#the media are ruthless unlike in the west...

[sakuhai]

[saucy-mesothelioma]

The Lone Ranger: Adapting Morals and Changing Perspectives

Arcs are what make characters in media relatable and compelling; without them the characters would feel stagnant. The most common arc is a character having a negative trait to overcome: Marty McFly had to learn to pick and choose his battles and Marlin has to learn to let go and let his son be his own person (or fish, I guess). But what about characters that don't have such negative traits? How can they have a character arc that's just as compelling?

The character of John Reid is actually a decent guy morally, which we see from the very first moment we're properly introduced to his character. John is a lawyer who moved out West to help keep the balances in check: he has a strong sense of justice, believing that every man deserves to be equal in the eyes of the law. This sense of justice is so strong in fact that even after finally tracking down Butch Cavendish, the man who ate his brother's heart in front of him and kidnapped his brother's wife and son, he still refused to kill him and instead wanted him to stand trial. He genuinely wishes to improve the lives of those around him, but he faces the problem of the ruthlessness of the west. Unlike what he is used to, even when he tries to do the right thing he is constantly met with corruption and injustice.

Take the character of Captain Jay Fuller for example: he's a cavalryman tasked with the job of protecting the railroad. When he is told the Comanche are attacking settlements, he leads an attack on the tribe in order to protect the settlers. But soon he learns that Latham Cole was the one behind the attack, and that he attacked the Comanche for no reason. This leaves Fuller to make a decision: does he stay true to his morals of protecting those who need it, or does he change his perspective to realize that the railroad does not have the best interests at heart. Fuller, unable to change his perspective, chooses the easy way out and disregards his morals.

John decides to go about his dilemma in a different way: he learns to adapt. Here, the good guy doesn't bend the wildness of the land to his perception, instead he bends his perception to the wildness. John realizes that the West is far more ruthless than the city and he can't change that, but he can change how he dispenses justice. His morals never change, as shown where he still refuses to shoot Butch when the two cross paths again, but he now has gained the ability to work with and around his rules as well as the nature of the West. Butch might not have been on trial, but in the end he did face punishment for his crimes due to his own hubris. Unlike Fuller, John is able to realize when what he perceives as doing something correctly isn't working and changes his methods, all while never changing what he believes in. It's a character arc that, although rare, stands as a wonderful example of truly unique and compelling storytelling.

[italianexotiicbeauty]

@copiious ( for joe ! )

It's been an entire year and a half now since Mary agreed to sign the contract, to be Joe's manager on the west coast only. Her contract had to have that particular stipulation because unlike everyone else that worked solely for the company? She had another job, her main job – this?.Was quite the side hustle. Mary wasn't a fool though, she has a dummy account on most of the social media platforms to see what the fans are saying, because the only personal account she has is Instagram. The tattoo parlor had a separate account for artists to display their work, there was a site linked in the bio as well as an email to contact the management. You know — a typical business account. 

Both rosters were on the road four days a week – and since the schedule literally changed every single week ? She's a bit grateful there's times where she's not needed at all, where it's the old wiseman having to be there and she can be at work or sitting on her surfboard watching the sunset. Did it at all weigh on her subconscious? Yes, it did — because Joe lived all the way on the other coast — 4, 649 miles if anyone needed the numbers. And there were very few who knew the truth — six people to be exact, other than themselves ( Joelle, his mom, Paul, Sefa, Jon & Josh ). It sat on her ring finger the whole time she was back in Hawai'i, she slept with it on and only ever removed it to shower — but they agreed to not wear them when working.

Fans were insanely ruthless, so it was a matter of safety. 

— — —

Today was going to be a tiring travel day for Thursday  — she had to fly to Los Angeles and stay there for four hours until her flight to Portland. Which was where the show was going to be and she had rented herself a cozy little AIRBNB for the night. So she could hang up her outfits and steam iron them all again for good measure, get her nails done and just have … quiet before all the chaos. ( yes, she's flying out a day early. )

She had just left her condominium, the dark green suitcase rolling along the hallway floor of the 30+ condo building. Dressed in a mauve colored loungewear set, flip flops on her feet and a matching dark green backpack with an empty yeti in a mesh side pocket. Her keys and wristlet clutch dangled from a lanyard around her neck, her android phone was neatly tucked inside of the clutch. While in the elevator and on her way down to the lobby, Mary removed a folded yellow slip of paper from the wristlet clutch to put in her mailbox. It was one of those request to hold mail forms for the post office, she had a whole stack of them on her desk for this reason alone — a downside of living alone. No one to get the mail and let it pile up on the coffee table for you, she didn't exactly trust her neighbors … because she was recognized a little more these days due to being on television. 

With the yellow piece of paper now safely within the confines of her mailbox, Mary exited the building and began walking towards the back of it. Where the parking lot was and only briefly stopped to remove the keys from the lanyard. Unaware that in those few seconds, the rolling suitcase had been taken — not in a nefarious manner, but was she in for a surprise when she turned around and squeaked!  “ — !!!” Uncertain of what to say — because standing before her were both Joe and Paul, who had his hand wrapped around the luggage handle. “ …. I …. hello to the both of you, I'm sure you'll explain to me why you're here but I also … kind of need coffee and a breakfast sandwich before going to the airport.”

[joshslittlemoviereviews]

The Wire S1

True stories, oftentimes, hit the hardest. Nonfiction - real stories, real people, everything. The Wire's first season, though completely fictional, is one of these.

Part of this is the lack of clear-cut roles. Part of this is the crude, documentary-style shooting. Most of all, the season is fucking brutal throughout.

Unlike most modern media, The Wire feels hopeless. It tells the story of how things cannot change, and how change never works as you wish.

We can analyze the entire first season with one character - Wallace. A 16-year-old from the low-rise projects working dope with D'Angelo Barksdale, nephew of the kind of drugs in West Baltimore, Avon Barksdale. Wallace is an honest kid, working well. 

Problem is, he's just that - a kid. An honest, decent kid involved in a violent, ruthless game. Wallace lives in a bando, caring for the little ones and just getting by. He is a kid, with more responsibility than most adults.

There's one scene that hit especially hard - it starts with Wallace on the terrace playing with a toy when he's supposed to be dealing. D'Angelo sees this, and, of course, calls for him to get back to work. We see here the first hints that Wallace isn't meant for the game - he can't let go of the life he should have if he wasn't born where he was. 

Later in the season, Wallace calls up Stringer Bell, Avon's advisor and best friend, because they've seen the boyfriend of a dope stealer named Omar playing pinball near them. The next day, Wallace walks out the door and sees the guy dead on top of a car, tortured to death.

He snitches to the police and goes down to his Grandma's house for a while. But, as the show continuously drives home, change is hard. He returns, and his best friends shoot him to death. 

The Wire is honest. It is unafraid to show a broken world and unafraid to show its pessimistic view of how things are going. While I might not completely agree, it's certainly something remarkable. 

9/10

[ylfva-remade]

did you know um...................... Batman[a] is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, and debuted in the 27th issue of the comic book Detective Comics on March 30, 1939. In the DC Universe continuity, Batman is the alias of Bruce Wayne, a wealthy American playboy, philanthropist, and industrialist who resides in Gotham City. Batman's origin story features him swearing vengeance against criminals after witnessing the murder of his parents Thomas and Martha, a vendetta tempered with the ideal of justice. He trains himself physically and intellectually, crafts a bat-inspired persona, and monitors the Gotham streets at night. Kane, Finger, and other creators accompanied Batman with supporting characters, including his sidekicks Robin and Batgirl; allies Alfred Pennyworth, James Gordon, and Catwoman; and foes such as the Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face, and his archenemy the Joker.

Kane conceived Batman in early 1939 to capitalize on the popularity of DC's Superman; although Kane frequently claimed sole creation credit, Finger substantially developed the concept from a generic superhero into something more bat-like. The character received his own spin-off publication, Batman, in 1940. Batman was originally introduced as a ruthless vigilante who frequently killed or maimed criminals, but evolved into a character with a stringent moral code and strong sense of justice. Unlike most superheroes, Batman does not possess any superpowers, instead relying on his intellect, fighting skills, and wealth. The 1960s Batman television series used a camp aesthetic, which continued to be associated with the character for years after the show ended. Various creators worked to return the character to his darker roots in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating with the 1986 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

DC has featured Batman in many comic books, including comics published under its imprints such as Vertigo and Black Label. The longest-running Batman comic, Detective Comics, is the longest-running comic book in the United States. Batman is frequently depicted alongside other DC superheroes, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, as a member of organizations such as the Justice League and the Outsiders. In addition to Bruce Wayne, other characters have taken on the Batman persona on different occasions, such as Jean-Paul Valley / Azrael in the 1993–1994 "Knightfall" story arc; Dick Grayson, the first Robin, from 2009 to 2011; and Jace Fox, son of Wayne's ally Lucius, as of 2021.[4] DC has also published comics featuring alternate versions of Batman, including the incarnation seen in The Dark Knight Returns and its successors, the incarnation from the Flashpoint (2011) event, and numerous interpretations from Elseworlds stories.

One of the most iconic characters in popular culture, Batman has been listed among the greatest comic book superheroes and fictional characters ever created. He is one of the most commercially successful superheroes, and his likeness has been licensed and featured in various media and merchandise sold around the world; this includes toy lines such as Lego Batman and video games like the Batman: Arkham series. Batman has been adapted in live-action and animated incarnations, including the 1960s Batman television series played by Adam West and in film by Michael Keaton in Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992) , The Flash (2022) and Batgirl (2022), Christian Bale in The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), Ben Affleck in the DC Extended Universe (2016–present), and Robert Pattinson in The Batman (2022). Kevin Conroy, Jason O'Mara, Will Arnett, and Keanu Reeves, among others, have provided the character's voice.

woag holy shit i didn’t know….

[welcome-to-the-cafe]

SHANG-CHI (2021) Review Pt. 3

This section will focus more on the potential cultural impact and reflections of the movie.

Good things first. This was a great movie for Asian-American representation. On face value, it was a huge rather well-promoted movie (in my opinion, but that could just be my algorithms) under arguably the most internationally renown franchise today, Marvel. It featured empowered and attractive Asian male leads, empowered and attractive Asian female leads, a glorious, dreamy romance between two of them, and multiple humanizing familial relationships that don't simply recycle the old "modern freedom vs oppressive tradition". Each Asian character is a fully fleshed person, as is due, and clear authentic effort is made to celebrate their backgrounds, from the action to settings to costumes to language to the jokes.

