanwhile, unauthorized border crossings of single adults, Mexicans, and people looking for seasonal work have greatly declined. The result is a change in the character of who is seeking to cross into the US:

To get to the US-Mexico border, Northern Triangle emigrants have to get through Mexico, a journey that takes weeks.

Under current US and international law, asylum seekers from Central America are allowed to apply for asylum either in Mexico or in the US. Many take the first option: Asylum applications in Mexico have gone up more than 1,000 percent since 2013, and most are from citizens of Northern Triangle countries. But applying for asylum in Mexico isn’t a walk in the park. Mexico has been accused of indiscriminate long-term detention of asylum seekers (exacerbated by a two-year backlog in processing applications), and some parts of Mexico aren’t safe for people who are already fleeing violence.

The US has enlisted Mexico to apprehend Central American migrants before they get to the US. Some 950,000 Central Americans have been deported from Mexico over the past several years, and human rights groups have reported torture and disappearance by Mexican security forces.

The crackdown has made an already dangerous journey more dangerous. The harder it is to get through Mexico without attracting attention from the authorities, the more that task falls to professional criminal organizations who might smuggle drugs alongside migrants or abuse migrants physically or sexually. The involvement of criminal organizations makes Mexico even more anxious to crack down.

For some Central Americans, the solution to this problem is hypervisibility: traveling out in the open, as part of a large group of people that can’t simply be grabbed or disappeared. That’s the reason small human rights organizations have gotten people together, on occasion, in “caravans” — and the appeal to hundreds or thousands of migrants who’ve joined them in trying to get to the US.

For some, it’s a way to call political attention to what they’re fleeing and what migrants have to endure; to others, it’s a desperate exodus; to some, it’s simply an opportunity that came along to hope for a better, safer life.

On October 12, 2018, a group of about 160 Hondurans set forth from the town of San Pedro Sula — which in the first half of the decade was often referred to as the “murder capital of the world” — in hopes of arriving to present themselves for asylum in Mexico or the United States.

Seventy-five miles and two days later, the caravan was more than 1,000 strong, according to the estimates of Associated Press reporters. By October 15, the AP estimated about 1,600 Hondurans had amassed at the border with Guatemala.

Jsvier Zarracina/Vox; location and date information via Associated Press

The earliest spokespeople for the caravan were a journalist and former leftist legislator named Bartolo Fuentes and his wife, human rights activist Dunia Montoya. The conservative government of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (with the help of friendly media outlets) has accused Fuentes of organizing the caravan to embarrass the Hernandez administration and promote instability.

Fuentes has vehemently denied that he organized the caravan even in its early stages, and has laughed off any idea that he coordinated an exodus of 1,600 people. Instead, he’s painted the caravan as an illustration of how miserable life is in Hernandez’s Honduras: The situation is bad enough, he argues, that so many people have been inspired to pick up and leave.

The government of Guatemala attempted to close the Guatemalan-Honduran border to the caravan on October 15; after a standoff of several hours, Guatemalan officials backed down. The caravan continued to grow as it crossed Guatemala, and arrived about 3,000 strong at the Mexican-Guatemalan border on October 19, when the members slept overnight on a bridge at the border after being driven back by Mexican riot police with pepper spray.

Mexico has begun slowly admitting caravan members to ask for asylum, and several hundred have complied. But more have decided to stop waiting and swim across the river to enter without papers. On Sunday, a surging group of migrants — thousands bigger than the group that had waited on the bridge — agreed to continue onward from Chiapas, Mexico, to the US.

Caravan members have given journalists a variety of answers to this question.

Some of them have pointed to concerns for their safety. One woman told the AP’s Sonia Perez D. that she’d been in hiding after a local gang threatened to kill her because they’d mistaken a tattoo of her parents’ names for a symbol of a rival gang. Another, traveling with her husband and two sons, told the Los Angeles Times’s Kate Linthicum that after her 16-year-old son refused to sell drugs for a gang, “they were going to kill him or kill us.”

Others have cited poverty, and the inability to support their families on $5 a day.

A few are trying to get back to America after having been deported, to return to their families (including US-born, US-citizen kids) and the lives they’d built. “I miss my PlayStation,” one caravan member told Linthicum. “I miss Buffalo Wild Wings.”

In a lot of cases, people are probably motivated by more than one of these — a generalized sense of desperation and a generalized sense of hope for a better life.

But the reasons given by caravan members are squarely representative of the current wave of Central American migration to the US.

In US law, there’s a firm distinction between “asylum seekers” (who are fleeing persecution because of their identity, usually from their governments) and “economic migrants” who are looking for a job. But the division in real life isn’t always so neat, and few of the people trying to come to the US from the Northern Triangle right now fit just one of those boxes.

Many people are leaving because they fear for their lives if they stay, because they’re being threatened by gangs and the local government is either complicit or absentee. They’re seeking asylum, even if their circumstances may not fit neatly into the definition of “persecution” in US asylum law. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions has used his authority to make it harder for people to claim asylum based on domestic or gang violence.)

Others are technically “economic migrants,” but they’re not simply coming for a better job — they’re fleeing desperate poverty. And with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stepping up deportations of unauthorized immigrants since its inception in 2003, especially of Mexican and Central American men, many migrants who’ve been deported have every incentive to try again.

US law treats these groups of people very differently — deportees who reenter illegally, for example, are permanently barred from ever getting legal status in the US, while people who can claim a “credible fear” of persecution are allowed to stay and seek asylum. But as far as the journey is concerned, that doesn’t matter. They’re all facing the same dangers, so they’re all traveling together.

On October 22, as the caravan regrouped on the Mexican side of the Mexico-Guatemala border, the United Nations estimated its size at 7,322 migrants. The UN estimate is the only official estimate of any sort, so it’s the best thing to go on for now. (Prior to the UN’s assessment, the AP had been estimating the caravan as slightly smaller — 3,000 on the Guatemalan side of the border — and it’s not clear whether the caravan has grown or the AP was underestimating its size.)

Estimating crowd size is an inexact science even when the crowd is stationary. But the caravan isn’t just on the move; it’s stretched out — people go at their own pace, hitching rides or resting. It’s possible while the leading edge of the caravan was stuck on the border bridge between Mexico and Guatemala, the rest caught up, causing the estimate to grow.

It’s hard to tell where the caravan ends and typical everyday Northern Triangle emigration begins. As Bartolo Fuentes pointed out in an interview with CNN Español, the size of the caravan as it left Honduras was roughly equal to the number of Hondurans who emigrate every 15 days. And the coverage of the caravan appears to have inspired others to plan their own.

The size of the caravan has led a lot of people to assume that someone must be organizing and supporting it. A video that appears to be from near the start of the caravan route, which shows money being handed out to women, has been used by conservatives in the US as evidence that the caravan is a liberal plot (Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has blamed George Soros) and by the Honduran government as evidence that Fuentes and Libre, the political movement to which he belongs, are behind the caravan.

But whatever that video actually captured, it doesn’t represent the truth of the caravan as it’s continued into Guatemala and Mexico — a straggling procession of people relying on humanitarian organizations and sympathetic locals for food, transportation, and medical assistance.

It’s hard to guarantee safety for such a sprawling group. The Honduran government has confirmed that at least two caravan members have been killed in accidents since the departure; several police officers and caravan members were injured when the caravan burst through a border fence on the Guatemala-Mexico bridge on October 19. The bet that caravan members are making is that it would be more dangerous to travel alone.

Because the caravan is large and not centrally coordinated, however, it’s impossible to know the identity of every migrant traveling with it. That makes it very easy to raise the specter of criminals or terrorists hiding within the caravan — to use any question mark to paint the whole caravan as a faceless and threatening mass.

The short answer is b-roll.

