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praphit · 4 years

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1BR- “Get your own damned sandwich!”

I think we've all thought about running away at some point in time this year. Of course, with The Ronas, there's really nowhere to run (not in America at least). But, if we could just go somewhere, and start over...

I've done that a few times in my life, and I'm sure some of you have as well.

You get away from a life that you screwed up, and start some new life... so that you can screw that one up as well.

That's what we have here in "1BR".

A young woman (Sarah) runs from her life of anxiety, confusion, and daddy issues, and runs towards L.A. It IS the city of angels, after all.

She gets a new place out there and it appears to be perfect (outside of the subtly baleful music that's playing in the background).

If only we all had background music playing in our lives that warned us of what's to come... though, honestly, there were a few red flags that didn't require music for discernment:

#1 - The community was too diverse with no signs of strife.

Some of you have been trapped in your home with the "love of your life" who may only have a couple of differences than you. A half a year of lockdown and you're already seeking divorce. A whole community with a bunch of different people with a lot of differences, with no cracks in it?? - c'mon.

#2 - Sarah is immediately greeted by your stereotypically cute and perfect guy, who's single and way too friendly. I've had a lot of different homes, and I've never been greeted by someone that perfect. If they've got the cute/sexy thing down, there's usually an angry, obsessive, and jealous ex, who just got out of prison. Or sometimes she's nice and all, but she ends up being a witch... no an actual witch (no offense to you witches out there, but... you know).

Or sometimes they've got 8 kids or something... and they're all drug dealers or something... idk, Baltimore, man.

Point is there is no perfection out there, and on the rare occasion that you find it, they're probably a serial killer.

#3 - this woman

I can't get her character in "American Horror Story" out of my head (pic to the left... though that should be obvious. Imagine if it were the other way around:).

She (Naomi Grossman) is always playing some creepy character. If you see her you KNOW that something sinister is afoot.

This community has a set of principles that everyone must live by or else there's punishment (this punishment tends to start with being locked in a torture room with your only comforts being a mystery shake and a bed pan.

The principles are selflessness, openness, acceptance, and security.

They all sound good, but... if you take them to the extreme...

I'm sorry, but Imma be selfish when it comes to my food. Have y'all ever had a chicken bacon club from "Wawa"... omg. Some of you may be thinking "Wawa?" YES, WAWA! I'm tryna tell ya! People are always asking if they can have a bite.

Bleep no! Get your own damned sandwich! They would just have to punish me. When it comes to my food and my women I am straight up monogamous. I ain't sharing for shit!

As far as openness, they wanted Sarah to share about her first sexual experience... right??! - stuff like that! They were like "We have no secrets here."

Pssh, you gotta have some secrets! I've had people say to me "Rambling Praphit, I want to know everything about you." NO YOU DO NOT! And I don't want to know everything about you either! I'm not sure that we could function in America without our secrets.

It's not that these principles are bad, they're just taken to the extreme.

With everything that I just told you, there's plenty there for a good movie, unfortunately...

It's like all the producers felt like they needed was a premise. We get to know Sarah, but no one else in this new community. They're all kinda prisoners just like Sarah, and it would have been nice to see how others were dealing. I saw some people of color sprinkled in the community. Imagine their perspectives. Most of the torturing is done by the white people. Imagine the movie showing a group of white people "punishing" a black man for... idk... leaving the toilet seat up. That would be a whole different movie! Think how awkward that would be.

"Look, I know this LOOKS racist, but... "

Another thing is that Sarah disappears for a hot minute. They said that they made sure to end her relationships via social media, but no one followed up?! No one?! Especially since the way her relationships are cut would have been totally out of character for her. If I ever go missing you can bet that at least my debt collectors would find me. At the very least, I'd see one of those slips of paper (reminding me that I still owe 800 thousand dollars) skate under the torture room door.

The movie definitely plays on the fear of government having too much control over us, us being too compliant, and a fear of science; many things that we see people growing in fear of today. Fear not, people. This would never happen. Mainly, because we could never be that organized to build and sustain that type of cultish community.