And the Asian-American jokes land very well, especially the ones that highlight how different each individual Asian-American 's experience, and familiarity with their heritage, can be. Central to this is Katy, of course, essentially the audience surrogate, the audience being both nonAsians and "standard" Asian-Americans. She is bad at Chinese, even as her own grandmother speaks it. She defies her mom's (gentle) expectations of her, she is amazed and somewhat intimidated by her heritage in full form. The other characters who are closer to their native culture are gentle with her unfamiliarity: Shang-Chi walks her through pronunciation, Ronny Chieng's character assures her "Don't worry I speak ABC", and even Wenwu treats her kindly as a guest, and doesn't put her down for her Americanness. Well other than the patronizing storytelling tone, but that's the villainous patronizing, not the "you are uncultured" patronizing. Even in the village, they look down on her mostly on account of her not having martial arts skills and being ambitionless, than of her Americanness.

Similarly, Shang-Chi's struggle with his father did not use his time in America, and his potential Americanizing, as much of a pain point. I appreciate this, and the gentleness to Katy, greatly, as it dances around the culture conflict narrative that so frequently plagues other Asian American media (looking at you Crazy Rich Asians). As such, Wenwu is not evil because he is more Chinese/traditional, he is so because of the very human pain of losing his wife. Also he was a ruthless immortal warlord. And his children are not good due to their separation from their heritage; they are good because of their ties to each other and their mother, and her heritage from the village, which also traditional. Like an equation, the culture on the good and bad sides cancel out, and you are left with a largely culture-neutral narrative, while Chinese culture itself is shown off more.

Most of the characters are Asian, the non-Asians are very tertiary. In this, the movie functions as normal Asian media does; in removing the racial differences, the characters level with each other as people, instead of as representatives of their heritage. Speaking of native Asian media, I will now explain how this movie, for all of its virtues, will still serve the same ultimate function as Crazy Rich Asians and Mulan in terms of cross-national relations.

This was an American movie. Featuring Asian culture, yes. But an American movie nonetheless. Its action scenes would probably stand up well against native Chinese media, but its overarching presentation would be seen as incredibly cheesy, and probably somewhat patronizing, to a Chinese viewer. What are those costumes? What are those Ta Lo "traditional clothes"? Straw Huts? Why the fuck does Death Dealer have face paint? What are those ridiculous hook swords and tassle helmets? Oh hey its the mythical beasts they see in every wuxia fantasy movie.

I liked a comparison I read on social media; it is like presenting orange chicken as a dish specially made for your Chinese guest. The dish may be good, but that is besides the point; it is insulting for you to expect them to appreciate your facsimile of their culture. In this metaphorical scenario, you may be a Chinese-American, but your weird attempt to reference your heritage only highlights the divide. They eat better Chinese food all the time anyways, this orange chicken may be a direct downgrade. Did you expect them to be happy just because you, the American, made it for them? Are you looking down on them?

It is better for you to make a pizza or a fettuccini alfredo for them. This equivalent would be the World of Warcraft movie, with no Asian references whatsoever.

I remember when Avatar: The Last Airbender came out, and my 3rd grade self was so excited to see the Chinese armor designs on the fire nation, the kung-fu inspired bending styles, and more. But now, I feel a bit strange seeing how much obsession is given to this series by the Asian-American community. For all its acclaim and AsAm representation, it is virtually unknown to native Asians, unlike the notorious Resident Evil live-action movie series. I wonder, if most Chinese-Americans had watched more Chinese wuxia and fantasy, they would be as excited about ATLA?

This is also related to how Westerners are discovering Tony Leung for the first time, and some Asians say "we been knew". But how many AsAm actually did know? For how many Asian-Americans did it take Shang-Chi to introduce them to this legend, and his previous body of work?

Why was I so excited to be represented in a cartoon, even if I did watch Journey to the West growing up? Could it be because finally it was something with Asians in it that the kids around me also watched? Maybe. I could go on and on about Sun Wukong, but nobody cared, while Prince Zuko was somebody everyone knew and rooted for.

So in this way, Shang-Chi, despite being mildly offensive to the motherland (for which the movie does not even have a release date), is still very important and positive to us stateside. I feel a little bad for Simu that his homeland may not appreciate his greatest work so far, but maybe it doesn't bother him that much; he is now a hero to almost the entire Asian-American community. I hope Tony Leung can be the movie's saving grace for native markets. I also hope that Chinese watchers would understand why this movie is important for the diaspora, even if they don't enjoy the movie itself.

Oh, and finally, I hope Chinese-Americans don't hold their motherland in contempt for disliking this movie. It's not for them! Cut them the slack! And go watch their movies and media! It may not have jokes about the immigrant experience, but it is effective representation. Watch Asian movies! With your family, with your friends! Western media is not the center of the universe, and it never deserved to be. Put more people who look like you on your own screen.

I saw a lot of Tiktoks of nonAsians (and Asians) doing kung-fu moves coming out of the theater. I...am not sure about this? I guess martial arts is once more the vehicle by which we get positive representation in Western media, as is tradition. The legacy of Bruce Lee, of Jackie Chan, of Jet Li. Should I celebrate? Martial arts are dope as fuck but...that's not all we are...well. The appropriate tropey thing to say is: "This is just the beginning."

Part 4 will be my rewrite ideas. I will write it on my blog and link it here later.

[heavyarethecrowns]

As Kate re-emerges more tanned and confident, a new Middleton girl takes a bow - May 2007

Amid the clatter of small talk and social niceties, it was a well-meaning attempt to rally a young girl's spirits: "Keep your chin up. Don't let them get you down. You'll be fine."

But when Tara Palmer-Tompkinson delivered these words of wisdom to Kate Middleton at a fashionable book launch, what was striking was not the kindness of the older woman's words but how superfluous they appeared.

For, since splitting from Prince William, Kate Middleton seems to have had very little trouble in keeping either her chin, or her profile, high.

ndeed it has become a much remarked oddity of Kate and Prince William's break-up that, in the weeks since her apparent heartbreak, she has never looked better...or happier.

Far from appearing shattered by the very public end of a romance that many - including Kate herself - predicted would end in marriage, Kate sans William is cutting a frankly far sexier figure.

Her hair is shinier, her skin more tanned and her dress sense more youthful than during her tweedy William days.

Far too dignified to accept the vast sums on offer for a royal 'kiss and tell,' she has, The Mail on Sunday has learned, drawn on the support and advice of a trusted few.

And, in the process, one figure has emerged above all as key among the newly single Kate's loyal coterie: her younger sister Pippa.

At 22, Pippa is three years junior to - and 4in shorter than - her more famous sibling but she has had an enormous impact on the emergence of this increasingly sleek and confident Kate.

She is, according to those who know her best, more sassy than Kate, more direct and, tantalisingly, less discreet.

And though these days she may pass largely unrecognised she is unlikely to do so for long.

After all, it was Pippa who joined Kate at the launch of Simon Sebag Montefiore's book on Stalin at Asprey's, Pippa whose hand Kate held as she left trendy London nightclub Boujis at three in the morning four days later, Pippa who will be at Kate's side when the girls attend the Kuoni World Class Cup Polo at Hurtwood Park, West Sussex - a tournament at which both Prince Harry and Charles have played.

In the weeks since her split from William, Kate has gleaned style advice from an executive at Vogue, discussed strategies for dealing with the media from Tatler editor Geordie Greig and, fascinatingly, turned to Guy Pelly, one of William's best friends, for entrance to some of London's coolest clubs. But it is Pippa who has been her ever present consort.

For where Kate's entree into high society was as the prettier 'add-on' to a powerful partner, her staying power may owe much to establishing herself in another, formidable, double act.

And according to one well placed source: "Kate and Pippa have already been dubbed The Wisteria Sisters - they're highly decorative, terribly fragrant and have a ferocious ability to climb.

"Pippa has just graduated in English from Edinburgh University and while other students are taking advantage of the last weeks of term to lie around in the meadows, have late breakfasts and long lunches and generally do very little, Pippa couldn't wait to get down to Kate and to London.

"She'll go back for the graduation ball at the end of June but it's clear that Kate is the key to unlocking a new social life for Pippa and Pippa is there to support Kate.

"So many doors were opened to Kate when she was with William and she's certainly not going to let them close now."

Certainly Pippa seems more than up to the task of putting a well-shod foot in the way of any door that threatens to shut now that Kate and William are no longer together.

According to one university friend: "As soon as Pippa arrived at Edinburgh, she was assiduous about joining the right social circle.

"At Edinburgh, the aristo crowd are divided into two social sets - one crowd who go to London for the weekend and are really into partying and hard drinking and the other who are more staid and go off to each others' country houses for weekends.

"Pippa joined the country set. She was very charming about it but quite ruthless in cultivating the "right" friends.

"If she found out that someone had impressive social credentials - the right title, standing, connections - she would immediately pay them a lot of attention where before she wouldn't have shown the least interest.

"She would leave notes in the pigeonholes of people she coveted as friends, desperate to arrange a time or date to meet.

"She was always well turned out to the point of being prim, always conscious of projecting the "right" image and, if she heard of other girls' "naughty" behaviour - too much drinking or partying or risque behaviour - she'd pull a face like there was a bad taste in her mouth."

Like Kate, Pippa attended Marlborough and, like Kate, her university ascent into the social elite was rapid. By the end of her university days, she could count Ted Innes-Ker and George Percy as flatmates - the sons of the Dukes of Roxburghe and Northumberland respectively.

And her boyfriend, who graduated two years before her, is JJ Jardine Patterson, an Eton friend of Edward and George and scion of a highly successful Hong Kong banking family.

"She met JJ through the boys," a friend said. "It really wasn't the family millions that attracted her to him but the social cachet."

Someone else who has met Pippa on many occasions recalled her as: "A charming girl who hung out with absolute toffs, most of whom are named after counties.

"She is incredibly well mannered and well-brought up. At dinner she always makes sure to speak to the person seated to her left and right.

"She has a lovely figure, much better than Kate's really. She's a very keen and aggressive tennis player. A mother's dream, in many respects.

"But she makes no secret at all of being very socially ambitious - almost aggressively so. She wants power and money."

Which explains perhaps, in part, the mixed feelings that Pippa has expressed to friends since her big sister split from her famous boyfriend.

According to one: "Pippa absolutely loved the fact that Kate dated William because of the cachet it brought but she's also quite pleased Kate's single again.

"She sometimes felt that her mum and dad tended to put Kate first, above her and her brother James, when she was dating William simply because of the extra responsibilities and practical considerations that went with that.

"And she was a little bit jealous that her sister was dating the future King of England.