B-roll is a TV industry term for the brief clips that run on mute to illustrate a segment while an anchor is narrating or a talking head is commentating. If a channel is giving a lot of coverage to a particular story, the b-roll clips it has for that story will get a lot of play — making it hard for any but the most dedicated viewer to tell when or where something happened, or even whether it’s happened more than once.

Caravans make for evocative b-roll: masses of people pressing toward the United States. Fox News leaped on the story of the caravan the minute it reached Guatemala with captions that talk about a press of people at the “border” and only a tiny note in the corner identifying that “border” as a Central American one.

And the president, Fox News-watcher-in-chief, has taken his cues on the caravan from the cable news channel. He started railing about it when Fox started covering it on October 16.

The caravan is a perfect obsession for Trump for the same reason it’s a perfect obsession for Fox: powerful images that appear to validate conservative base fears of “invasion” by “lawless” foreigners and the countries that “send” them. Trump himself has been using imagery like this since he started his presidential campaign in 2015 and talked about Mexico “sending” rapists and murderers over the US-Mexico border.

The caravan has provided more fodder. It’s a constant motif of his near-daily rallies and his morning and evening tweetstorms as the midterm elections approach.

His rage is being fed by hardliners in the administration who want to do more to crack down on families and asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border (options being considered include forcing parents to choose between months-long detention and family separation). It’s also being fed by Fox.

Other Republicans were already following Trump’s lead in making immigration their key issue in the closing weeks of the midterm campaign, amid concerns that the Republican base won’t turn out without Trump on the ballot. They’ve followed his lead on the caravan too. While GOP hardliners within the administration are using the caravan as a reason to push for a change to the laws governing children and asylum seekers who arrive at the border, Republicans have turned the caravan into a reason that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to take Congress — because they would let in untold numbers of migrants.

The Trump administration absolutely believes this is the way to fire up the Republican base for the midterms. But it’s hard to tell how much of this is deliberate strategy and how much is Trump’s personal obsession — or if there’s any difference between the two.

Even before the caravan set out, the administration was raising alarms about families coming to the US-Mexico border. But the current situation isn’t really a crisis of numbers so much as a crisis of resources.

Overall, apprehension levels in August and September 2018 were only a little above average for the past several years at this time. And they’re still way, way below pre-Great Recession levels. (For context, apprehensions in fiscal year 2018 were a little more than half as high as fiscal year 2008, and about a quarter of fiscal year 1998 levels.)

But the people coming in are different.

Over the past several years, apprehensions of single adults at the US-Mexico border have declined. At the same time, apprehensions of unaccompanied children, and of parents with children, have continued to increase. In September 2018, children and families made up more than half of all people apprehended crossing the border illegally — up from 17 percent in September 2013.

The US has developed a border policy that’s designed to maximize the efficient apprehension and deportation of everyone trying to cross the border illegally and not get caught. It is not designed to facilitate the processing of families who are seeking asylum, a decision that is not immediate. Nor can families be kept in conventional ICE detention centers while they wait.

Refusing to offer asylum would violate international law. So the Trump administration has been trying to crack down on how families are treated after they arrive — by detaining or separating them, for example.

There is some evidence that efforts to deport families leads to fewer people seeking asylum. But there isn’t evidence that harsher treatment of asylum seekers accomplishes the same goal. Neither the 2017 pilot nor the widespread 2018 policy of family separation had the effects that officials hoped for at the border. Neither did Obama’s efforts to expand family detention in fall 2015.

The Trump administration’s sweeping border crackdown has, in fact, made it harder for people to seek and receive asylum. But it hasn’t been enough to persuade people that they’d be better off staying in their home countries.

There’s only so much the US can do with the caravan still weeks from US soil. Sending US officials to stop a group of people from crossing a border from one non-US country into another — or trying to disperse them within Mexico, for example — would be a pretty straightforward invasion of national sovereignty. (Trump has threatened to send “the military” to the US-Mexico border, but the only option that appears to have been seriously discussed in is sending additional National Guard troops to the border.)

As far as Donald Trump is concerned, though, the failure of the governments of Guatemala and Honduras (and, somehow, El Salvador) to stop the caravan from leaving their countries is an insult to the United States — and a reason to slash foreign aid to those countries.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S. We will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given to them.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2018

Agencies say they haven’t received any guidance over foreign aid cuts. And plenty of key Trump administration officials believe that the only way to reduce emigration from Central America to the US is to invest more in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Trump does not buy into this narrative. In a February speech, he said that the governments of Mexico and the Northern Triangle are “not our friends” — and that the US was getting played for a fool by sending them millions of dollars in aid.

Trump’s officials, though, still buy into the investment narrative. On Thursday, at a think tank event with the Mexican ambassador to the US about border security partnerships, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan stressed that investment was as important as enforcement in stopping unauthorized migration. On Monday, the US ambassador to El Salvador stressed that aid would continue.

The irony is that the more Trump paints Central American countries as irredeemable hellholes, the more he strengthens the case for allowing its refugees to seek shelter in the US.

Some number of the people currently traveling toward the US will almost certainly arrive at the US-Mexico border eventually. Some number will elect to stay in Mexico (as of Monday, Mexican authorities had already received 1,000 requests for asylum from caravan members) or be detained and deported en route.

It’s impossible to know how many people will fall into each of those categories. And while whoever makes it to the US will still call themselves “the caravan,” it’s not clear that most Americans will notice. When a few hundred members of the spring caravan arrived at the border in May, the only people still paying attention were in the Trump administration.

The key question right now is whether the Mexican government will be able to forcibly disperse this caravan, as it did with the group in spring. The Mexican government has said that it won’t provide travel visas to members of this caravan, and that people who don’t seek asylum in Mexico will be deportable.

In general, the Mexican government has a lot more capacity to enforce immigration law than the Guatemalan or Honduran governments. But its first attempt to stop the caravan from entering the country didn’t work. And despite rumors, it hasn’t yet tried again.

The caravan is absolutely not, no way, no how, going to be able to push its way en masse across the US-Mexico border — even if the US military doesn’t get involved. And it probably wouldn’t even try.

It is perfectly legal for caravan members, or anyone else, to seek asylum in the US without papers.

Caravan members could present themselves legally at an official border crossing (officially termed a “port of entry”) and say they fear persecution — entitling them to the screening interview that could start the asylum process. Or they could choose to cross into the US between a port of entry and then tell the Border Patrol agent who apprehended them that they feared persecution — they’d be committing the misdemeanor of illegal entry, but they’d still have the legal right to seek asylum.

It’s then up to the US government to honor those rights. Human rights advocates charge that the Trump administration often doesn’t.

Across the US-Mexico border, right now, people are being made to wait weeks at ports of entry before being allowed to officially enter the US and seek asylum. Advocates recount stories from asylum seekers of officials on both sides telling them they aren’t allowed to seek asylum in the US, or of Mexican officials detaining them or threatening them with deportation after they tried to present themselves at a US port.

When the caravan arrived at San Ysidro this spring, the US didn’t allow any of its members to enter initially, due to the restrictions at the port of entry. It gradually allowed a few at a time to enter legally over the next days and weeks.

In the meantime, a Human Rights Watch report published last week alleges that Mexican police arrested two of the asylum seekers and beat one of them, and a group of armed men attempted to burn down the shelter where another group of asylum seekers was staying.

One Mexican official told Human Rights Watch that the US had asked the Mexican government to clear out the plaza where asylum seekers were waiting. If Mexico had complied, it would have, essentially, deported people from Mexico because they had to wait in Mexico before being allowed to cross legally into the US.

These things happened to small numbers of caravan members at a time. They happened to groups that looked just like any other group of Central Americans trying to come to the US. The ultimate fate of the spring caravan, if anything, proved the point of why caravans are important: because even if size and visibility to the US (and the president) create political backlash, they make it harder for any individual migrant to disappear.

Original Source -> The migrant caravan, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[lucyariablog]

Are You Really Smart About How AI Works in Marketing?