We're all jerks! Think about it - we've all signed papers saying we won't or will do certain things, but... there's always those people who still don't pick-up their dog's poop. There are always those people who refuse to cut their grass. Just the other week, some random drunk dude passed out in my yard! We'd spend all of our time in the torture room. They'd have to build many rooms like that. We'd be a community of constant torture!

Between the poster for this film and the rating including “gore” in it. I expected, you know... lots of gore.

- not true. I mean, there were a couple of spots, but... nothing to hide under the covers over.

As scared as Sarah looks, I was expecting “Saw” levels of blood. Although, to be fair, it's clear that they didn't have the budget for that type of horror.

I also didn't like that Sarah was so submissive. Fight, woman! I mean she kinda fights at the end, but she's still so... ugh. Channel your inner Black Widow!

Grade: generous C- (a good early morning, start my day with thoughts of torture-provoked utopias type of story) It'll get you thinking a lil bit, but that's it... just a lil.

Sarah’s relationship with her one black friend is highlighted, cuz of course :) She was so much feistier than Sarah. That's the attitude I wanted to see! - maybe she should have been the lead.

Maybe a woman of color would have been better for the role. Imagine Cardi B being the lead in this movie:

She wouldn't have taken any of their shit.

Speaking of shit, she probably wouldn't have been shy about the use of that bed pan.

And think of what response she'd have to those "openness" questions about sex.

That's the movie I want!

#1br #horror #Horror Movies #john praphit #praphitproductions.com #cardi b #wap #naomi grossman #praphit #los angeles #wawa #Black Widow

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frenchkisst · 3 years

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How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation

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Dr. Li-Meng Yan wanted to remain anonymous. It was mid-January, and Yan, a researcher in Hong Kong, had been hearing rumors about a dangerous new virus in mainland China that the government was playing down. Terrified for her personal safety and career, she reached out to her favorite Chinese YouTube host, known for criticizing the Chinese government.

Within days, the host was telling his 100,000 followers that the coronavirus had been deliberately released by the Chinese Communist Party. He wouldn’t name the whistleblower, he said, because officials could make the person “disappear.”

By September, Yan had abandoned caution. She appeared in the United States on Fox News, making the unsubstantiated claim to millions that the coronavirus was a bioweapon manufactured by China.

Overnight, Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Donald Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero. Nearly as quickly, her interview was labeled on social media as containing “false information,” while scientists rejected her research as a polemic dressed up in jargon.

Her evolution was the product of a collaboration between two separate but increasingly allied groups that peddle misinformation: a small but active corner of the Chinese diaspora and the highly influential far right in the United States.

Each saw an opportunity in the pandemic to push its agenda. For the diaspora, Yan and her unfounded claims provided a cudgel for those intent on bringing down China’s government. For American conservatives, they played to rising anti-Chinese sentiment and distracted from the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the outbreak.

Both sides took advantage of the dearth of information coming out of China, where the government has refused to share samples of the virus and has resisted a transparent, independent investigation. Its initial cover-up of the outbreak has further fueled suspicion about the origins of the virus.

Story continues

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that the virus almost certainly originated in an animal, most likely a bat, before evolving to make the leap into humans. While U.S. intelligence agencies have not ruled out the possibility of a lab leak, they have not found any proof to back up that theory.

Yan’s trajectory was carefully crafted by Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire, and Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump.

They put Yan on a plane to the United States, gave her a place to stay, coached her on media appearances and helped her secure interviews with popular conservative television hosts like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, who have shows on Fox. They nurtured her seemingly deep belief that the virus was genetically engineered, uncritically embracing what she provided as proof.

“I said from Day 1, there’s no conspiracies,” Bannon said in an interview. “But there are also no coincidences.”

Bannon noted that unlike Yan, he did not believe the Chinese government “purposely did this.” But he has pushed the theory about an accidental leak of risky laboratory research and has been intent on creating a debate about the new coronavirus’s origins.

“Dr. Yan is one small voice, but at least she’s a voice,” he said.

The media outlets that cater to the Chinese diaspora — a jumble of independent websites, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts with anti-Beijing leanings — have formed a fast-growing echo chamber for misinformation. With few reliable Chinese-language news sources to fact-check them, rumors can quickly harden into a distorted reality. Increasingly, they are feeding and being fed by far-right American media.