"It didn't help that James, who's also at Edinburgh, would go around saying, "My sister's going to be the Queen of England." He can be very indiscreet.

"Also, Pippa's glad to "get her sister back". The two are very close and she never got to spend much time with Kate when she dated William. Kate would always put William first."

Indeed, Kate put William before all other considerations - personal and professional.

It is worth noting that, since their split, she has been promoted from assistant accessories buyer to accessories buyer for High Street store Jigsaw.

Pippa is similarly bright, but she is yet to fall upon a career path of her own. She enjoys travel and writing and has expressed an interest in journalism.

However, such thoughts are not foremost in the girls' minds this summer.

Instead, Pippa has moved into the Chelsea home that the girls' parents Carole and Michael bought for Kate and, according to a friend: "The two of them are enjoying being quite girlie together.

They have a mobile tanner who comes round and does their spray-on tan. They love shopping on the Kings Road.

They get ballet pumps at French Sole and Pippa loves Chloe clothes and has her hair done in Richard Ward's VIP section just like Kate.

"Kate gets sent a lot of free clothes and gifts and Pippa is very keen to get in on the action as far as that's concerned. She's happy to go along to parties and events on Kate's coat-tails."

Certainly there has been no shortage of invitations. On Wednesday, the girls will be at Mahiki - a favourite haunt of Prince William and the site of his infamous I'm Free! 'celebration' following his split from Kate.

The marketing for the club is looked after by Guy Pelly and it is Guy who is believed to have invited Kate and Pippa to Wednesday's Johnny Cash-themed party.

Kate and Pippa have also been invited to Richard Branson's pre-Wimbledon party - and have received invitations to the members' enclosure for the tournament.

They are on the guest list for Royal Ascot - though whether or not they will venture towards the Royal Enclosure remains to be seen - and have been invited to the Cartier Polo at Windsor Great Park on the last Sunday of July.

Ahead of them both lies the tantalising prospect of a summer of sisterly fun - with a social agenda writ large.

One close friend says: "Obviously, Kate and William aren't together any more but they have an ongoing arrangement. They will go to a couple of things together - things that were planned before they split and which William will honour.

It seems a bit of a habit among that set not to entirely sever relationships. There's rarely a clean break."

As we reported last week, William will go to the wedding of Kate's cousin on July 21. It is understood that they will also spend a weekend together in William's cottage in Balmoral in August.

Being in such close proximity to the man she once hoped to marry - and being so as 'just friends' - must be a prospect that Kate regards with profoundly mixed feelings.

However glossy her image and admirable her poise, there are, in the weight she has shed and the cigarettes she has started smoking again, clues to the effort required in presenting a positive face to the world she knows is watching still.

The importance of Pippa's place at Kate's side right now cannot, friends say, be underestimated.

"Pippa and Kate really are very close," says one. "Sure, they have a very like-minded approach to life and if Kate is leaning on Pippa at the moment who can blame her?

"The whole Middleton family were thinking of holidaying in Scotland this year but Kate felt it was too much of a thorny reminder of the last time that they were all together in Scotland, earlier this year, when they rented a great big house in Perthshire and waited for William to show up for New Year and he never did.

"Instead, they're looking at renting some fabulous villa in Tuscany or Umbria for a few weeks in August at the end of the summer.

"And goodness, I'd have thought by the time they reach August, the girls will need a break."

[peppersonironi]

Batfam/Avengers Crossover Chapter Four: Growing Suspicions

Tagging (Let me know if you want to be tagged): @the-fair-maiden-of-fandom

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Category: Gen

Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types

Relationships: Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Natasha Romanov & Damian Wayne, Clint Barton & Cassandra Cain, Tim Drake & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tim Drake & Duke Thomas, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel, Tim Drake/Kon-El | Conner Kent, Dick Grayson/Wally West, Roy Harper/Koriand'r/Jason Todd,

Characters: Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown, Barbara Gordon, Justice League (DCU), Alfred Pennyworth, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Clint Barton, Thor (Marvel), Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, Alfred the Cat (DCU), Bat-Cow (DCU), Goliath (DCU), Selina Kyle’s Cat Isis, Kate Kane (DCU), Duke Thomas,

Additional Tags: Batbrothers (DCU), Avengers Meet The Batfam, MCU/Batfam crossover, Crossover, no beta we die like robins, rated T for Jason’s language, I bleeped it out though. Just to be safe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, canon? What’s canon?, Deaf Clint Barton,Deaf Character, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Happy Batfamily (DCU), Birdflash and joyfire are implied/referenced,

Summary: After some questionable comments from Jason regarding murder, some of the Avengers are (understandably) freaked out and untrusting towards the bats. They decide to research their hosts.

Natasha stood to the side as Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown finished sparring. Everyone else was either watching or warming up. Natasha was part of the former.

Their skill was undeniable. She had no doubt that if it came to a real fight, she might not win. They had fought hard for almost five minutes, though Nat could tell it was all in good fun. Their looks of concentration did not hide the easy-going eyes and smiles.

Natasha was honestly unsure of who would win, but then Stephanie pulled out of a flip a split second early and delivered a kick to Tim’s chest. A moment later she had used his off-balance to bring him to the floor. He quickly surrendered when she sat on him with her forearm to his throat.

“That was an interesting kick,” Tim said as Stephanie helped him up. “I wonder who you learned it from.” He glanced over his shoulder to glare at a smirking Damian.

“I’m sorry Drake, is there a problem? Aren’t we all supposed to help each other improve our technique?” Damian was smirking even more at that point.

Tim snorted then walked off to get some water, grumbling as he went.

Stephanie laughed. “Sore loser!” She high fived Damian.

“Could I perhaps have a turn,” Natasha asked when no one seemed to be ready immediately to fight.

Steve stepped forward. “Shall we?”

Natasha groaned inside. Steve was a decent fighter, especially with his shield, but she had been looking forward to a challenge.

Natasha nodded. “Sure, I’d like a warm-up.” This got some chuckles from the teens.

They faced each other and started to circle for a few seconds. When Nat grew bored, she darted forward and struck his shoulder. He twisted and she used it to strike the back of his knee. She delivered a kick to the back of his head and he was on the ground a moment later.

There were several appreciative claps and laughs from the kids. The rest of the Avengers just nodded. They were used to Natasha beating them up.

“Someone needs a better opponent,” Bruce Wayne said. He didn’t smile, but there was a slight upturn on the corner of his mouth. “Damian, why don’t you take a turn. I know you’ve been itching for a fight.”

The boy smiled dangerously, and several of the Avengers laughed. They underestimated him - most likely due to his incredibly short stature - unlike Natasha. There was something strange about him, She had sensed it from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. And she hadn’t forgotten that he was dangerous.

Damian strolled forward and took his position. Natasha followed suit. A moment later Dick gave the mark to start.

Damian was fast . He sprinted forward in an instant and struck Nat’s gut. She barely managed to block, and wasn’t able to dodge the next blow, this time to her shin. She darted out with a counterblow, but he stepped out with his back leg, bringing his arm up to block. A split second later his back leg darted out to land a blow on the back of Natasha’s knee, bringing her down. He smoothly transitioned into bringing a knee up and jumping into a spinning kick landing at Natasha’s head.

Natasha was on the ground for a moment before she rose and resumed her atack. Damian flipped away before advancing once again. He unleashed a sequence of torso blows followed by a front handspring finished with a double kick. Natasha spun to the side and attacked him with multiple strikes across his shoulders and head.

She could tell his style easily. He stuck with torso and leg strikes due to his height, and only used roundabout kicks, which utilized his leg strength. But he was also holding back. Some of his blows were clearly designed to kill, but had been modified to be non life threatening. Perhaps what had been implied earlier was true: the kid had killed.

The fight dragged on, and Natasha couldn’t find an opening. Damian was ruthless in his attacks, and his form impeccable. There were times when Natasha was clearly losing, but she managed to pull back from the brink and keep going. She managed to get a decent combo in before Damian swiped at her head mid flip. She dodged to the side: a pivotal mistake. In the blink of an eye, Damian was at her. He brought her into a headlock, and Nat had no choice but to accept defeat.

They rose together, to the astonished faces of the Avengers. Tony was especially shocked. Apparently, none of them had ever considered that Natasha could be beaten. Let alone by an eleven year old.

“Great Job, both of you.” Dick said. “I haven’t seen anyone stand that long against Damian in a while.”

Damian smiled at her smugly.

Natasha smiled right back. The fight had been invigorating, and she hadn't had to work that hard before. But for the same reason, it was worrying. The kid taught with skill that would have taken years to develop. Damian had clearly been trained from a very young age, which brought a shiver down Natasha's spine. She had flashbacks to the Red Room. The bloody horror that has been her childhood.

No one should have to face that.

*****

They trained for a few more hours, and the mood gradually returned to whatever could be considered normal. The bats - Damian specifically - had declared the Avengers to be woefully under trained when it came to fighting. They did admit that Natasha was good, and Clint decent, however. They had everynight standards.

Everyone - even Banner, much to his dismay - had been roped into a basic hand to hand combat training routine, modified to fit each person's skill level. Natasha had enjoyed her's very much, but after three hard hours, she was grateful for the shower.

They had rejoined in the kitchen after everyone had a chance to bathe and chat for lunch. Natasha had found more clothes placed in her room, this time black ripped jeans and tank top. Nat wondered who they belonged to, they clearly didn't come from Cassandra, Barbara, or Stephanie.

Nat didn’t worry too much about it though. She just wanted food. Pretty much everyone was there, though Tony was behind her in the hallway. Natasha came and sat down on one of the stools, along with Tim and Cass.

Natasha had no doubt.

Wayne was wearing dressy casual slacks and a cashmere sweater, as was Damian. They truly looked identical. Everyone else was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, or some variation thereof.

“I have prepared a meal for you, do tell me if it is unsatisfactory,” Alfred the butler said as he set some food on the table. Everyone thanked the old man, who only smiled.

Natasha ate in peace, not ignoring anyone, but not partaking in conversation either. Then she heard Jason raise his voice.

“Come on Replacement, you know  I’m about as dangerous as a butterfly.” He was speaking sarcastically, though Tim didn’t seem to notice.

“Tell that to Black Mask’s henchmen,” he muttered, taking a bite of salad.

Jason snorted. “That was a long time ago, and in my defense, it was his mother’s f***ing fault!”

Damian sat straight upright. “How dare you-”

“You know it's true Dami,” Dick said. “She is malicious, even for an assassin.”

“Can we not talk about Talia over lunch?” Wayne asked, his hands on his temples.

Damian made his t-t sound once again, and continued to eat. Jason shrugged and launched back into a conversation with Tim.