In its widely talked about State of Marketing Report, Salesforce reports that just over half (51%) of marketers are using AI in one form or another, while another quarter plan to test it over the next two years.

A smaller study of over 500 search, content, and digital marketers by BrightEdge found that just 4% have implemented AI (that’s not a typo).

Who’s right? Salesforce, which reports one in two marketers is using AI, or BrightEdge, which puts the number at one in 25?

The answer may be “neither.” That’s because many marketers (and business leaders as a whole) are confused about which technologies are genuinely AI-powered and which simply rely on advanced algorithms and analytics.

Many marketers are confused about which tech is genuinely AI-powered, says @Clare_mcd. Click To Tweet

As Luis Perez-Breva, head of MIT’s Innovation Teams Program and research scientist at MIT School of Engineering, explains, “Most of what the retail industry refers to as artificial intelligence isn’t AI.” He says many “confuse analyzing large amounts of data and profiling customers for artificial intelligence. Throwing data at machines doesn’t make machines (or anyone) smarter.”

Throwing data at machines doesn’t make machines (or anyone) smarter, says @lpbreva. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

Rather, AI’s promise is what is often called relevance at scale. It’s the ability of machines to crunch massive datasets and data lakes – structured and unstructured data – and optimize decision-making in a way that algorithm-enabled humans cannot achieve. Perhaps most importantly, in an AI-enabled system the machine learns and improves without human input.

Rather than ask, “How many marketers are using AI?,” the more apt question may be, “What are you doing with it?” Let’s examine some of the ways companies are using AI-led initiatives to make the most of AI’s promise.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Should You Trust Artificial Intelligence to Drive Your Content Marketing?

8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence

Using AI for personalization

Marketers have long practiced personalization in content marketing, developing over time more sophisticated ways of personalizing the customer journey – whether through marketing automation and progressive profiling or using programmatic advertising to support our content path. The idea is that as we learn more about our customer or prospect and fill in information about that person’s needs, budgets, and interests, we can create unique, personalized experiences that educate and delight the person.

Now we are entering the era of hyper-personalization: the ability to personalize not just by persona, profile, or the trail of breadcrumbs people leave on your site, but by a massive set of user details and signals, analyzed and made actionable by machines.

The retail industry is the most talked about application of AI-led personalization, but most examples you read about don’t really fit the definition of AI … they’re just really good personalization.

The examples that seem to cross over – from algorithm-driven personalization to AI-driven personalization – are those in which the AI sifts through data from multiple channels and sources, learning which signals matter in which circumstances and evolving its approach over time. The key variables that influence how one customer interacts with your brand may be completely different from the variables that define another, multiplied millions of times across each person, each channel, and each step of the process – and changing constantly.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Cognitive Content Marketing: The Path to a More (Artificially) Intelligent Future

Using AI for voice-searchable entertainment and education

A less common but exciting application for AI-enriched content? Virtual assistants. Alexa (Amazon) offers developers the chance to build “skills” on its platform. Alexa Skills help customers answer questions, gather information, and even control internet-enabled devices and appliances. (To be fair, there’s disagreement about whether Alexa is an AI technology or just an advanced natural language technology – another nod to the problem of assessing AI adoption.)

Companies far and wide are racing to launch Alexa Skills – both to inform and delight customers as well as to test out the channel’s promise.

Companies are racing to launch Alexa Skills to inform and delight customers, says @Clare_mcd. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

Entertainment

Content-rich brands are delivering entertainment and information via Alexa Skills. Disney’s Character of the Day Skill introduces a new character each day from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Or you could try out Cat Translator to understand the “why” behind weird cat behavior.

Real-time news

Media companies have been among the first to offer content snippets via Alexa Skills. If you enable the NPR News Hour Skill, for example, you’ll have access to a five-minute news summary, refreshed every hour. Big brands are quickly jumping in too. J.P. Morgan customers can access investment news: “Send me the latest research report from Joyce Chang” or “Send me the tear sheet for eBay.”

Customer service and engagement

Global consumer brands are enabling e-commerce, customer service, and analytics using Alexa Skills. The Capital One Skill lets you ask Alexa, “How much did I spend at Target last month?” or “When is my mortgage payment due?”

For content marketers, there are interesting opportunities to deliver education and entertainment via voice-enabled search. Beauty brand Wunder2 was the first in its segment to launch an Amazon Alexa Skill. The company offers a daily beauty tip via Skills, from how to thicken the appearance of your brows to how to achieve healthier looking hair. As one reviewer explained, “It’s very cool when I can get the latest beauty tips while having my hands free to apply my makeup.”

Wunder2 co-founder and CEO Michael Malinsky tells Forbes, “As a business, we are fascinated with the rapid integration of AI into people’s lives. We think the level of adoption will exceed many people’s expectation and create fluid recommendation experiences using AI technology found in Google Home, Alexa, and the recently launched Apple HomePod. It is something we are absolutely developing already.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Set Your Content Free for a Mobile, Voice, Ready-for-Anything Future

Using AI to put email on steroids

For marketers, AI-enabled decision-making for customizing and delivering email (i.e., dynamic emails) could be a game-changer.

Once upon a time, marketers would ask, “What’s the best time of day to send out our email newsletter?” Through trial and error, marketers discovered that certain days and times yielded higher open rates on average.

AI, however, allows marketers to send emails based on the open histories of individual users (or people like him/her in the absence of better data). And no longer will marketers send promotions to huge swaths of their audience. Instead, promotions will be designed uniquely for prospects based on a wide range of signals, from cart abandonment in retail to which times of day an individual is most likely to sign up for a conference. Finally, AI will enable much more customized and nuanced customer journeys. That leads to our next AI application – one which is too often misunderstood.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Scale Your B2B Content With Artificial Intelligence: Ideas and Tools Marketers Can Try

Using AI to write

Long decried as evidence that AI will herald in a new soulless age, machine-made content is one of the most controversial applications of AI … but, under the right circumstances, it may be the most pro-creative. Let me explain.

#ArtificialIntelligence under right circumstances, might be the most pro-creative content creator. @Clare_mcd Click To Tweet

As machine-made content becomes better at approximating human language, there’s a clear case for its use in content marketing. Not all content generated by marketing needs to be highly creative and witty, after all. Many organizations are already using machine-generated content, such as Edmunds generating vehicle profiles based on manufacturer data and Homesnap publishing community profiles based on publicly available data. The best applications are those in which there’s a need to publish at scale and the content is somewhat “modular” or easily put together from pieces and parts.

And, if you’re not convinced, perhaps this will change your tune. Even The Washington Post uses machine-generated content. According to Digiday, as of September 2017, the paper’s robot writer (a solution from Heliograph) had published 850 articles and tweets like this one:

Landon beat Whitman 34-0; https://t.co/V6zVPi7a9O @LandonSports @koachkuhn

— WashPost HS Sports (@WashPostHS) September 2, 2017

The key is in how you pair the robot to the writing. For The Washington Post, Heliograph generated articles about local political races, where the paper didn’t have the resources to assign reporters but had data to fill in the story. It also published short summaries about the Olympics in Rio via machine. (The paper reports that four employees previously took 25 hours to collect, analyze, and report on a small portion of local election results. Using Heliograph, The Washington Post created more than 500 articles generating 500,000 views.)

And therein lies the most powerful promise of AI: to release marketers from the mundane to focus on more creative and fulfilling efforts. Marvin Chow, vice president of global marketing at Google, writes that artificial intelligence and machine learning “will spark new ideas and push the boundaries of creativity. With new tools, what will makers, artists, and musicians design? And how will that affect the marketing world we work in?” The full vision is still out of reach, but early signs point to a machine-led period of creative efficiency.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Content Creation Robots Are Here [Examples]

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Manual Content Creation?