Wang Dinggang, the YouTube host contacted by Yan and a close associate of Guo, appears to have been the first to seed rumors related to Hunter Biden, a son of President-elect Joe Biden. A site owned by Guo amplified the baseless claims about Hunter Biden’s involvement in a child abuse conspiracy. They were picked up by Infowars and other fringe U.S. outlets. Bannon, Wang and Guo are now all promoting the false idea that the presidential election was rigged.

Big technology companies have started to push back, as Facebook and Twitter try to better police content. Twitter permanently banned one of Bannon’s accounts for violating its rules on glorifying violence after he suggested on his podcast that the heads of the FBI director and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, should be put on pikes.

But such mainstream notoriety has only bolstered their anti-establishment credentials. Wang’s YouTube following has nearly doubled since January. Traffic for two of Guo’s websites soared to more than 135 million last month, up from fewer than 5 million visits last December, according to SimilarWeb, an online data provider. Many conservatives who claim Facebook and Twitter censor right-wing voices are flocking to new social media platforms such as Parler — and Yan, Wang and Guo have already joined them.

Yan, through representatives for Bannon and Guo, declined multiple requests for an interview. So did Wang, citing The New York Times’ “reputation for fake news.”

In a statement sent through a lawyer, Guo said he had only offered “encouragement” for Yan’s efforts “to stand up against the CCP mafia and tell the world the truth about COVID-19.”

“I would gladly assist others seeking to tell the world the truth,” he said.

Finding a platform

As the new year began, Wang was doing what he did best: attacking the Chinese Communist Party on YouTube. He railed against China’s crackdown on Muslims and pontificated on the U.S. trade war.

Then on Jan. 19, he suddenly shifted to the emerging outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. It was early in the crisis, before the lockdown in the city, before China had disclosed that the virus was spreading among humans, before the world was paying attention.

In an 80-minute show devoted to an unnamed whistleblower, Wang said that he had heard from “the world’s absolute top coronavirus expert,” who had told him China was not being transparent. “I think this is very believable and very scary,” he said.

Wang, who was a businessman in China before moving to the United States for unknown reasons, is part of a growing group of commentators who have emerged on the Chinese-language internet. Their shows, which mix punditry, serious analysis and outright rumor, cater to a diaspora that often does not trust Chinese state media and has few reliable sources of news in its native language.

Since starting his program several years ago, Wang, who broadcasts under the name Lu De, has emerged as one of the genre’s most popular personalities, in part for his embrace of outlandish theories. He has accused Chinese officials of using “sex and seduction” to entrap enemies, and urged his audience to hoard food in preparation for the Communist Party’s collapse.

His January show on the unnamed whistleblower combined the same elements of fact and fiction. He called his source, later revealed to be Yan, an expert but greatly exaggerated her credentials.

She had studied influenza before the outbreak but not coronaviruses. She did work at one of the world’s top virology labs, at the University of Hong Kong, but was fairly new to the field and hired for her experience with lab animals, according to two university employees who knew her. She helped investigate the new outbreak but was not overseeing the effort.

The episode caught the attention of Bannon, who said he started worrying about the virus when China began locking down. Someone, he didn’t say who, pointed out the show and translated it.

A few months later, Wang suddenly told Yan to flee Hong Kong for her safety, he explained in later broadcasts. Guo, his primary patron, paid for her to fly first class, he added.

On April 28, Yan quietly left for the airport. Her family and friends panicked but could not reach her, said Jean-Marc Cavaillon, a retired professor of immunology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who has known Yan since 2017. A missing persons report was filed in Hong Kong.

Two weeks later, she resurfaced in the United States.

“I’m currently in New York, very safe and relaxed” with the “best bodyguards and lawyers,” Yan wrote on WeChat, in a screenshot seen by The Times. “What I’m doing now is helping the whole world take control of the pandemic.”

A media makeover

After Yan arrived in the United States, Bannon, Guo and their allies immediately set out to package her as a whistleblower they could sell to the American public.