Nat glanced over at Tony and Steve, who were frowning, most likely due to the mention of Damian’s assassin mother. They would be talking about this later, no doubt.

*****

“Did you hear how casually they mentioned it?!” Steve was saying. He had gathered Tony, Nat and Clint with him in one of the libraries, desperate to talk about their hosts.

Tony was nodding while he replied. “This place seems more dangerous than we first thought. I’m not sure if we can trust these … bats .”

Clint frowned. “But they have not actually done anything to harm us. Sure, their methods are questionable, but they are our only way home.”

“The least we can do is gather information,” Tony said. “But be careful. If they really do kill, then they might harm us for questioning them.”

“But what behavior have we seen that would suggest they would do something like that?” Clint insisted. “Sure Jason swears a lot and carries guns, and Damian sharpened his katana quite threateningly, but that is not cause for mistrust!”

“They mentioned assassins! The kid’s mother is an assassin !” Steve said. “That in and of itself is cause for mistrust .”

Natasha chuckled lightly, and Steve’s eyes widened. The three men slowly turned to their resident ex-assassin.

“I’m sorry, Tash,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean you , of course. You’re plenty trustworthy!” Tony couldn’t help but chuckle.

“But that’s exactly what you said,” Cint snapped, growing defensive.

“Steve,” Nat said, sighing. “I understand your worry, I really do. But I’m honestly not worried about us.”

Steve blinked. “Why not?”

“Because when I fought with Damian I could tell his style. He had clearly been trained to kill,” This gained an outraged ‘ahah’ from both Steve and Tony, to which Natahsa shook her head. “He had been trained to kill, yes, but his style was adapted. It was like he was unlearning everything he’d been taught. And I know how that is.”

Clint nodded his head, remembering when he had found Nat, and the months afterward when she had been taken in.

“You’re worried about the kids.” Clint stated.

It wasn’t really a question, but Nat nodded anyway. “He would have had to have been trained for years to be that skilled. And he’s only eleven …” Natasha shook her head. “They mentioned the mother in a way that leads me to believe she isn’t really in his life anymore. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say she’s the one that trained him, not Bruce Wayne.”

“So he probably isn't abusing the kid, that’s great,” Tony said sarcastically, though Natasha could still direct the relief in his voice. “But what about Jason and Cassandra? I wouldn’t put it past Jason to kill us, honestly. But Cassandra, I don’t know.”

“He mentioned something like manipulation while questioning Thor, so maybe he didn’t mean to?” Clint shook his head. “But he still talked about it so flippantly. I’m not sure about him.”

Natasha nodded. “I agree. Jason seems the most volatile. As for Cassandra, I am honestly not sure. I haven’t seen her fight, nor do anything violent. But the way she moves … in some ways I think she’s the most dangerous of them all.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, thinking. Natasha sat back, having done her piece. After a while, Tony spoke.

“I think we should do our own research. With a team this large, surely there will be plenty of information.”

*****

There was not, in fact, plenty of information. Tony had found a free computer on one of the desks in the library that was most likely meant for public use - it had a sticky note with the password (IAmTheNight) on it - and quickly set up a search.

They had started with the basics: Batman, Gotham Vigilantes. But there really hadn’t been much. The most they could gather was that Batman had been an urban legend up until he joined the Justice League. There had been sightings going back almost 15 years, which Meant Bruce had started when he was in his early twenties.

Robin had come in a few years later, and was clearly not Damian Wayne. But beyond that, there wasn’t much. Sometimes Robin wore pants, sometimes not. Sometimes Robin was even a girl. Tony could never find anything defininite. There were countless vigilantes mentioned, some nameless, others not. Some showed up for a few weeks, then disappeared.

Finally they found something.

“Ahah!” Tony said as he clicked on an article about Red Hood. “This should be worth our

time.” Tony pulled up the first paragraph, and began reading.

“It is well known to everyone in Gotham that Crime Alley is one of the most dangerous places in our already dangerous city. What is also well known is its protector: The Red Hood. The Red Hood has had a somewhat rocky past with Gotham, but unlike the other vigilantes that haunt the rooftops, it is relatively easy to follow.

Red Hood first came on the scene a few years ago and quickly made a splash. Hood quickly took over most if not all of Gotham’s crime organizations, and began to make immediate changes.

It is reported that all the drug syndicates halted dealing near schools or children. All human trafficking sceeced. Crime was managed, to a point that not even Batman had achieved.

Red Hood enacted a strict law: he only killed rapists, murderers, abusers, and drug dealers - only those who sell to kids.

But we can’t forget about the dark knight. Batman was seriously against Red Hood in the beginning, and there are several documented fights to prove it. Red Hood became the only major criminal to stay active with the bat’s knowledge, and not be defeated.

After a while, though, Red Hood left Gotham. No one is quite sure why, as he had built himself quite an empire. Later on - no one is sure of the specifics - he returned. Details are foggy around this time, but Red Hood started to appear again, back to patrolling Crime Alley. One thing was different though. This time he wore a red bat on his armor, effectively announcing his allegiance.

According to many Gothamites, Red Hood has not killed anyone since his return, and has given up his crime lord status. Some say he protects Crime Alley, and occasionally teams up with the other vigilantes of Gotham. Many eye witness reports say that Hood has a somewhat amicable relationship with the bats, and is clearly one of them. There are also notes of him using rubber bullets, proving even more that he has sided with the bats. Though this is uncertain, as others report he still uses lead, and has even continued killing.

At this point Hood is considered a hero by most of Gotham, with the minority calling him a plague upon the city. The Police themselves have even stopped actively searching for the red helmeted hero - whether this is due to their inability to catch him, or as a sign of friendship, it is unclear. Police Commissioner Gordan has not commented on the matter beyond a vague statement of Hood appearing with the bats when the bat signal is deployed.”

“Bat signal?” Clint asked.

Tony typed furiously for a moment before retrieving the answer. “Apparently the police have an industrial spotlight on their roof with the silhouette of a bat on it which they shine when in need of the vigilantes.”

Natasha smirked. “Overkill much?”

Tony shrugged. “Hey, apparently  it works.”

“That’s beside the point,” Steve interjected. “We found barely anything on Jason. Sure it says he doesn’t kill anymore, but that doesn’t mean they can be trusted.”

Clint groaned again. “Let me guess, you want us to investigate the family personally?”

Steve nodded. “Nat, I want you to start, you are the intelligence expert after all.”

Natasha nodded, though inside she was in turmoil. She wanted to trust these people. She didn’t know why, but she felt connected somehow. Like they were similar in some core way.

Steve nodded right back. “Good. Meet back here in a few hours. See what you can find.”

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Swimming with the sharks: What progressives can learn from Republicans Against Trump

By Laura Shields and Dirk Singer

We've always known that conservatives have the campaigning instincts of sharks. But it's rare for progressives to see their techniques being used against a common enemy, rather than ourselves.

As dual UK-US nationals who work in communication, we have become obsessed with the Never Trumpers who are going all in to get Donald Trump out in November. They include The Lincoln Project, a super PAC which includes former strategists for John McCain and George W Bush as well as George Conway, the husband of one of Trump's closest advisers, and Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), a campaign that has run some ads, but mainly uses video testimonials from Republicans who will not be voting for Trump.

To give you an idea of what this might look like in the UK, just imagine if Lynton Crosby all of a sudden announced that Boris Johnson is a danger to democracy and they will now be campaigning for Keir Starmer.

So, what can we learn from swimming with our new temporary friends?

Be ruthless

The Never Trumpers might as well have written the phrase 'go big or go home'.  For them there is no Plan B, so there is an intensity and relentlessness about their approach. They act quickly and opportunistically through their attack ads, frames and messages and react to and lead conversations in real time.

For example, on the day that John Bolton came out with his revelations about Donald Trump begging President Xi of China for help in getting re-elected, the Lincoln Project released their Chyna ad.

There is no magic formula – they just keep it simple by using Trump's own words against himself. The attacks are often witty. Crucially they always go straight for the jugular. And part of the strategy is to wind Trump up so that he attacks them rather than Joe Biden. This means nothing is off limits, which a lot of the left ('we're better than this') finds distasteful. We do too. But you don't take a bar of soap when wrestling with pigs in mud.

Zeroing in on Trump's bizarre ramp walk at West Point and the way he was drinking water made a lot of people with liberal sensibilities uncomfortable. Yet it arguably succeeded in making his unfitness for office an issue and also robbed the Trump campaign of one its most potent attack lines against Joe Biden – ie the 'Sleepy Joe' insult.

That in itself is a lesson. Republican operatives have in the past attacked an opponent's perceived strengths, not weaknesses. If you demolish their key talking points one by one, they have nothing left.

Target your efforts

Never Trumpers target their time and money at the 15 or so battleground states where the election will be won or lost and ignore the national polls.

Within these states, they don't talk to the Democrats, they talk to the people they need to convert: swing voters, conservatives who also hate Trump or those who voted for him in 2016 but are feeling uneasy about him now.

As Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson said in a recent podcast, the people the Democrats need to win over in these states "are not people who care about gender pronouns". Unlike a lot of progressives, the Never Trumpers understand what makes their target audiences tick. The left is good at talking to itself but not empathising with the views of people who think differently.

Empathy is not endorsement. It simply means getting inside people's heads and understanding what messages and arguments work best to persuade them.

Values matter more than policy or facts

Republicans Voters Against Trump is a master class in low budget values campaigning. The videos are shot on smart phones or computers.  And they are effective because they are unpolished peer to peer testimonials that speak to core conservative morals, values and identity frames.

Words that come up a lot are responsibility, character, authority, respect, decency, faith, honour and integrity. Unsurprisingly, for all these ex-GOP voters, Trump has none of these qualities. For many, Biden does. They will vote for him because he's a man of character not because they agree with his policies.

A timely example of all these approaches coming together is the one minute testimonial of Carter and Nancy, Republicans who live near Tulsa, Oklahoma who will be voting for Biden this year. Their story was broadcast on Fox News ahead of Trump's rally in Tulsa on Saturday.

The closest the UK has come to using voter testimonials in the same way was through the highly underrated and underused Remainer Now campaign, who were not given anything like the prominence or support they needed by the stop Brexit campaigns.

Be consistent, employ message discipline

Message discipline seems to have gone out of the window for the left in recent years in the UK, probably because they associate it with Tony Blair.  But the idea that you can shift public opinion or change conversations is fanciful if you don't hammer your points consistently.

The Never Trumpers pick a theme and keep hammering away at it so that it sticks.