A version of this article originally appeared in the August issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

Discover more about how to use AI (and how not to use it) at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Are You Really Smart About How AI Works in Marketing? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/08/ai-works-marketing/

[a-breton]

Are You Really Smart About How AI Works in Marketing?

In its widely talked about State of Marketing Report, Salesforce reports that just over half (51%) of marketers are using AI in one form or another, while another quarter plan to test it over the next two years.

A smaller study of over 500 search, content, and digital marketers by BrightEdge found that just 4% have implemented AI (that’s not a typo).

Who’s right? Salesforce, which reports one in two marketers is using AI, or BrightEdge, which puts the number at one in 25?

The answer may be “neither.” That’s because many marketers (and business leaders as a whole) are confused about which technologies are genuinely AI-powered and which simply rely on advanced algorithms and analytics.

Many marketers are confused about which tech is genuinely AI-powered, says @Clare_mcd. Click To Tweet

As Luis Perez-Breva, head of MIT’s Innovation Teams Program and research scientist at MIT School of Engineering, explains, “Most of what the retail industry refers to as artificial intelligence isn’t AI.” He says many “confuse analyzing large amounts of data and profiling customers for artificial intelligence. Throwing data at machines doesn’t make machines (or anyone) smarter.”

Throwing data at machines doesn’t make machines (or anyone) smarter, says @lpbreva. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

Rather, AI’s promise is what is often called relevance at scale. It’s the ability of machines to crunch massive datasets and data lakes – structured and unstructured data – and optimize decision-making in a way that algorithm-enabled humans cannot achieve. Perhaps most importantly, in an AI-enabled system the machine learns and improves without human input.

Rather than ask, “How many marketers are using AI?,” the more apt question may be, “What are you doing with it?” Let’s examine some of the ways companies are using AI-led initiatives to make the most of AI’s promise.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Should You Trust Artificial Intelligence to Drive Your Content Marketing?

8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence

Using AI for personalization

Marketers have long practiced personalization in content marketing, developing over time more sophisticated ways of personalizing the customer journey – whether through marketing automation and progressive profiling or using programmatic advertising to support our content path. The idea is that as we learn more about our customer or prospect and fill in information about that person’s needs, budgets, and interests, we can create unique, personalized experiences that educate and delight the person.

Now we are entering the era of hyper-personalization: the ability to personalize not just by persona, profile, or the trail of breadcrumbs people leave on your site, but by a massive set of user details and signals, analyzed and made actionable by machines.

The retail industry is the most talked about application of AI-led personalization, but most examples you read about don’t really fit the definition of AI … they’re just really good personalization.

The examples that seem to cross over – from algorithm-driven personalization to AI-driven personalization – are those in which the AI sifts through data from multiple channels and sources, learning which signals matter in which circumstances and evolving its approach over time. The key variables that influence how one customer interacts with your brand may be completely different from the variables that define another, multiplied millions of times across each person, each channel, and each step of the process – and changing constantly.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Cognitive Content Marketing: The Path to a More (Artificially) Intelligent Future

Using AI for voice-searchable entertainment and education

A less common but exciting application for AI-enriched content? Virtual assistants. Alexa (Amazon) offers developers the chance to build “skills” on its platform. Alexa Skills help customers answer questions, gather information, and even control internet-enabled devices and appliances. (To be fair, there’s disagreement about whether Alexa is an AI technology or just an advanced natural language technology – another nod to the problem of assessing AI adoption.)

Companies far and wide are racing to launch Alexa Skills – both to inform and delight customers as well as to test out the channel’s promise.

Companies are racing to launch Alexa Skills to inform and delight customers, says @Clare_mcd. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

Entertainment

Content-rich brands are delivering entertainment and information via Alexa Skills. Disney’s Character of the Day Skill introduces a new character each day from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Or you could try out Cat Translator to understand the “why” behind weird cat behavior.

Real-time news

Media companies have been among the first to offer content snippets via Alexa Skills. If you enable the NPR News Hour Skill, for example, you’ll have access to a five-minute news summary, refreshed every hour. Big brands are quickly jumping in too. J.P. Morgan customers can access investment news: “Send me the latest research report from Joyce Chang” or “Send me the tear sheet for eBay.”

Customer service and engagement

Global consumer brands are enabling e-commerce, customer service, and analytics using Alexa Skills. The Capital One Skill lets you ask Alexa, “How much did I spend at Target last month?” or “When is my mortgage payment due?”

For content marketers, there are interesting opportunities to deliver education and entertainment via voice-enabled search. Beauty brand Wunder2 was the first in its segment to launch an Amazon Alexa Skill. The company offers a daily beauty tip via Skills, from how to thicken the appearance of your brows to how to achieve healthier looking hair. As one reviewer explained, “It’s very cool when I can get the latest beauty tips while having my hands free to apply my makeup.”

Wunder2 co-founder and CEO Michael Malinsky tells Forbes, “As a business, we are fascinated with the rapid integration of AI into people’s lives. We think the level of adoption will exceed many people’s expectation and create fluid recommendation experiences using AI technology found in Google Home, Alexa, and the recently launched Apple HomePod. It is something we are absolutely developing already.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Set Your Content Free for a Mobile, Voice, Ready-for-Anything Future

Using AI to put email on steroids

For marketers, AI-enabled decision-making for customizing and delivering email (i.e., dynamic emails) could be a game-changer.

Once upon a time, marketers would ask, “What’s the best time of day to send out our email newsletter?” Through trial and error, marketers discovered that certain days and times yielded higher open rates on average.

AI, however, allows marketers to send emails based on the open histories of individual users (or people like him/her in the absence of better data). And no longer will marketers send promotions to huge swaths of their audience. Instead, promotions will be designed uniquely for prospects based on a wide range of signals, from cart abandonment in retail to which times of day an individual is most likely to sign up for a conference. Finally, AI will enable much more customized and nuanced customer journeys. That leads to our next AI application – one which is too often misunderstood.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Scale Your B2B Content With Artificial Intelligence: Ideas and Tools Marketers Can Try

Using AI to write

Long decried as evidence that AI will herald in a new soulless age, machine-made content is one of the most controversial applications of AI … but, under the right circumstances, it may be the most pro-creative. Let me explain.

#ArtificialIntelligence under right circumstances, might be the most pro-creative content creator. @Clare_mcd Click To Tweet

As machine-made content becomes better at approximating human language, there’s a clear case for its use in content marketing. Not all content generated by marketing needs to be highly creative and witty, after all. Many organizations are already using machine-generated content, such as Edmunds generating vehicle profiles based on manufacturer data and Homesnap publishing community profiles based on publicly available data. The best applications are those in which there’s a need to publish at scale and the content is somewhat “modular” or easily put together from pieces and parts.

And, if you’re not convinced, perhaps this will change your tune. Even The Washington Post uses machine-generated content. According to Digiday, as of September 2017, the paper’s robot writer (a solution from Heliograph) had published 850 articles and tweets like this one:

Landon beat Whitman 34-0; https://t.co/V6zVPi7a9O @LandonSports @koachkuhn

— WashPost HS Sports (@WashPostHS) September 2, 2017

The key is in how you pair the robot to the writing. For The Washington Post, Heliograph generated articles about local political races, where the paper didn’t have the resources to assign reporters but had data to fill in the story. It also published short summaries about the Olympics in Rio via machine. (The paper reports that four employees previously took 25 hours to collect, analyze, and report on a small portion of local election results. Using Heliograph, The Washington Post created more than 500 articles generating 500,000 views.)

And therein lies the most powerful promise of AI: to release marketers from the mundane to focus on more creative and fulfilling efforts. Marvin Chow, vice president of global marketing at Google, writes that artificial intelligence and machine learning “will spark new ideas and push the boundaries of creativity. With new tools, what will makers, artists, and musicians design? And how will that affect the marketing world we work in?” The full vision is still out of reach, but early signs point to a machine-led period of creative efficiency.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Content Creation Robots Are Here [Examples]

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Manual Content Creation?