They installed her in a “safe house” outside of New York City and hired lawyers, Bannon said. They found her a media coach, since English is not her first language. Bannon also asked her to submit multiple papers summarizing her purported evidence, Yan later said.

“Make sure you can walk people through this logically,” Bannon recalled telling her.

Bannon and Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo, who also goes by Miles Kwok, was a property magnate in China with ties to senior party officials until he fled the country about five years ago under the shadow of corruption allegations. He has since styled himself as a freedom fighter, although many are skeptical of his motivations.

Bannon, who patrolled the South China Sea as a young naval officer, has long focused much of his energy on China. During his time in the White House, he counseled Trump to take a tough approach toward the country, which he has described as “the greatest existential threat ever faced by the United States.”

Guo’s deep pockets and Bannon’s extensive network have given them an influential platform. The two men set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption in China. They spread conspiracy theories about the accidental death of a Chinese tycoon in France, calling it a fake suicide orchestrated by Beijing.

By late January, they were both acutely focused on the outbreak in China.

Bannon pivoted his podcast to the coronavirus. He was calling it “the CCP virus” long before Trump started using xenophobic labels for the pandemic. He invited fierce critics of China to the show to discuss how the outbreak exemplified the global threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo began claiming that the virus was an attack ordered by China’s vice president. He circulated the same claims on his media operation, which includes GTV, a video platform, and GNews, a site that features glowing coverage of Guo and his associates. He released a song called “Take Down the CCP,” which briefly hit No. 1 worldwide on the Apple iTunes chart.

The men have continued to target the Chinese government even as they battle their own legal woes. Guo is reportedly under investigation by U.S. federal authorities over fundraising tactics at his media company. Bannon, who was arrested this summer on Guo’s yacht, is facing fraud charges for a nonprofit he helped set up to build a wall along the Mexican border.

In Yan, the two men found an ideal face for their campaign.

On July 10, she revealed her identity for the first time in a 13-minute interview on the Fox News website. She said that the Chinese government had concealed evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus. She accused, without proof, professors at the University of Hong Kong of assisting in the cover-up. (The university quickly rejected her accusations as “hearsay.”)

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID-19,” she said.

She made no mention of Guo or Bannon, by design.

“Don’t link yourself to Bannon, don’t link yourself to Guo Wengui,” Guo on his own show recounted telling Yan. “Once you mention us, those American extreme leftists will attack and say you have a political agenda.”

After the first Fox interview, Yan embarked on a whirlwind tour of right-wing media, echoing conservative talking points. She said that she took hydroxychloroquine to ward off the virus, even though the FDA had warned that it was not effective. She suggested that the World Health Organization helped cover up the outbreak.

Those interviews were amplified by social media accounts proclaiming allegiance to Guo. They translated her appearances into Chinese, then posted multiple versions on YouTube and retweeted posts by other pro-Guo accounts.

Some of the accounts have tens of thousands of followers — of a dubious nature. Many have multiple indicators of so-called inauthentic behavior, according to an analysis by First Draft, a nonprofit that studies misinformation. The analysis found that they were created in the past two years, lacked background photos and had usernames that were jumbles of letters and numbers.

Collectively, the followers created online momentum for the conservative media world, which in turn reenergized the pro-Guo accounts. “The two are filtering and feeding off of each other,” said Anne Kruger, First Draft’s Asia Pacific director.

Going mainstream

In early September, Yan met with Dr. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University who had floated the possibility that the virus was the product of a laboratory experiment. Lucey said Yan’s associates, who set up the meeting, wanted to find a credible scientist to endorse her claims. “That was the only reason for bringing me there,” he said.

For more than four hours, Yan discussed her background and research, while one of her associates, whom Lucey declined to name, impatiently walked in and out of the room. He said that Yan appeared to genuinely believe that the virus had been weaponized but struggled to explain why.

At the end, the associate asked Lucey if he thought Yan had a “smoking gun.” When Lucey said no, the meeting quickly ended.

Days later, Yan released a 26-page research paper that she said proved the virus was manufactured. It spread rapidly online.