Some key examples are #AmericaOrTrump, where they tried to pin the Confederate flag on him, and more recently #Trumpisnotwell and #PlagueRally to describe Trump's Tulsa rally. The Lincoln Project and their founders have significant online reach. Both George Conway and Rick Wilson have over a million followers. The media of course tunes into Twitter, and these messages then get currency, are amplified, and stick.

At the moment the Never Trumpers are on our side because they believe in the fundamentals of democracy and the rule of law. But the reason why they want the Republican party to be demolished at the polls in 2020, is so that they can rebuild it from the ground up to once again look more like the Reagan GOP of the 1980s. That means eventually they'll be targeting - and beating - progressives again.

Had we adopted some of their tactics, a whole series of disasters from Brexit in 2016 to Johnson's 2019 election victory could have been avoided.

As a result, we'd do well to watch what they are doing between now and November and internalise some of the lessons they are teaching us, so that we don't become shark bait next time we meet.

[wolfliving]

I bet that book’s pretty good

“People with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” Though she is one of the city’s most fervent defenders, Eve Babitz captures a prevalent sort of sentiment about her native Los Angeles. As we see in films like Mullholland Drive and Under the Silver Lake, the cultural identity of Los Angeles has been largely dominated by Hollywood and the glamourous and sinister entertainment industry—superficial, fickle, and ruthless.

Even during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the city faced critiques from the storied, East Coast bastions of art and thought as being vapid and lacking in cultural merit. With such a reputation to overcome, how has Los Angeles, over the course of the last century, become one of the world’s major cities—with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach?

In CITY AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER: Los Angeles Reimagined UCLA professor and critic Peter Lunenfeld reconstructs the portrait of the city through unlikely associations, forgotten histories, and strange connections. In this LA, rocket science connects the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Scientology; rock ‘n roll legends like Jim Morrison, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Frank Zappa are inextricably linked with the aerospace industry and the military industrial complex; and, perhaps Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner weren’t so different after all.

Lunenfeld illustrates Los Angeles’s importance as an influential hub of design and modernism through the comparison of two husband and wife teams—historians Will and Ariel Durant and designer-architects Charles and Ray Eames. Joan Didion and local LA celebrity Angelyne are connected by way of the iconic Corvette Stingray—a car designed by Larry Shinoda, a Japanese American who was interned along with his family during World War II. The city’s development into a thriving locale for gastronomy dovetails with the arrival and popularity of Bruce Lee and martial arts.

Each chapter of CITY AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER reveals a new and unusual dimension to the history and development of the city. It is a wholly original and engaging account of the unique spirit and bustling landscape of modern Los Angeles.

Peter Lunenfeld is vice chair of UCLA's Design Media Arts department, and a faculty member in the Urban and Digital Humanities programs. He has published award-winning essays and several books with the MIT Press about the ways in which art, design, and technology intertwine, including The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. His historical and theoretical writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has lived in Southern California for the last three decades. “Immersive cultural history…Richly detailed and evocatively written this highly original account unearths L.A. stories ‘more complex [and] contradictory... than anything that ever made it to the screen.’

Readers will be spellbound.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A kaleidoscopic view of Los Angeles that looks beyond stereotypes… [Lunenfeld] makes a strong case for the city’s exceptionalism.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Here is a title to be added to the list of great meditations on Los Angeles. City at the Edge of Forever is a book about southern California but it is also a book about all of us, about how fringes become mainstream, how politics morphs into culture, and how culture mutates uncontrollably under the American sun.”—Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?

CITY AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER Los Angeles Reimagined By Peter Lunenfeld Viking | On Sale: August 11, 2020 | Hardcover | ISBN: 9780525561934 | Price: $28.00

[bountyofbeads]

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html

“Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health."

THE XINJIANG PAPERS

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

BY AUSTIN RAMZY AND CHRIS Buckley | Published November 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 16, 2019 |

*PART 1/2

HONG KONG — The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

“They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.”

The question-and-answer script also included a barely concealed threat: Students were to be told that their behavior could either shorten or extend the detention of their relatives.

“I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good,” officials were advised to say, “and also for your own good.”

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

Read the Full Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps

The party has rejected international criticism of the camps and described them as job-training centers that use mild methods to fight Islamic extremism. But the documents confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words and orders of the very officials who conceived and orchestrated it.

Even as the government presented its efforts in Xinjiang to the public as benevolent and unexceptional, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in these internal communications. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including the mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.

Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:

• President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

• Terrorist attacks abroad and the drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan heightened the leadership’s fears and helped shape the crackdown. Officials argued that attacks in Britain resulted from policies that put “human rights above security,” and Mr. Xi urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s “war on terror” after the Sept. 11 attacks.

• The internment camps in Xinjiang expanded rapidly after the appointment in August 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealous new party boss for the region. He distributed Mr. Xi’s speeches to justify the campaign and exhorted officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

• The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.

The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.

The Chinese leadership wraps policymaking in secrecy, especially when it comes to Xinjiang, a resource-rich territory located on the sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. The largest of these groups are the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and have long faced discrimination and restrictions on cultural and religious activities.

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including��ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

Of the 24 documents, the directive on how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017 offers the most detailed discussion of the indoctrination camps — and the clearest illustration of the regimented way the party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.

Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.

Officials in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang, drafted the question-and-answer script after the regional government warned local officials to prepare for the returning students. The agency coordinating efforts to “maintain stability” across Xinjiang then distributed the guide across the region and urged officials to use it as a model.

The government sends Xinjiang’s brightest young Uighurs to universities across China, with the goal of training a new generation of Uighur civil servants and teachers loyal to the party.

The crackdown has been so extensive that it affected even these elite students, the directive shows. And that made the authorities nervous.

“Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country,” the directive noted. “The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”

The document warned that there was a “serious possibility” students might sink into “turmoil” after learning what had happened to their relatives. It recommended that police officers in plain clothes and experienced local officials meet them as soon as they returned “to show humane concern and stress the rules.”

The directive’s question-and-answer guide begins gently, with officials advised to tell the students that they have “absolutely no need to worry” about relatives who have disappeared.

“Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs, and the standards are quite high,” officials were told to say, before adding that the authorities were spending more than $3 per day on meals for each detainee, “even better than the living standards that some students have back home.”

“If you want to see them,” the answer concluded, “we can arrange for you to have a video meeting.”

The authorities anticipated, however, that this was unlikely to mollify students and provided replies to a series of other questions: When will my relatives be released? If this is for training, why can’t they come home? Can they request a leave? How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.

“Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” one answer said. “This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”

The authorities appear to be using a scoring system to determine who can be released from the camps: The document instructed officials to tell the students that their behavior could hurt their relatives’ scores, and to assess the daily behavior of the students and record their attendance at training sessions, meetings and other activities.

“Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”

If asked about the impact of the detentions on family finances, officials were advised to assure students that “the party and the government will do everything possible to ease your hardships.”

The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, “Did they commit a crime?”

The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. “It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts,” the script said.

“Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.

SECRET SPEECHES

The ideas driving the mass detentions can be traced back to Xi Jinping’s first and only visit to Xinjiang as China’s leader, a tour shadowed by violence.

In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.

Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.

Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.

The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.

“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”

“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”

In free-flowing monologues in Xinjiang and at a subsequent leadership conference on Xinjiang policy in Beijing, Mr. Xi is recorded thinking through what he called a crucial national security issue and laying out his ideas for a “people’s war” in the region.

Although he did not order mass detentions in these speeches, he called on the party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam in Xinjiang.

Mr. Xi displayed a fixation with the issue that seemed to go well beyond his public remarks on the subject. He likened Islamic extremism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.”

“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Mr. Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to Xinjiang. “People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”

In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.”

“As soon as you believe in it,” he said, “it’s like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.”

In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.

“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”

But Mr. Xi’s main point was unmistakable: He was leading the party in a sharp turn toward greater repression in Xinjiang.

Before Mr. Xi, the party had often described attacks in Xinjiang as the work of a few fanatics inspired and orchestrated by shadowy separatist groups abroad. But Mr. Xi argued that Islamic extremism had taken root across swaths of Uighur society.

In fact, the vast majority of Uighurs adhere to moderate traditions, though some began embracing more conservative and more public religious practices in the 1990s, despite state controls on Islam. Mr. Xi’s remarks suggest he was alarmed by the revival of public piety. He blamed lax controls on religion, suggesting that his predecessors had let down their guard.

While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi said that was not enough. He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities.

“The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Mr. Xi told the leadership conference on Xinjiang policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market.

THE SOVIET PRISM

Mr. Xi is the son of an early Communist Party leader who in the 1980s supported more relaxed policies toward ethnic minority groups, and some analysts had expected he might follow his father’s milder ways when he assumed leadership of the party in November 2012.

But the speeches underscore how Mr. Xi sees risks to China through the prism of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he blamed on ideological laxity and spineless leadership.

Across China, he set about eliminating challenges to party rule; dissidents and human rights lawyers disappeared in waves of arrests. In Xinjiang, he pointed to examples from the former Soviet bloc to argue that economic growth would not immunize a society against ethnic separatism.

The Baltic republics were among the most developed in the Soviet Union but also the first to leave when the country broke up, he told the leadership conference. Yugoslavia’s relative prosperity did not prevent its disintegration either, he added.

“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right,” Mr. Xi said. “But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself.”

In the speeches, Mr. Xi showed a deep familiarity with the history of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule, or at least Beijing’s official version of it, and discussed episodes rarely if ever mentioned by Chinese leaders in public, including brief periods of Uighur self-rule in the first half of the 20th century.

Violence by Uighur militants has never threatened Communist control of the region. Though attacks grew deadlier after 2009, when nearly 200 people died in ethnic riots in Urumqi, they remained relatively small, scattered and unsophisticated.

Even so, Mr. Xi warned that the violence was spilling from Xinjiang into other parts of China and could taint the party’s image of strength. Unless the threat was extinguished, Mr. Xi told the leadership conference, “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected.”

Setting aside diplomatic niceties, he traced the origins of Islamic extremism in Xinjiang to the Middle East, and warned that turmoil in Syria and Afghanistan would magnify the risks for China. Uighurs had traveled to both countries, he said, and could return to China as seasoned fighters seeking an independent homeland, which they called East Turkestan.

“After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia,” Mr. Xi said. “East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”

Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, responded to the 2009 riots in Urumqi with a clampdown but he also stressed economic development as a cure for ethnic discontent — longstanding party policy. But Mr. Xi signaled a break with Mr. Hu’s approach in the speeches.

“In recent years, Xinjiang has grown very quickly and the standard of living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist violence have still been on the rise,” he said. “This goes to show that economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and security.”