A version of this article originally appeared in the August issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

Discover more about how to use AI (and how not to use it) at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2vvCNMD

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/jerry-trimble-talks-supernatural-ramiel-working-richard-speight-jr/

Jerry Trimble talks 'Supernatural,' Ramiel and working with Richard Speight Jr.

I was fascinated by Ramiel on the recent Supernatural episode ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ – in just one episode, actor Jerry Trimble, along with director Richard Speight Jr. and writer Davy Perez, created a memorable character who most fans would be happy to see more of. So I was thrilled to have a chance to ask Jerry about his experience on the show. Lynn: Congrats again on the amazing job you did on Supernatural. As you probably read in my review on Fangasm, I’m a big fan of the original ‘Yellow Eyed Demon’ who was portrayed by Fred Lehne. I got to know Fred from interviewing him for Fangasm and for the books I’ve written on Supernatural and was always impressed by his ability to make the character compelling as well as scary. You managed to do the same in one episode with Ramiel. So I’ve got a few questions for you. I’ve known Richard Speight for years, and am looking forward to hearing his thoughts on directing this episode (stay tuned for that!),  but I’d love to hear your thoughts on being directed by him. Were there some notes he gave you that were particularly helpful? JT:  Richard was one of the best directors I’ve had the pleasure of working with, he’s an actor’s dream director.  Probably because he’s an actor as well and a fantastic one at that.  He was so helpful and pivotal in helping me to create the character of Ramiel, Prince of Hell.  There were times when I was going too dark and hard, and then Richard pulls me aside and says, dude, back off and BAM Ramiel comes alive.  Richard was collaborative in the coolest way.  Some directors I work with are too into their comfort zone and just want to pump it out. They settle for less than the best, whereas Richard had an idea, I had an idea, we meshed them together, and as you saw from the episode, it was magic.  Loved working with him. Lynn: Richard is good friends with Jared, Jensen, Misha and Mark, since they all do Supernatural conventions together a few weekends a month. Did that influence the way Richard directed or the way they responded to his direction? JT: I could see how well everyone clicked and got along well on set.  Everyone was like old friends which was nice to see.  They joked, laughed, had so much fun working together.  The Supernatural cast and crew was one of the finest filmmaking machines I’ve ever been involved with.  When it’s tight, it’s right.  And this team was spot on. Lynn: Everyone who works on Supernatural is impressed with their ability to work together so seamlessly. And  Ruth Connell tweeted that you do your own stunts – can you talk about what that entailed for this episode? JT: With my background in martial arts, which is pretty extensive, I am able to do most of my own stunts, it’s like second nature to me.  Besides being a World Champion in kickboxing, and a 6th degree black belt, it allows me the opportunity to bring something extra to the table.  I will always do that and thoroughly enjoy anything that involves fighting, that’s my thing, but they had a terrific stunt double for me just in case I needed him, Yves Langlois.  He was fantastic to work with and did an awesome job getting nailed by the truck.  But when it comes to fighting,  it’s my time to shine.  Richard came up to me a couple of times and said, hey brother, if you need a double we got you one, but what you’re doing is awesome.   I’m like; it’ll be a cold day in hell when I have someone else fight my battles for me on screen (laughing). Acting and fighting on film is my dream job. Lynn: Well, the fight scenes were truly epic in this episode. Did you work with stunt coordinator Lou Bollo on them, and if so, what was that experience like? I’ve been on set and watched him work on fight scenes and have always been impressed with how much it’s like choreographing a dance almost! JT: It is sort of a dance.  It moves in beats with reactions, timing, and a smooth coolness that comes together when you have a coordinator like Lou Bollo and his team.  Lou and his crew were very specific in what they wanted, so it all worked out pretty fantastic in the end result. Lynn: It really did. Does your background in fighting and kickboxing help you with fight scenes? JT: Oh yes, you could say that.  Since I was a teenager, I’ve been doing action choreographed fight scenes and filming them with friends.  It’s been fun doing it my whole life.  Since 1990 I started doing leads in action films for the first part of my career, and it definitely helped to bring it all to fruition and makes it easier that I could remember the dance moves no matter how elaborate they may be.    Lynn: How was it to work with Jared and Jensen, who are not trained fighters but are experienced in stage fighting (which I’m sure is a lot different)? JT: Jared and Jensen were amazing. They were so good in the way they portrayed themselves as badasses- reactions, punches, timing were impeccable.  These guys are pros, and it shows.  They move like real fighters.  Much respect for those guys.   Lynn: Were you and Jared able to coordinate that ‘Sam stabs Ramiel with the lance’ scene easily or were there multiple takes? JT: I believe there were a few takes, yes, but we were all in sync and made it look as good as it did.  Sam was great in the action scenes too.  She was such a pleasure to work with. Lynn: She’s made Mary into a very believable hunter, absolutely. As a psychologist, I can’t help but try to ‘figure out’ the characters on my favorite show. It seemed like Ramiel wasn’t a bad guy as demons go, and that he would have been content to just keep fishing if he was left alone.  What was your take on him and his motivations, and did you see him as a good guy or a bad guy? JT: I saw him as a good guy, that you didn’t want to mess with.  All he wanted was to be left alone.  But as you saw it didn’t work out that way. Lynn: Unfortunately, no. But I did get that sense from him, that he wasn’t inherently a bad guy. Do you tend to create a back story for the characters you play as a guest actor, and if so, what did you create for Ramiel? JT: I discussed Ramiel with Richard and started getting the character from our conversation.  I brought back some things from my past from the 80’s.  The anger, the intensity and his motivation of what he had to lose.  What he was trying to protect.  He was one guy that you didn’t want to mess with and if you did, WTF? Lynn: Well said! You had scenes with Sam Smith, Jared, Jensen, Misha and Mark Sheppard – all the main characters. What was the most fun scene to film, and what was the most challenging? JT: My favorite scene was “A REAL BARN BURNER” of course because of the acting combined with fighting.  And you got to see Ramiel’s badassery in action along with everyone else.  We had a blast. They were all great and to hang and chat with them, very cool.  Just living the dream.  Everyone was so nice and supportive of each other. It was pretty intense going from all the dialogue and then right to the action. Lynn: That would be a challenge on most shows, I’m sure.  Every time I’ve been on the Supernatural set, I’ve been impressed with what a well-oiled machine it is and what a fun place to be. It sounds like that was your experience as well? JT: YES.  No wonder why they’ve been on the air for twelve years because it is a well-oiled machine.  When you’ve got crew coming up to you and telling me I was their favorite villain ever on the show, how cool is that?   Everyone made me feel at home.  I’m so blessed to have been a part of the Supernatural family.  Truly grateful. Lynn: That’s good because once you’re part of the SPNFamily, that’s that. (laughing)  I’m curious about the more serious dialogue scenes you had too. Jared and Jensen have told me that they don't like to be over rehearsed, so that they can be 'available' for the other actor in a scene. How did that impact your scenes with them? JT:  These guys were there for everyone and so caring and just nice guys.  Even when I head butted Jensen in his shoulder.  OUCH!  That guy’s rock solid.  He’s like man, you okay?  Fun guys.  Great control. Lynn: (silently) Solid. Mmm hmm. (not silently): Any anecdotes from filming or behind the scenes insights you can share? JT: There were a couple of times I would unconsciously make sound effects.  Like when i was a kid playing fight scenes.  Jensen stopped and said “Man, that was great. Jerry’s doing his own sound effects, you’re going to put Foley artists out of business.  I did it a few times in different scenes,  a couple of punch effects and made a sound effect for the stop watch.  They got a kick out of it.  Oops. Lynn: (laughing)  That’s awesome. So like I said, Supernatural fans are the most loyal and passionate group of fans out there, and now you’re part of the SPNFamily. What else do you have coming up that fans can look forward to? (Other than Ramiel perhaps coming back to the show…) JT: Ramiel coming back would be cool.  Who knows.  I’m up for a couple of projects.   Did a couple of episodes on iZombie.  Another film called “Mother of all Lies”  directed by another superb director, Monica Mitchell.  Played a really bad guy, a sleaze.  I’m auditioning like a madman.  Working on producing a Live action/animation film that I wrote with my father in law, Micky Dolenz (The Monkees) Currently, writing a self help book on finding your spark and discovering your purpose and passion, for teens and anyone unhappy with their life by not doing what they love. Lynn: So clearly you like to keep busy!  Imdb tells me that you’re married to Micky Dolenz’ daughter. That’s not a question, but now I have ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ stuck in my head. Also you’re a youth speaker – can you talk a little about that? (It appeals to my psychologist side as well). JT: My wife, Ami Dolenz, is an actress and artist,  lovely, talented lady.  Micky is the coolest father in law. Funny man.  Yes, I am a Youth speaker I travel throughout the USA and Canada speaking and doing  workshops with different schools and organizations,  sharing my message of inspiring kids to overcome obstacles, face their fears and live their dreams.  An anti-bullying message that encourages kids to find their spark and be their best.  I’ve been working with kids since I was a teenager.  I overcame bullying when I was 13 years old, was inspired by Bruce Lee.  He changed my life.   If a shy, insecure, fearful bullied kid from a small town in Kentucky can make his dreams come true, anyone can.  I share my story of how I did it and how they can too.  It’s pretty cool stuff.  Very rewarding. I’m blessed to be able to live my dreams as an actor and youth speaker. Never underestimate the power of planting a seed. [caption id="attachment_43892" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Photos: Twitter[/caption] Lynn: Thanks so much, Jerry. I really hope we see you again on Supernatural! JT: THANK YOU So much Lynn You can check out all about Jerry at the websites below. And stay tuned for lots of insights about this episode from director Richard Speight Jr! Keep up with all of Jerry Trimble's goings on here or at www.JerryTrimble.