The paper, which was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, was posted on an online open-access repository. It was backed by two nonprofits funded by Guo. The three other co-authors on the paper were pseudonyms for safety reasons, according to Bannon.

Virologists quickly dismissed the paper as “pseudoscience” and “based on conjecture.” Some worried that the paper — laden with charts and scientific jargon, such as “unique furin cleavage site” and “RBM-hACE2 binding” — would lend her claims a veneer of credibility.

“It’s full of science-y sorts of terms that are jumbled together to sound impressive but aren’t supported,” said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University who was among several authors of a rebuttal to Yan’s report.

Other misinformation about the pandemic has also emphasized supposed expertise. In the spring, a 26-minute video that went viral featured a discredited American scientist accusing hospitals of inflating virus-related deaths. A July video showed people in white coats, calling themselves “America’s doctors” and suggesting that masks were ineffective; the video was removed by social media platforms for sharing false information.

On Sept. 15, a day after her report was published, Yan secured her biggest stage yet: an appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Carlson’s popular show has frequently served as an influential megaphone for the right.

Carlson asked if Yan believed Chinese officials had released the virus intentionally or by accident. Yan did not hesitate.

“Of course intentionally,” she said.

The clip went viral.

Footage of their interview racked up at least 8.8 million views online, even though Facebook and Instagram flagged it as false information. High-profile conservatives, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., shared it on Twitter. When the Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist supporter of Trump, posted about Yan on Facebook, it became the most-shared link posted by a U.S.-based Facebook account that day.

Lou Dobbs, another Fox host, tweeted a video of himself and a guest discussing Yan’s “great case.” Trump retweeted it.

Yan was welcomed by an audience already primed to hear her claims. A March poll found that nearly 30% of Americans believed the virus was most likely made in a lab.

“Once Tucker Carlson picks it up, it’s not fringe anymore,” said Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies disinformation. “It’s now mainstream.”

Fox News declined to comment.

Weeks later, Carlson said on his show that he could not endorse Yan’s theories. Regardless, he welcomed her back as a guest to detail her latest claim: Her mother, she told him, had been arrested by the Chinese government.

The Chinese government often punishes critics by harassing their families. But when The Times reached Yan’s mother on her cellphone in October, she said that she had never been arrested and was desperate to connect with her daughter, whom she had not spoken to in months.

She declined to say more and asked not to be named, citing fears that Yan was being manipulated by her new allies.

“They are blocking our daughter from talking to us,” her mother said, referring to Guo and Wang. “We want our daughter to know that she can video-chat with us at any time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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balogheszter25 · 4 years

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How can a retired Hungarian man become world-famous?

In this blog entry I would like to recommend a TED Talk for you that I think it is worth watching. Not only was the topic of this lecture extremely interesting, but also the presenter did a great job.

The title of this Ted talk is ”Waking up as a meme-hero” presented by András Arató or better known as ”Hide the pain Harold”. He is a retired Hungarian man who was invited to Kiev to tell his story how he became world-famous at the age of 70.

András Arató was born in Kőszeg 74 years ago. He went to the University of Budapest and graduated as an electric engineer and worked at different companies as lightning expert. He got some scientific awards he was elected as the vice president of the Hungarian Lightning Society.

But how can a retired engineer become a meme?

Everything started with a vacation in Turkey. He uploaded pictures, which were taken on this trip to iWiW. But not only saw their acquaintances the pictures, but also a professional photographer noticed these pictures and he contacted András Arató, writing that he was looking for a model, a character like him. This photographer invited Arató for a trial shooting who said yes to the invitation and went to this trial shooting. The photographer did some pictures that Arató liked very much. The photographer invited him back and during the several sessions a couple of hundred pictures were made: stock photo pictures. He knew what these picture are used for since the photographer informed him about everything, and he had to sign a cotract, by doing so Arató was agree to use his pictures. He only highlited 3 sensitive areas that he did not want to see himself on the monitor or in printed form. Politics, religion and sex. Because these are topics which can divide people the most, and he did not want to do that.

A few months later he was wondering what his pictures were used for. It was enough to run a Google search and he appeared on a hospital’s home page as a doctor.