Ensuring stability in Xinjiang would require a sweeping campaign of surveillance and intelligence gathering to root out resistance in Uighur society, Mr. Xi argued.

He said new technology must be part of the solution, foreshadowing the party’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in Xinjiang. But he also emphasized old-fashioned methods, such as neighborhood informants, and urged officials to study how Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Like the United States, he said, China “must make the public an important resource in protecting national security.”

“We Communists should be naturals at fighting a people’s war,” he said. “We’re the best at organizing for a task.”

The only suggestion in these speeches that Mr. Xi envisioned the internment camps now at the heart of the crackdown was an endorsement of more intense indoctrination programs in Xinjiang’s prisons.

“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals,” he told officials in southern Xinjiang on the second day of his trip. “And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue.”

Within months, indoctrination sites began opening across Xinjiang — mostly small facilities at first, which held dozens or hundreds of Uighurs at a time for sessions intended to pressure them into disavowing devotion to Islam and professing gratitude for the party.

Then in August 2016, a hard-liner named Chen Quanguo was transferred from Tibet to govern Xinjiang. Within weeks, he called on local officials to “remobilize” around Mr. Xi’s goals and declared that Mr. Xi’s speeches “set the direction for making a success of Xinjiang.”

New security controls and a drastic expansion of the indoctrination camps followed.

“The struggle against terror and to safeguard stability is a protracted war, and also a war of offense,” Mr. Chen said in a speech to the regional leadership in October 2017 that was among the leaked papers.

In another document, a record of his remarks in a video conference in August 2017, he cited “vocational skills, education training and transformation centers” as an example of “good practices” for achieving Mr. Xi’s goals for Xinjiang.

The crackdown appears to have smothered violent unrest in Xinjiang, but many experts have warned that the extreme security measures and mass detentions are likely to breed resentment that could eventually inspire worse ethnic clashes.

The camps have been condemned in Washington and other foreign capitals. As early as the May 2014 leadership conference, though, Mr. Xi anticipated international criticism and urged officials behind closed doors to ignore it.

“Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang,” he said.

‘ROUND UP EVERYONE’

The documents show there was more resistance to the crackdown inside the party than previously known — and highlight the key role that the new party boss in Xinjiang played in overcoming it.

Mr. Chen led a campaign akin to one of Mao’s turbulent political crusades, in which top-down pressure on local officials encouraged overreach and any expression of doubt was treated as a crime.

In February 2017, he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in a vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a “smashing, obliterating offensive.” In the following weeks, the documents indicate, the leadership settled on plans to detain Uighurs in large numbers.

Mr. Chen issued a sweeping order: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The vague phrase appears repeatedly in internal documents from 2017.

The party had previously used the phrase — “ying shou jin shou” in Chinese — when demanding that officials be vigilant and comprehensive in collecting taxes or measuring harvests. Now it was being applied to humans in directives that ordered, with no mention of judicial procedures, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or anti-government views.

The authorities laid out dozens of such signs, including common behavior among devout Uighurs such as wearing long beards, giving up smoking or drinking, studying Arabic and praying outside mosques.

Party leaders reinforced the orders with warnings about terrorism abroad and potential copycat attacks in China.

For example, a 10-page directive in June 2017 signed by Zhu Hailun, then Xinjiang’s top security official, called recent terrorist attacks in Britain “a warning and a lesson for us.” It blamed the British government’s “excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security,’ and inadequate controls on the propagation of extremism on the internet and in society.”

It also complained of security lapses in Xinjiang, including sloppy investigations, malfunctions in surveillance equipment and the failure to hold people accused of suspicious behavior.

Keep up the detentions, it ordered. “Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it said. “If they’re there, round them up.”

The number of people swept into the camps remains a closely guarded secret. But one of the leaked documents offers a hint of the scale of the campaign: It instructed officials to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in crowded facilities.

‘I BROKE THE RULES’

The orders were especially urgent and contentious in Yarkand County, a collection of rural towns and villages in southern Xinjiang where nearly all of the 900,000 residents are Uighur.

In the 2014 speeches, Mr. Xi had singled out southern Xinjiang as the front line in his fight against religious extremism. Uighurs make up close to 90 percent of the population in the south, compared to just under half in Xinjiang over all, and Mr. Xi set a long-term goal of attracting more Han Chinese settlers.

He and other party leaders ordered a quasi-military organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, to accelerate efforts to settle the area with more Han Chinese, the documents show.

A few months later, more than 100 Uighur militants armed with axes and knives attacked a government office and police station in Yarkand, killing 37 people, according to government reports. In the battle, the security forces shot dead 59 assailants, the reports said.

An official named Wang Yongzhi was appointed to run Yarkand soon afterward. With his glasses and crew cut, he looked the picture of a party technocrat. He had grown up and spent his career in southern Xinjiang and was seen as a deft, seasoned official who could deliver on the party’s top priorities in the area: economic development and firm control of the Uighurs.

But among the most revealing documents in the leaked papers are two that describe Mr. Wang’s downfall — an 11-page report summarizing the party’s internal investigation into his actions, and the text of a 15-page confession that he may have given under duress. Both were distributed inside the party as a warning to officials to fall in line behind the crackdown.

Han officials like Mr. Wang serve as the party’s anchors in southern Xinjiang, watching over Uighur officials in more junior positions, and he seemed to enjoy the blessing of top leaders, including Yu Zhengsheng, then China’s most senior official for ethnic issues, who visited the county in 2015.

Mr. Wang set about beefing up security in Yarkand but he also pushed economic development to address ethnic discontent. And he sought to soften the party’s religious policies, declaring that there was nothing wrong with having a Quran at home and encouraging party officials to read it to better understand Uighur traditions.

When the mass detentions began, Mr. Wang did as he was told at first and appeared to embrace the task with zeal.

He built two sprawling new detention facilities, including one as big as 50 basketball courts, and herded 20,000 people into them.

He sharply increased funding for the security forces in 2017, more than doubling spending on outlays such as checkpoints and surveillance to 1.37 billion renminbi, or about $180 million.

And he lined up party members for a rally in a public square and urged them to press the fight against terrorists. “Wipe them out completely,” he said. “Destroy them root and branch.”

But privately, Mr. Wang had misgivings, according to the confession that he later signed, which would have been carefully vetted by the party.

He was under intense pressure to prevent an outburst of violence in Yarkand, and worried the crackdown would provoke a backlash.

The authorities set numeric targets for Uighur detentions in parts of Xinjiang, and while it is unclear if they did so in Yarkand, Mr. Wang felt the orders left no room for moderation and would poison ethnic relations in the county.

He also worried that the mass detentions would make it impossible to record the economic progress he needed to earn a promotion.

The leadership had set goals to reduce poverty in Xinjiang. But with so many working-age residents being sent to the camps, Mr. Wang was afraid the targets would be out of reach, along with his hopes for a better job.

His superiors, he wrote, were “overly ambitious and unrealistic.”

“The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with realities on the ground and could not be implemented in full,” he added.

To help enforce the crackdown in southern Xinjiang, Mr. Chen transferred in hundreds of officials from the north. Publicly, Mr. Wang welcomed the 62 assigned to Yarkand. Privately, he seethed that they did not understand how to work with local officials and residents.

The pressure on officials in Xinjiang to detain Uighurs and prevent fresh violence was relentless, and Mr. Wang said in the confession — presumably signed under pressure — that he drank on the job. He described one episode in which he collapsed drunk during a meeting on security.

“While reporting on my work in the afternoon meeting, I rambled incoherently,” he said. “I’d just spoken a few sentences and my head collapsed on the table. It became the biggest joke across the whole prefecture.”

Thousands of officials in Xinjiang were punished for resisting or failing to carry out the crackdown with sufficient zeal. Uighur officials were accused of protecting fellow Uighurs, and Gu Wensheng, the Han leader of another southern county, was jailed for trying to slow the detentions and shield Uighur officials, according to the documents.

Secret teams of investigators traveled across the region identifying those who were not doing enough. In 2017, the party opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in Xinjiang for infractions in the “fight against separatism,” more than 20 times the figure in the previous year, according to official statistics.

Mr. Wang may have gone further than any other official.

Quietly, he ordered the release of more than 7,000 camp inmates — an act of defiance for which he would be detained, stripped of power and prosecuted.

“I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” Mr. Wang wrote.

“Without approval and on my own initiative,” he added, “I broke the rules.”

BRAZEN DEFIANCE

Mr. Wang quietly disappeared from public view after September 2017.

About six months later, the party made an example of him, announcing that he was being investigated for “gravely disobeying the party central leadership’s strategy for governing Xinjiang.”

The internal report on the investigation was more direct. “He should have given his all to serving the party,” it said. “Instead, he ignored the party central leadership’s strategy for Xinjiang, and he went as far as brazen defiance.”

Both the report and Mr. Wang’s confession were read aloud to officials across Xinjiang. The message was plain: The party would not tolerate any hesitation in carrying out the mass detentions.

Propaganda outlets described Mr. Wang as irredeemably corrupt, and the internal report accused him of taking bribes on construction and mining deals and paying off superiors to win promotions.

The authorities also emphasized he was no friend of Uighurs. To hit poverty-reduction targets, he was said to have forced 1,500 families to move into unheated apartments in the middle of the winter. Some villagers burned wood indoors to keep warm, leading to injuries and deaths, his confession said.

But Mr. Wang’s greatest political sin was not revealed to the public. Instead, the authorities hid it in the internal report.

“He refused,” it said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

______

Design and development by Rebecca Lieberman. Additional production by Jessica White.

______

To omit identifying markings, these documents have been retyped to resemble the originals.

[frankendykes-monster]

"In April 1962, a match pitting Japanese pro wrestling superstar Rikidozan and tag-team partners Toyonobori and Great Togo against American challengers Freddie Blassie, Lou Thesz, and Mike Sharpe aired nationally on Japanese television. During the bout, Blassie bit Great Togo on the forehead, opening a horrible bloody gash. Two elderly viewers, shocked by the gory sight, collapsed and died, casualties of a media war that saw networks and sponsors producing outrageous programs and stunts to grab the audience. Released later that year, Honda's King Kong vs. Godzilla is pop art imitating life, with two gargantuan wrestlers of Japanese and American pedigree tussling on live TV, raising ratings while razing cities. It's monster-movie-as-satire, a biting critique of the banal programming that dominated television, prompting widespread debate over the ascendant medium's effect on Japanese culture. The social critic Soichi Oya warned that TV was creating "a nation of 100 million idiots."