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/09/huffington-post-finally-democrats-have-a-pro-wrestler-in-their-corner-7/

Huffington Post: Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner

ATLANTA ― Curtis Wylde wasn’t expecting to become one of Missouri’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state party’s nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouri’s Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.   

Wylde ― known on the Midwest’s weekend pro wrestling circuit as “Volatile” Curtis Wylde ― was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

“I’m gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC,” he said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!”

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: “We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!”

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde ― who’s also known as “Lion of the Lou” and the “Wolf of West County” ― posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $1,100 ― much of it in $27 increments, an homage to his political idol ― to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders’ populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi ― or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring ― on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders. Curtis Wylde, Missouri Democratic National Committeeman

“In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders,” Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wylde’s life; he calls him “Dad.” The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen, Wylde bounced from job to job ― he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebee’s, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or “heel.” His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona, he frequently “cheats” in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wylde’s notoriety has earned him an “antihero” following. “A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer,” Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wife’s earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, it’s enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Curtis Wylde

“Volatile” Curtis Wylde, right, alongside Wyldefyre at a Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling match.

Prior to Sanders’ presidential run, Wylde’s political involvement didn’t go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didn’t vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a “resource-based economy” where money is no longer necessary.

“I didn’t really claim a political standing,” Wylde said. “I didn’t feel there was a place for me, because of these ― not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.”

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting “people first, then profit,” said Wylde.

“If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen,” he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders’ campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders’ calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders’ appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

“Bernie Sanders came along and said, ‘Get involved,’” Wylde recalled. “I always had my dad telling me, ‘You can’t make changes from the outside. You’re going to have to get involved. You’re going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays.’ And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.”

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouri’s 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote ― and on a campaign budget of just over $6,000, compared to Schroer’s $77,000. He says he hasn’t ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.  

Wylde’s “got a lot of energy,” said Brian Wahby, one of Missouri’s at-large DNC members. “It’s also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.”

Wylde’s personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in America’s future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

“I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee,” Wylde said. “I heard that at the doors of Republicans.”

But Wylde was no “Bernie or bust” holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats’ successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

“I’m in the Democratic Party, and I’m here to stay, so I have to take it over,” he told the crowd. “All of you have to take it over!”

PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images

Wylde speaks at a protest during the 2016 Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2016, in Philadelphia. He encouraged fellow Bernie Sanders supporters to stay in the party.

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called “#DemEnter” movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders’ image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

He’s been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if they’re willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. He’s planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a “#DemEnter progressive dance party.”

The work Wylde has been doing “isn’t about Bernie Sanders,” said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. “It’s all about old-school effort.”

But Wylde’s also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the “legacy” Democrats.

Sometimes Wylde’s populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellison’s loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook. “They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!!” he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perez’s leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.  

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

“The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party,” he said. “We just need to get people to see that.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[edgysocial]

New Post has been published on http://edgysocial.com/finally-democrats-have-a-pro-wrestler-in-their-corner/

Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner

function onPlayerReadyVidible(e)'undefined'!=typeof HPTrack&&HPTrack.Vid.Vidible_track(e)!function(e,i)if(e.vdb_Player)if('object'==typeof commercial_video)var a='',o='m.fwsitesection='+commercial_video.site_and_category;if(a+=o,commercial_video['package'])var c='&m.fwkeyvalues=sponsorship%3D'+commercial_video['package'];a+=ce.setAttribute('vdb_params',a)i(e.vdb_Player)elsevar t=arguments.callee;setTimeout(function()t(e,i),0)(document.getElementById('vidible_1'),onPlayerReadyVidible);

ATLANTA ― Curtis Wylde wasn’t expecting to become one of Missouri’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state party’s nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouri’s Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.   

Wylde ― known on the Midwest’s weekend pro wrestling circuit as “Volatile” Curtis Wylde ― was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

“I’m gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC,” he said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!”

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: “We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!”

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde ― who’s also known as “Lion of the Lou” and the “Wolf of West County” ― posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $ 1,100 ― much of it in $ 27 increments, an homage to his political idol ― to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders’ populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi ― or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring ― on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders. Curtis Wylde, Missouri Democratic National Committeeman

“In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders,” Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wylde’s life; he calls him “Dad.” The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen, Wylde bounced from job to job ― he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebee’s, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or “heel.” His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona, he frequently “cheats” in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wylde’s notoriety has earned him an “antihero” following. “A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer,” Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wife’s earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, it’s enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Prior to Sanders’ presidential run, Wylde’s political involvement didn’t go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didn’t vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a “resource-based economy” where money is no longer necessary.

“I didn’t really claim a political standing,” Wylde said. “I didn’t feel there was a place for me, because of these ― not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.”

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting “people first, then profit,” said Wylde.

“If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen,” he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders’ campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders’ calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders’ appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

“Bernie Sanders came along and said, ‘Get involved,’” Wylde recalled. “I always had my dad telling me, ‘You can’t make changes from the outside. You’re going to have to get involved. You’re going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays.’ And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.”

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouri’s 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote ― and on a campaign budget of just over $ 6,000, compared to Schroer’s $ 77,000. He says he hasn’t ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.  

Wylde’s “got a lot of energy,” said Brian Wahby, one of Missouri’s at-large DNC members. “It’s also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.”

Wylde’s personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in America’s future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

“I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee,” Wylde said. “I heard that at the doors of Republicans.”

But Wylde was no “Bernie or bust” holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats’ successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

“I’m in the Democratic Party, and I’m here to stay, so I have to take it over,” he told the crowd. “All of you have to take it over!”

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called “#DemEnter” movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders’ image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

He’s been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if they’re willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. He’s planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a “#DemEnter progressive dance party.”

The work Wylde has been doing “isn’t about Bernie Sanders,” said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. “It’s all about old-school effort.”