At the beginning his photos served as illustration in different Internet publication, printed publication, newspaper articles, advertisments and so on. But later he could be seen mostly with some funny caption called “meme”. The definition of memes is: “it is an image, a video, a piece of text and so on, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users often with slight variations.” It perfectly applies to his case.

A few months later he repeated the search and he discovered the first meme.

But not only this kind of funny meme was born, there were some rude or offensive ones, too. There was an American guy who gathered Arató’s stock photos and announced a contest among his friends about who could add some funny texts, make some visual jokes and that was the way these memes were born. First it was a shocking experience for him. He did not know what to do. He wanted memes to disappear. But he could not do anything. It is well known that nothing can disappear from the internet. His only hope was that people would forget about it. But he was wrong. The propagation of the memes sis not stop, even more and more countries joind this mania. It started in the United States ,went over to Europe and spread out to the every continent.

During the shooting the photographer asked him to smile. People felt that this smile was not really heartfelt. They saw some hidden sadness or pain behind it, so that’s why he got the name “Hide the Pain Harold”. He still thought that people would forget it.

Out of the blue a Russian somehow discovered his real identity and sent him an email writing that there are so many people who don’t believe that he is a real living person, a human being. So this guy asked Arató to show himself that he is a real living person. Arató ignored his request, but he repeated again and again and finally Arató was agree to upload a picture about himself holding a piece of paper in his hand writing that “I live”.

In the next few hours the Internet has exploded. Ten thousands of people saw this picture, and the international media discovered him as well. He created his home pages on the social networks. This whole thing made a dramatic change in his life. He got invitations to great places. He says that “Hide the pain Harold” is a roleplay. It’s not him, it’s a role given to him by the internet users.

It made his life very exciting and interesting with many new opportunities. He can be seen in short films and commercials as well. He tried himself after he was a meme, for five years in a small local radio station as a music DJ.

Unfortunately or luckily not everybody can be meme.

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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5 Horror Movies That Made Up Rules Midway Through The Film

Any good movie needs to establish the rules of its universe. The viewer absolutely must know what happens if zombie blood gets in your mouth, or if you give a gremlin a boner. Unfortunately, not every movie can keep its own rules straight. Some make stuff up right in the middle and hope you won’t notice. Spoilers ahead, of course.

In Get Out, The Villains Must Vet And Seduce Their Victims Carefully … Or Just Kidnap Random People?

One of the major reveals in Get Out is that even white people who voted for Obama can be racist. Another big one is that Chris’s girlfriend, Rose, only dated him so that her family could hypnotically trap his mind and auction his body off to wealthy brain-rapists. It’s an amazing movie, is what we’re saying here.

Anyway, we’re first tipped off to the evil plot when Chris discovers a troublingly large stack of photographs of Rose and all her (black) exes, including her parents’ weird servants. You might not immediately think, “These are people she’s mentally enslaved,” but it’s worth bringing up.

Universal PicturesAlso, what’s with the box of physical photographs? Are you a hundred years old?

Rose has been dating Chris for five months. And judging from the intimate photos, she’s convinced over a dozen other people to fall for her. This means she has been in the family business of debauching African Americans since she was, at best, a teenager. Forget about how creepy that is; it’s sort of incredible. They’ve been asking this girl to constantly convince strangers to fall in love with her and then betray them since before she could buy beer. She’s the Meryl Streep of brain transplant crime.

Using Rose as a honeypot sounds extremely inefficient, but what else could the family do? The movie clearly establishes that they’ve got to get those people to their house somehow, and it’s not like they can simply abduct anyone on the street.

Except … wait, that’s exactly what they can do.

Universal PicturesTo this guy. This poor son of a bitch right here.

The man in the picture above is Andre. Andre is nabbed while wandering around an upscale suburban neighborhood, presumably looking for an Olive Garden. Rose’s brother, Jeremy, lacks his sister’s bubbly charm, so he apparently knocks out random black pedestrians and stuffs them in his car.

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And it’s not like Jeremy’s method is any less successful than Rose’s. Andre was clearly hypnotized, brain-transplanted, and sold with no real problems. Jeremy achieved in a single night what took Rose five full months.