"People were making a big deal out of ratings," said Honda. "But my own view of TV shows was that they did not take the viewer seriously, that they took the audience for granted...so I decided to show that through my movie."

King Kong vs. Godzilla was one of five banner releases for 1962 to commemorate Toho's thirtieth anniversary, along with [Akira] Kurosawa's Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjuro), Hiroshi Inagaki's 47 Samurai (Chu-shingura), Mikio Naruse's Lonely Lane (Hourou-ki), and Yasuki Chiba's Born in Sin (Kawa no hotori de). By far Honda's most commercially successful film, King Kong vs. Godzilla was a runaway hit and the bedrock of the long-running Godzilla franchise that followed. Though Godzilla was a household word, this was the monster's first appearance in seven years. Only after Godzilla battled "the eighth wonder of the world" - Kong, the more popular monster, received top billing - did Toho truly begin producing its long and legendary series of monster-versus-monster sequels.

This is also perhaps Honda's most infamous effort, thanks to a poor imitation of the great King Kong and an inept, reworked American version that, as with Godzilla [1954], was distributed to many more territories than Honda's cut. Most troubling for Honda, though, was how Godzilla, in only its third film - and the first in color and scope - transformed from nuclear protest monster into outsized Rikidozan, engaging in comic wrestling antics. "[The studio] thought it would be interesting to make these two monsters fight," Honda later reflected. "That was all there was to it. Still, when you are the director, it is your film, so you still have to do your best. So I sucked it up and worked as hard as possible."

The project originated in Hollywood several years earlier, when stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien developed a proposed project titled King Kong vs. Frankenstein (later King Kong vs. Prometheus). O'Brien envisioned a battle in the streets of San Francisco between Kong and a monster created by Victor Frankenstein's grandson; the creatures would be animated via O'Brien's signature effects work. O'Brien partnered with independent producer John Beck, who failed to attract a Hollywood studio but eventually hit paydirt in Japan. Beck brokered a deal wherein Toho purchased the right to use King Kong in a film; however, O'Brien's ideas were jettisoned and he would have no involvement in the production. Toho made King Kong vs. Godzilla instead, with Beck retaining the lucrative overseas distribution rights.

RKO's fee for King Kong was reportedly 80 million Yen (about $220,000), inflating the budget and forcing Honda to cut costs. At the last minute, he canceled plans to film scenes set on Faro Island, Kong's home, on location in Sri Lanka. Instead, the crew shot at Oshima Island near Tokyo and on studio sets. "King Kong took all the money!" said actor Yu Fujiki.

Shinichi Sekizawa's script is light and quickly paced. Tako (Ichiro Arishima), the excitable advertising chief for Pacific Pharmaceutical Co., is desperate to shake up the low-rated TV science program that his company sponsors. He sends a cameraman, Sakurai (Tadao Takashima), and a sound man, Furue (Fujiki), to the Solomon Islands archipelago to investigate reports of a majin (demon god) worshipped by natives of tiny Faro Island. They return with King Kong literally in tow, but Kong breaks free in route and runs wild in Japan. Meanwhile, Godzilla bursts out of an iceberg in the Arctic and instinctively heads south toward its Tokyo stomping grounds. The Japanese military can't stop either creature, so a plan is hatched to pit them against one another, a monster matchup tailormade for the TV cameras.

King Kong vs. Godzilla takes a page from the keizai shosetsu (business novels) and films of the late 1950s and early 1960s that spoofed ruthless Japanese business practices. There are also similarities to Yasuzo Masumura's excellent Giants and Toys (Kedamono no yado, 1958), a satire about two candy companies engaged in an over-the-top media war, though where Masumura is cynical and heavy-handed, Honda is lighthearted. "The reason I showed the monster battle through the prism of a ratings war was to depict the reality of the times," said Honda. "When you think of King Kong just plain fighting Godzilla, it is stupid. But how you stage it, the times in which it takes place, that's the thought process of the filmmaker. Back then, Sekizawa was working on pop song lyrics and TV series, so he had a clear insight into television."

[Section omitted]

"This is neither the Kong of 1933 nor the Godzilla of 1954, and the monsters inspire little of their original pathos. Instead of moody monochrome, they are photographed in bright, revealing Eastmancolor and often framed at waist level, betraying any illusion of size. Godzilla has an improved design and blue-hot radiation breath; but Kong, played by stuntman Shoichi Hirose, is too obviously a man in a furry costume with lumpy facial features. Curiously, RKO reportedly required Toho not only to distinguish its Kong with a different face, but also to depict the ape snatching a female and scaling a building, recalling the original. Mie Hama does an excellent job shrieking in Kong's clutches, though one wishes Honda had borrowed even just a bit of the tragic romance of Merian C. Cooper's film. Godzilla mocks its opponent, Kong beats his chest and scratches his noggin, and both monsters employ slapstick fighting moves - Godzilla kicking boulders, Kong swinging its foe by the tail, and so on. Kong appears outmatched, but the odds are evened in the final battle via a deus ex machina, a thunderstorm that gives Kong a jolt of strength-inducing electricity."

[Section omitted]

"Because it was made not long after the AMPO protests, King Kong vs. Godzilla is sometimes interpreted as a critique of the Japan-US alliance, the monsters representing their respective countries. Studies such as Cynthia Erb's excellent Tracking King Kong make this analogy, but Honda had no such intent and, in fact, he portrays Kong as something of a proxy Japanese monster, with no apparent American origins. Unlike The Mysterians, Battle in Outer Space, Mothra, or Gorath, there is no involvement by the West in averting the crisis, and unlike Honda's 1950s dramas, the trappings of imported American culture (steaks and fries eaten with a fork and knife, jazz albums decorating Fumiko's apartment) are benign. Kong unintentionally helps expel Godzilla from Japan, playing the hero-by-default role that Godzilla would adopt a few years later. The fight ends in an apparent draw, then the monsters swim away - an ending to be repeated often, with variation."

- Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa, by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski

[a-ngua]

China reproaches West's 'laxity' in fight against coronavirus

Health specialists from China have warned Italians they are risking lives by not taking a government-imposed lockdown seriously, as Italy's coronavirus death toll surpassed China's. Chinese scientists also rejected the “herd immunity” approach proposed by Dutch and British authorities.

“Here in Milan, the area hardest hit by Covid-19, the lockdown measures are very lax,” said Chinese Red Cross vice president Sun Shuopeng, who visited the northern Italian city with a team of specialists flown in from China.

Italy, with 3,405 coronavirus deaths, is the country with the most casualties, overtaking China with 3,248 casualties. 

In spite of a draconian lockdown, Italy’s numbers have continued to soar over the past week, reaching 41,035 cases yesterday, compared to China, where infections seem to have stabilised at 81,000.

Unlike China, Italy does not seem able to implement the strict lockdown.

“I can see public transport is still running, people are still moving around, having gatherings in hotels, and they are not wearing masks,” said Sun, warning that public resistance to the lockdown will prove deadly. 

“I don’t know what people here are thinking. We really have to stop our usual economic activities and our usual human interactions. We have to stay at home and make every effort to save lives. It is worth putting every cost we have into saving lives,” he was quoted as saying.

Dictatorship

China, which is ruled by an authoritarian communist dictatorship, is extremely well positioned to mobilise large numbers of people. 

Since the Communist takeover in 1949, “mass mobilisation” has been a trusted tool of the Chinese Communist Party in organising millions of people to work for a common goal. 

Before the 1978 capitalist revolution, Beijing's “mass mobilisation” resulted in disasters like the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

But the principles – the central leadership issues a decree, which is then transmitted to the grassroots and implemented by local police, party cells and thousands of neighborhood committees – have remained the same ever since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping started his capitalist reforms.

In today’s China, foreigners are often flabbergasted to see the short time it takes for the authorities to empty entire cities, as happens yearly during party celebrations. 

In 2003, all cities and most villages in China’s countryside were locked down as a result of the Sars-1 epidemic. The policy is implemented swiftly and without much consideration or discussion, and, as recorded by human rights organisations, accompanied by ruthless censorship, police brutality and unnecessary suffering of many people. Critics of the Beijing regime claim dissidents and other “hostile elements” are also rounded up in the process.

Herd mentality

In spite of criticism of its draconian measures, China now prides itself on having successfully contained the coronavirus outbreak. As a result, there has been widespread shock about plans by some European countries to counter the epidemic by using so-called “herd immunity,” where large segments of the population are exposed to the virus to be cured by the natural autodefence system of individuals.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, in his speech on 15 March, said that “the virus will be among us for a long time to come … a large part of the population will be infected.”

While the Netherlands' health authorities advised precautions such as washing hands, keeping a safe social distance and reporting to a medical service if showing symptoms, they did not impose a hard lockdown.

Protective wall

The more people who get infected, Rutte argues, the more people will achieve immunity, resulting in “a protective wall”.

The policy the Dutch government has chosen is one of “controlled spreading” of the disease, and only among those who are not in risk groups, such as the elderly or chronically ill. These groups will be completely isolated.

The alternative, proposed and implemented by China, and now in force in Italy and France, is “complete lockdown,” minimising contact between people.

Rutte rejected this saying it would “lock down the country for at least a year” without a guaranteed success.

Rutte was echoing the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, who told the local media that the British would aim to achieve “herd immunity”, claiming that once 60 percent of the population (40 million people) contract the coronavirus, the resulting pool of natural immunity will limit the impact of the infection.

The remarks caused a tsunami of anger and ridicule on Chinese social platforms. 

Social Darwinism

Critics said the UK and other proponents of the ‘’herd immuninty” theory were promoting nothing less than social Darwinism, or “the survival of the fittest”.

“This shows just how scientifically astute developed nations’ approaches to virus prevention are,” reads one ironic response on Chinese social media. “Combatting the virus by employing the Darwinian model of natural selection highlights the unique appeal of modern science.”

So... which “way” will You choose providing one of yours loved ones will have to be sacrificed?  -_-

[justbeingnamaste]

President Duterte Warns George Soros ‘There Is A Bounty On Your Head’

Soros is a strong candidate for south-east Asia’s most unpopular man after being widely blamed for crashing the Thai and Malaysian economies in 1997 and sparking the Asian financial crisis through ruthless currency speculation.

President Duterte hasn’t forgiven the globalist financier. The man dubbed “Duterte Harry” by the Filipino people is also wise to the Soros agenda of divide and conquer and his brand of media manipulation.

The Philippine House of Representatives approved a proposal last week to reinstate the death penalty, and the president took the opportunity to fire a warning at George Soros: “There is a special place in hell for you, idiot. Set one foot in this country and my duty is to make you go straight there.”