But Wylde’s also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the “legacy” Democrats.

Sometimes Wylde’s populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellison’s loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook. “They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!!” he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perez’s leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.  

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

“The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party,” he said. “We just need to get people to see that.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Sports – The Huffington Post

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner

ATLANTA ― Curtis Wylde wasn’t expecting to become one of Missouri’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state party’s nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouri’s Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.   

Wylde ― known on the Midwest’s weekend pro wrestling circuit as “Volatile” Curtis Wylde ― was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

“I’m gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC,” he said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!”

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: “We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!”

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde ― who’s also known as “Lion of the Lou” and the “Wolf of West County” ― posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $1,100 ― much of it in $27 increments, an homage to his political idol ― to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders’ populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi ― or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring ― on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders. Curtis Wylde, Missouri Democratic National Committeeman

“In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders,” Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wylde’s life; he calls him “Dad.” The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen, Wylde bounced from job to job ― he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebee’s, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or “heel.” His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona, he frequently “cheats” in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wylde’s notoriety has earned him an “antihero” following. “A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer,” Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wife’s earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, it’s enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Prior to Sanders’ presidential run, Wylde’s political involvement didn’t go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didn’t vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a “resource-based economy” where money is no longer necessary.

“I didn’t really claim a political standing,” Wylde said. “I didn’t feel there was a place for me, because of these ― not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.”

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting “people first, then profit,” said Wylde.

“If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen,” he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders’ campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders’ calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders’ appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

“Bernie Sanders came along and said, ‘Get involved,’” Wylde recalled. “I always had my dad telling me, ‘You can’t make changes from the outside. You’re going to have to get involved. You’re going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays.’ And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.”

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouri’s 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote ― and on a campaign budget of just over $6,000, compared to Schroer’s $77,000. He says he hasn’t ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.  

Wylde’s “got a lot of energy,” said Brian Wahby, one of Missouri’s at-large DNC members. “It’s also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.”

Wylde’s personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in America’s future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

“I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee,” Wylde said. “I heard that at the doors of Republicans.”

But Wylde was no “Bernie or bust” holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats’ successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

“I’m in the Democratic Party, and I’m here to stay, so I have to take it over,” he told the crowd. “All of you have to take it over!”

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called “#DemEnter” movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders’ image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

He’s been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if they’re willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. He’s planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a “#DemEnter progressive dance party.”

The work Wylde has been doing “isn’t about Bernie Sanders,” said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. “It’s all about old-school effort.”

But Wylde’s also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the “legacy” Democrats.

Sometimes Wylde’s populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellison’s loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook. “They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!!” he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perez’s leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.  

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

“The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party,” he said. “We just need to get people to see that.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mHwzpW

[idontneedasymbol]

12x15: Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell - the not as good

There were things I liked about the ep...and then there were things I liked a lot less (under a cut for those who want to stay positive!)

This ep was emblematic of the problems I’ve been having with this season. The emotions are underplayed to the point that there is no drama to engage you; the boys are superficially working together but in practice might as well not be; past elements are being brought up, but strictly as plot points without any exploration of the personal history; any potential moments for h/c are carefully arranged so there is none; characters make dumb, OOC decisions to further the plot.

The biggest question of the episode (after the lack of sexier glasses): Why was Sam lying to Dean?

If someone has a good explanation, please tell me, because I have no idea. The boys have a long history of lying to each other (it’s one of the major defenses I’ve seen of Mary’s character, that the Winchesters lie all the time, and it’s not untrue.) But every other time I can think of them lying, there is a clear motivation for it. It’s not always a good reason (often it’s a terrible one) but it’s understandable. Sometimes it’s to try to avoid hurting someone, sometimes it’s out of guilt or shame; but there’s a reason.

While I was already a little confused why Mary was so determined to lie to them, I am utterly baffled why Sam would. When Dean had been so hurt Mary had lied – but forgave her. When Dean knows Mary is working for the BMOL and is a little grumbly about it but not really pissed. What possible reason is there for Sam not to tell Dean right away? And why did he need an incredibly hamfisted conversation with the episode’s innocent to realize that lying is bad? Haven’t the last 12 years taught you that lesson, Sam?

If Dean had really blown up at the end, maybe it would’ve justified Sam’s hesitation a little – but he didn’t. And their previous fight with Mary, and its resolution, proved that Dean is open to reason about this. The impression is that Sam would rather lie to and manipulate his brother into doing something he doesn’t want to do, for weeks, rather than risk a day or two of argument. Because it would be inconvenient.

I’m also disappointed that Dean just says “we hate them” without saying why -- it feels like the show is avoiding the whole ‘they tortured Sam’ issue because they don’t have a good way around it. Instead it, again, casts Dean’s protests as an immature, unreasonable grudge for him to get over. Like he’s more angry that Sam doesn’t agree with him than that there are damn good reasons for them not to trust or work with the BMOL.

Meanwhile, Sam is seriously trusting the BMOL. He’s not trying to infiltrate or undermine them; that disaster last time truly convinced him their way is better. What the hell, Sam. He’s not even verifying their intel (that we saw) even though  he’s had at least two examples of their intel being so wrong that it got hunters killed.

I’m assuming that we the audience are not meant to like this. That we’re supposed to be questioning his decision, and now Dean’s, to work with them.  Or are we just supposed to accept that the BMOL have a better way? That the last decade plus we’ve watched the boys saving people and hunting things, they were actually massively ineffective screw-ups who missed tons of murderous supernatural things right under their noses? That all the times we thought they were being smart and skilled, tracking down and researching monsters, it really would’ve been better for them to be taking orders from random British dudes, because they really are just blunt instruments, good for killing, not for brainpower.

I don’t think that’s what the show is going for. But I’m not sure what they are. Dean says at the end that they will get out if anything seems off. Like, umm, them kidnapping and torturing you? Or giving inaccurate info that gets hunters killed? Or inducing your own mother to use you in a mission? Or wholesale slaughtering supernatural beings that may not all be evil? Where is the line? It feels like if/when the boys find out about Magda’s murder, they’re just going to shrug and go, well, that sucks, but we’re getting more monsters to hunt so it’s worth it.

I’m starting to suspect that the show is never going to explore whether the BMOL are moral or not, that the questions of their methods and attempts at supernatural genocide are never going to be raised; instead they’re going to be wiped out by some mistake or accident, leaving us regretful that we never get to see their new and better world.

Honestly, though, I’d probably be okay with this if the show were giving me what I watch for. I’m a simple fangirl with simple needs. SPN has always been a reliable source of h/c…until this season, in which along with excising the melodrama, it’s taken out most of the other character drama, too. This is the third time now that Sam is in trouble and Dean turns up late, so not only do we not get a rescue (or really any reason why Sam even needs to work with Dean, when he’s so effective without him), but we don’t even get to see Dean asking if Sam’s okay.

In fact, Dean hasn’t had a chance to show more than momentary and ineffective worry for his brother all season. He hasn’t so much as helped Sam up off the floor, much less save his life, run to his side, hold him, perform any physical sign of caring. Sam’s gotten to help Dean in a few cases (like going to him in “Lily Sunder,” and obviously “Regarding Dean” thank you Meredith Glynn) but not the reverse.

Which may be part of a larger trend to avoid showing Dean’s softer side. Dean has not had any alone time with any innocent victim all this season; it’s always been Sam. Instead we get Dean expressing worry about Baby – and while that’s funny and all, when it’s juxtaposed with Dean not showing an iota of concern for either the victim or Sam, it comes across as callous. Not as badly as if either of them had actually gotten hurt – but why couldn’t Sam have gotten banged up a bit, and let Dean show a moment of concern about that?