Read Next

6 Classic Movies That Get Ruined By Grade-School Science

On top of all of that, Jeremy’s method is significantly safer. While she was dating Chris for half a year, she met all the people in his life — like his friend, Rod, who might wonder why his friend didn’t come back from her house. A bisexual girl who dates only black people is already going to generate some gossip, but if every single one of those people mysteriously goes missing, it’s safe to say that story would get picked up sooner or later. And a string of abductions linked to the city’s most famous interracial sex addict is a much easier crime to solve than a few seemingly unrelated disappearances.

In Freddy Vs. Jason, Jason Randomly Becomes Afraid Of Water

Freddy Vs. Jason was supposed to be the horror villain smackdown to end all horror villain smackdowns. But before the two really go at it, Freddy enters Jason’s dreams to see what he fears most. After decades of murder, Jason has been beaten and mangled, sometimes to death, so obviously the thing he fears most is water. Wait, water!?

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Specifically, harmless cascading water. It’s … it’s weird.

Later in the movie, Freddy uses this knowledge to his advantage. Right when Jason is about to machete the shit out of Freddy, a pipe bursts, spraying wetness between the supernatural forces of death. There’s nothing special about this water. It’s just water. And it stops Jason right in his tracks. Now, this rule makes sense on paper … if you’ve never seen a Friday The 13th movie. As a boy, Jason first died by drowning, so a phobia of water would not be out of the question. Now here’s a picture of a very relaxed Jason chest-deep in his greatest fear:

New Line CinemaOr maybe he’s scared? It’s hard to tell, of course.

Here he is in Jason Takes Manhattan, wherein he hitches a ride to the big city on a boat’s anchor with no problem whatsoever. This is almost certainly the wettest way to get to Manhattan.

New Line CinemaLook at the poor thing: Scared to death.

Even in a Friday The 13th video game, Jason has no problem getting in the water to do some good old-fashioned lake slaying.

Gun Media“Oh thank god! Rescue me!”

Is it possible Freddy reawakened some dormant fear in Jason? Maybe, but the more likely explanation is that there needed to be some kind of tension in a fight between two immortal fear monsters, and they didn’t hire the world’s most creative writer to develop the story every seven-year-old horror fan thought of first.

In It Follows, Shooting The Follower Doesn’t Work (Until It Does)

It Follows is about a monster that follows you if you fuck someone who was already being followed by the monster. Then, if the monster catches you, it fucks you to death. It’s uh … it’s better than it sounds. The whole thing is a not-so-subtle metaphor for STDs, so you would imagine the solution to the problem would be some kind of poetic, maybe metaphorical thing, like convincing teens to practice abstinence, or maybe burning off your genitals. But no. Instead they shoot it.

They straight up shoot the thing dead.

RADiUS-TWC

Now, shooting isn’t a bad idea if you’re looking to kill something, but they establish early in the movie that bullets don’t work on the Follower. Instead of getting on a plane to Australia to wait it out (because the entity can only very slowly walk wherever it goes), the main group of kids decide to hang out at a nearby beach and let it catch up. Naturally, the monster shows up, and the main character, Jay, shoots it in the neck.

This doesn’t keep it down for long. It gets right back up and continues following Jay. This should communicate that it’s a mystical being that can’t be stopped with mortal techniques, but it doesn’t. In fact, the movie soon gets straight up Scooby-Doo. During the big final showdown, the heroes attempt to electrocute the creature in a pool. But when that plan goes belly-up, they decide to finish it off once and for all … by shooting it. Again.

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Maybe it’s not a metaphor for STDS, but for how nothing matters and everything’s stupid.

When the pool fills with blood, the kids decide the entity is defeated once and for all. Now sure, there’s a scene at the end which shows it may (or may not) still be following the characters, but the monster inexplicably showing up at the end of the horror film is a tried and true cliche. It means practically nothing. It’s as pointlessly ridiculous as having the monster leap out of the pool on a surfboard and go, “I’ll be back in It Follows 2: Beach Bods!”