Duterte and Soros have been locked in a war of words for years, with the Philippine president accusing Soros of destabilizing Asian democracies and financing editorial hit-pieces against him and his country in media outlets around the world.

Critics around the world, including in the U.S. and in Soros’ homeland of Hungary, say the liberal billionaire disguises himself as a “humanitarian” while causing chaos and manipulating the political landscape.

Duterte homed in on Human Rights Watch, which he said was attacking him to justify a $100 million, 10-year grant globalist George Soros promised it six years ago.

“This Human Rights Watch of New York, that belongs to Soros. Soros was the financier. That’s him. It’s his grant,” he said.

“They have funding money. They will really attack to justify. They chose me… they’re pounding on me. That is fine, editorials every day. I can swallow that.”

Corporate media hit pieces may have influenced international opinion of Duterte, but in his own country he is revered. He boasts a massive 83% popular approval rating across the land.

President Duterte rode into power campaigning on a ticket of major change, but unlike Western politicians who pay lip service to change before letting down their supporters, the Philippines president has delivered on his promises – in spades.

During the election campaign Duterte urged the people to kill him if he failed to resolve crime and corruption in the country during the first six months of his term.

Over one year into his term and he has delivered on his promises. He’s now famous for more than calling President Obama a “son of a whore” at a regional summit in Laos last year. Much to the Soros-influenced international community’s outrage, Duterte Harry is shooting from the hip, and cleaning up his country.

How does Duterte get away with taking on the rich and the powerful, installing law and order, and going against the globalist agenda of chaos and destruction?

The corporate media has no power over him. George Soros and corrupt oligarchs cannot use the mainstream media to destroy him because the people don’t trust what the media says anymore.

The people trust Duterte because unlike generations of politicians who came before him, he actually does what he says. His anti-globalist policies enrage the powers that be in the West, who have waged war against him through their propaganda channels in the media.

But his policies have improved the lives of citizens of the Philippines, who were suffering in a chaotic, lawless land under corrupt regimes for decades.

Whose judgement should we trust – the global cabal, or his own people?

Source ~  https://newspunch.com/duterte-soros-bounty/

[antoine-roquentin]

Christianity could not provide social upward mobility, but it ensured that Satyam and his siblings received a proper education, despite taunts from caste Hindus. Because they were educated, Gidla’s relatives could get jobs in Christian schools and hospitals. But a brown-skinned Christian was still treated very differently from a white-skinned one, and brahmin converts to the imperial religion refused to marry untouchable Christians. Conversion didn’t erase the stigma of untouchability. As a teenager, Satyam was hostile to Nehru and Gandhi – he saw them as products of British rule and tied to it in too many ways – but sympathetic to the militant, secular nationalism of Subhas Chandra Bose. From here, Satyam moved the short distance to the Communist Party, inspired by the accounts that student CP members gave him of the Telangana peasants’ struggle. Until a few years before his death in 2012, Satyam was engaged in the peasant resistance in Andhra Pradesh. After the Communist Party split in 1967 he became involved in the Naxalite, Maoist wing of the party, backing an armed revolt. After its failure, and the killing of many Naxalite leaders, he cofounded the People’s War Group, which Gidla describes as the ‘most notorious, famous and successful Naxalite party, a thorn in the side of the Indian rulers’. He was eventually expelled from it after complaining about the party’s treatment of untouchables. ‘Talk of caste feeling within the party had always been taboo,’ Gidla writes, but young untouchables were beginning to see it as a political issue. They told Satyam that ‘when they joined, they were not given a gun. Instead, they were handed a broom and told to sweep the floors.’ For a long time, too long, he’d preferred to believe that caste prejudice was false consciousness and would disappear in time. It never had. Even in the People’s War Group, members of the barber caste shaved their comrades, washer-caste members washed the clothes and the untouchables ‘were made to sweep and mop the floors and clean the lavatories’. This was life in a revolutionary group committed to an armed struggle to liberate the poor. 

Satyam can’t have been too surprised by this. He had suffered many insults from upper-caste members of the party, some of whom would leave money in the lavatory in order to see if he pocketed it. Feeling that the question of caste had now reached a new stage (there had been massacres of untouchables and angry responses), he confronted his comrades on the Central Committee. Their response was ‘swift and ruthless. He was expelled on the spot for “conspiring to divide the party”.’ The news of his expulsion became public when Gidla’s mother wrote a letter to a newspaper explaining what lay behind it. That was when most people found out that the founder of the People’s War Group, whom they knew as a revolutionary and a poet, publishing under the pseudonym Siva Sagar, was also an untouchable. 

*

Gidla, born in appalling conditions in an untouchable ghetto in the city of Kazipet in Telangana, now works as a conductor on the New York subway (she lost her job as a software programmer in a bank after the 2008 financial crash). Her experiences in the United States pushed her to write this book, an attempt to explain to her new friends and colleagues the difference between caste and race. Race is visible. Caste is a hierarchy established more than 2500 years ago. ‘What comes by birth and can’t be cast off by dying – that is caste,’ Arundhati Roy describes it in an essay introducing B.R. Ambedkar’s 1930s classic, The Annihilation of Caste:

What we call the caste system today is known in Hinduism’s founding texts as varnashrama dharma or chaturvarna, the system of four varnas. The approximately four thousand endogamous castes and sub-castes (jatis) in Hindu society, each with its own specified hereditary occupation, are divided into four varnas – Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (servants). Outside of these varnas are the avarna castes, the Ati-Shudras, subhumans, arranged in hierarchies of their own – the Untouchables, the Unseeables, the Unapproachables – whose presence, whose touch, whose very shadow is considered to be polluting by privileged-caste Hindus … Each region of India has lovingly perfected its own unique version of caste-based cruelty, based on an unwritten code that is much worse than the Jim Crow laws.

Unsurprisingly, Gidla’s tone in her portrait of everyday social and political life in India over the late 19th and 20th centuries is defiant, sometimes angry: Gandhi is portrayed as a hypocrite, Nehru as a conscienceless Kashmiri brahmin who was happy to send troops to crush the Telangana peasant uprising and remained unaffected by the resulting thousands of deaths. Unlike his many apologists, Gandhi never concealed his views on the caste system. He was opposed to treating untouchables badly, but defended the system itself: ‘I am one of those who do not consider caste to be a harmful institution,’ he wrote in the journal Young India in 1920. ‘In its origin, caste was a wholesome custom and promoted national wellbeing. In my opinion, the idea that inter-dining or intermarrying is necessary for national growth is a superstition borrowed from the West.’

Contrary to the radical slogans of the late 1940s, India’s wasn’t a ‘fake independence’. Self-rule was achieved at a high price and it meant something, but it incorporated many colonial practices. The new masters benefited, but for the untouchables, tribals and others conditions remained the same or got worse. According to recent estimates by India’s National Crime Records Bureau, every 16 minutes a crime is committed by caste Hindus against an untouchable – or Dalit, as they prefer to be called. The figures are horrific: every month 52 Dalits are killed and six kidnapped; every week almost thirty Dalit women are raped by caste Hindus. This will be a serious underestimate. Most victims of caste violence don’t report the crime for fear of reprisals, notably death by burning.

In 2012 the Indian and Western media extensively covered the gang rape and murder of a single woman in Delhi, largely because students and feminist groups had protested on the streets and made it an issue; that same year 1574 Dalit women were raped and 651 Dalits murdered. Add to this the regular mob punishment of Dalit and low-caste women: they are forcibly stripped then paraded through villages to humiliate them further. Politically a democracy, constitutionally secular, India has, since 1947, been a caste Hindu dictatorship. During the run-up to independence, B.R. Ambedkar pinpointed the futility of ‘rights’: ‘If the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no law, no parliament, no judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word … What is the use of fundamental rights to the Negro in America, to the Jews in Germany and to the Untouchables in India?’ He also advised the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, not to place any trust in the brahmin-dominated Congress and to fight hard for a Muslim state. Ambedkar considered demanding a separate status for untouchables, slicing them away from Hinduism. This would have given them separate electoral representation as was the case with Muslims and other minorities. Gandhi talked him out of this by flattery, and by arguing that since Ambedkar would be drafting the new Indian constitution he could write in all the safeguards he wanted. This did happen, but had little impact. ‘Implement the Constitution’ remains a Dalit demand to this day.

[joseph-gonzales]

Marcel Young

The impeccable career growth of Marcel’s mother -Michel’le Toussaint

Dr. Dre is known to b the music king and was the father of seven kids. Marcel Young was one of them. Marcel’s mother was Michel’le Toussaint's singer and had always preferred to stay out of media attention. Considering this, there isn’t much information available but Dr. Dre seems to be still alive, unlike his sibling Andre Young Jr who passed away at the age of 20 due to a drug overdose.

Marcel Young's early life

born on the 6th of February 1991, in Los Angeles Marcel Young was the son of singer Michel’le and Dr. Dre. He also had over six half-siblings that included Truly, Curtis, La Tanya Danielle Young, Andre, and Bailei Knight who was Surge Knight's daughter. Marcel's parents met in mid 80 and had also worked earlier before they started dating. They got engaged but his father's abusive relationship with his mom caused the end of their marriage. Their marriage was even re-told in the movie called “Surviving Compton”.

About Marcel mother

Marcel had seen a lot in his childhood. His mom struggled hard for a better living but eventually landed up on drugs and abusive relationships. Michel’le Denise Toussaint was born on the 5th of December 1967 in California USA to David West Jr. She also had a brother Ray West. In the early 90’s Michel’le Toussaint got engaged to Dre.

She always wanted to be single since her childhood. She rather started her career by being a World Class Wreckin’ Cru music group member as the female vocalist. In the popular single by the name “Turn Off the Lights”  Michel’le got popular and then she even got signed up for the Records Easy-E’s Ruthless

She then continued her career as a vocalist for the record which arête many albums. In the year 1989, her debut album was released and produced by her then-husband Dr. Dre which earned them both gold status. The album was a huge hit and gave tough competition to No More Lies”. It was also listed on the second number of Hot R&B/Hip-Hop charts

Another album was released in the year 1998 called “Hung Jury”, and since then there was no looking back. In early’s 2010 she was not seen much in the music industry. But again she managed to release her single in 2011 By name of “Freedom to Love”.

Ending note:

Marcel’s mother rose to fame with many of the great releases like Moonlight, and It Still Hurts and also gave a soundtrack for a movie named Surviving Compton. For more details visit: https://marriedbiography.org/what-is-doing-marcel-young-now-michelle-and-dr-dres-son/