From the beginning of the show, my favorite thing about Dean is that he acts all tough but cares so deeply. This season that deep heart has been limited to, “Dean gets cranky and immature when people close to him do things he doesn’t like, but eventually he gets over it.” He doesn’t bond with victims, he doesn’t save his brother, he doesn’t exhibit any particular understanding or compassion for anybody (except Cas, on a limited basis, which I suspect is why a lot of Destielers are loving this season. And even this time, the Winchesters hear that angels are dying again but don’t want to tag along this time, are content to let Cas handle it solo?)

Speaking of Castiel – is there something in the water that’s promoting pointless deception? Because as confused as I am by Sam lying, I am even more puzzled by Cas at the end. What possible reason did he have for not telling the Winchesters that he’s going to Heaven? It’s not like it’s the first time – Heaven was Cas’s home; they know he wants to go back. They know the nephilim is dangerous enough that it might require help. And they were taking on the phone, so it’s not like the boys could’ve stopped Cas from going. I’m pretty sure the next few eps are going to have the brothers being increasingly concerned when they can’t get hold of Cas, having no clue where he could be, when he could’ve just told them.

It feels like lying to manufacture drama…except going by this season’s past performance, the drama is going to be resolved in a single underplayed conversation, not worth the time it takes to establish it.

There were other things that bugged me – like bringing back hellhounds and never making a single reference to the Winchester’s past history with them -- or really that entire A plot, which was boringly linear (unexpected, after the fun of “Stuck in the Middle” – did Davy Perez blow his whole plotting wad on that ep?) No trick or trap or research is needed to take out the hellhound, just Sam being quick with a knife, and Dean being completely superfluous. As is Crowley – he tells us that it’s Lucifer’s special hellhound, but that has zero bearing on any following events. The only reason Crowley comes along is to bond with the boys, and (more importantly) to be away from Lucifer long enough for that plot to go down. It’s sloppy writing such as the show is prone to, but it’s disappointing in a writer with as much promise as shown in Perez’s previous eps.

But yeah, in all honestly, I probably wouldn’t be harping on any of this if the show would just give me Dean helping/supporting/saving Sam (physically or emotionally). Which is the one thing I always thought I could count on SPN providing, and I don’t understand why it’s not anymore.

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/09/huffington-post-finally-democrats-have-a-pro-wrestler-in-their-corner-6/

Huffington Post: Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner

ATLANTA ― Curtis Wylde wasn’t expecting to become one of Missouri’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state party’s nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouri’s Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.   

Wylde ― known on the Midwest’s weekend pro wrestling circuit as “Volatile” Curtis Wylde ― was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

“I’m gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC,” he said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!”

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: “We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!”

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde ― who’s also known as “Lion of the Lou” and the “Wolf of West County” ― posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $1,100 ― much of it in $27 increments, an homage to his political idol ― to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders’ populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi ― or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring ― on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders. Curtis Wylde, Missouri Democratic National Committeeman

“In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders,” Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wylde’s life; he calls him “Dad.” The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen, Wylde bounced from job to job ― he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebee’s, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or “heel.” His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona, he frequently “cheats” in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wylde’s notoriety has earned him an “antihero” following. “A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer,” Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wife’s earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, it’s enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Curtis Wylde

“Volatile” Curtis Wylde, right, alongside Wyldefyre at a Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling match.

Prior to Sanders’ presidential run, Wylde’s political involvement didn’t go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didn’t vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a “resource-based economy” where money is no longer necessary.

“I didn’t really claim a political standing,” Wylde said. “I didn’t feel there was a place for me, because of these ― not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.”

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting “people first, then profit,” said Wylde.

“If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen,” he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders’ campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders’ calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders’ appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

“Bernie Sanders came along and said, ‘Get involved,’” Wylde recalled. “I always had my dad telling me, ‘You can’t make changes from the outside. You’re going to have to get involved. You’re going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays.’ And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.”

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouri’s 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote ― and on a campaign budget of just over $6,000, compared to Schroer’s $77,000. He says he hasn’t ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.  

Wylde’s “got a lot of energy,” said Brian Wahby, one of Missouri’s at-large DNC members. “It’s also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.”

Wylde’s personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in America’s future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

“I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee,” Wylde said. “I heard that at the doors of Republicans.”

But Wylde was no “Bernie or bust” holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats’ successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

“I’m in the Democratic Party, and I’m here to stay, so I have to take it over,” he told the crowd. “All of you have to take it over!”

PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images

Wylde speaks at a protest during the 2016 Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2016, in Philadelphia. He encouraged fellow Bernie Sanders supporters to stay in the party.

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called “#DemEnter” movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders’ image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

He’s been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if they’re willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. He’s planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a “#DemEnter progressive dance party.”

The work Wylde has been doing “isn’t about Bernie Sanders,” said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. “It’s all about old-school effort.”

But Wylde’s also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the “legacy” Democrats.

Sometimes Wylde’s populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellison’s loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook. “They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!!” he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perez’s leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.  

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

“The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party,” he said. “We just need to get people to see that.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/09/huffington-post-finally-democrats-have-a-pro-wrestler-in-their-corner-5/

Huffington Post: Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner

ATLANTA ― Curtis Wylde wasn’t expecting to become one of Missouri’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state party’s nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouri’s Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.   

Wylde ― known on the Midwest’s weekend pro wrestling circuit as “Volatile” Curtis Wylde ― was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

“I’m gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC,” he said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!”

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: “We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!”

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde ― who’s also known as “Lion of the Lou” and the “Wolf of West County” ― posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $1,100 ― much of it in $27 increments, an homage to his political idol ― to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders’ populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi ― or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring ― on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders. Curtis Wylde, Missouri Democratic National Committeeman

“In the wrestling ring, I’m a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, I’m a little more Bernie Sanders,” Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wylde’s life; he calls him “Dad.” The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen, Wylde bounced from job to job ― he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebee’s, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or “heel.” His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona, he frequently “cheats” in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wylde’s notoriety has earned him an “antihero” following. “A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer,” Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wife’s earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, it’s enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Curtis Wylde

“Volatile” Curtis Wylde, right, alongside Wyldefyre at a Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling match.

Prior to Sanders’ presidential run, Wylde’s political involvement didn’t go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didn’t vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a “resource-based economy” where money is no longer necessary.

“I didn’t really claim a political standing,” Wylde said. “I didn’t feel there was a place for me, because of these ― not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.”

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting “people first, then profit,” said Wylde.

“If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen,” he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders’ campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders’ calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders’ appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

“Bernie Sanders came along and said, ‘Get involved,’” Wylde recalled. “I always had my dad telling me, ‘You can’t make changes from the outside. You’re going to have to get involved. You’re going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays.’ And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.”

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouri’s 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote ― and on a campaign budget of just over $6,000, compared to Schroer’s $77,000. He says he hasn’t ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.  

Wylde’s “got a lot of energy,” said Brian Wahby, one of Missouri’s at-large DNC members. “It’s also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.”

Wylde’s personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in America’s future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

“I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee,” Wylde said. “I heard that at the doors of Republicans.”

But Wylde was no “Bernie or bust” holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats’ successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

“I’m in the Democratic Party, and I’m here to stay, so I have to take it over,” he told the crowd. “All of you have to take it over!”

PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images

Wylde speaks at a protest during the 2016 Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2016, in Philadelphia. He encouraged fellow Bernie Sanders supporters to stay in the party.

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called “#DemEnter” movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders’ image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

He’s been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if they’re willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. He’s planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a “#DemEnter progressive dance party.”

The work Wylde has been doing “isn’t about Bernie Sanders,” said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. “It’s all about old-school effort.”

But Wylde’s also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the “legacy” Democrats.

Sometimes Wylde’s populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellison’s loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook. “They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!!” he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perez’s leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.  

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

“The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party,” he said. “We just need to get people to see that.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link