In 2004’s Dawn Of The Dead, People Turn Into Zombies Just, Like, Whenever The Hell

A lot of zombie movies play their “zombie rules” pretty fast and loose, but the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake reeeally stretched the boundaries of zombification science. Basically, when people get bitten, they turn into zombies whenever it’s most convenient for the plot.

In the opening scene, Ana’s husband gets bitten in the neck by a zombified neighbor child and collapses on the bed. In the time it takes for Ana to call 9-1-1 and get a busy signal, he dies and pops back up as an undead maniac:

Universal Pictures“HEY! We’re out of toilet paper! I TOLD YOU YESTERDAY WE’RE OUT OF TOILET PAPER! YOU ALWAYS DO THIIIIIS!!!”

Later, when the gang is in the mall, they bring in a truck full of eight people, two of whom have been bitten. One is a lady in a wheelbarrow, best described as 300 pounds of moaning rotten meat long overdue to die from any number of things. The other is TV’s Max Headroom, who has a little bite on his arm.

Universal Pictures“Wait, in what zombie story do you bring me into an enclosed space!? This is fucking crazy!”

Universal Pictures“Wait, someone remembers Max Headroom? This is fucking crazy.”

Max Headroom dies very shortly, but another character, the pregnant Luda, has a similar wound on her arm, and she lasts days, maybe weeks? The movie doesn’t give a clear timeline, but within one montage set to a lounge cover of “Down With The Sickness,” it’s made clear the party is in there long enough to get suicidally stir-crazy.

The point is, Luda lives hundreds, maybe thousands of times longer than other people with the same wound. Maybe her pregnancy had an effect? Meanwhile, the lady in the wheelbarrow seemed to rot into a corpse puddle long before she hopped up as a zombie. Maybe her weight problem had an effect? Is diabetes the cure for zombism?

The characters spell it right out for the audience that bites transit the disease, and yet not a single infection seems to follow the same rules. For instance, the gun shop owner gets bitten on the arm, describes it as “not bad,” and turns undead in minutes. Can the zombie virus tell when it’s time to speed up the plot?

Universal PicturesZombie for “Wrap it up.”

So turning into a zombie can take several minutes, a few hours, or literally weeks, based on whatever reveal is coolest. Maybe the silliest dramatic transformation happens in the climax, when the Ty Burrell “rich dick” character gets jumped by a zombie and moments later comes back as a hissing monster. Which means that within seconds, a zombie kills him, decides to stop eating him, and leaves the area completely. This goes against everything we’ve learned about zombie behavior and most of what we’ve learned about bite timelines, but it allows him to get shot in the face for a callback to earlier in the movie, when Ana said she was going to shoot him in the face.

Universal Pictures“Ha! I knew that line about shooting me in the face would pay off!”

In Saw, Jigsaw Lets People Live If They Appreciate Life. Except No, He Doesn’t.

Saw‘s central villain, John Kramer, conducts sinister tests on human beings, only allowing them to live if they learn what life really means. The movies clearly want us to think of Jigsaw as a complicated character. Yes, he’s a murderous criminal, but also sort of a free life coach? Which may be how they justify letting him win at the end of every movie. (Sorry for spoiling Saw, Saw II, Saw IV, Saw 3D, and Jigsaw.)

There’s always some reveal to explain how all the people in Jigsaw’s traps deserve it, and unlike his insane proteges, Kramer himself has a single guiding philosophy he’s trying to carry out. Supposedly, he forces people to appreciate what they have, and if they demonstrate that they’ve learned this, he lets them go. But is that really what he does? Is all of this as stupid as it sounds?

Yes. In one movie, he forces a man to tunnel through a maze of razor wire to prove that he wants to live. The man in question does indeed want to live, and is so determined to do so that he slices his stomach open while fighting his way through. So he proves it, right? No, Jigsaw lets him die. It wasn’t any kind of test; it was a weird murder with torture and puppets that would have killed him less if he wasn’t so motivated to live. Enjoying life isn’t the same as being immune to barbed wire, Jigsaw!

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The movie is full of traps built around how much damage a body can take, not how determined the body is to seize the day. For instance, the man covered in flammable jelly and made to tread on broken glass without flinching. Jigsaw watches that poor guy through a peephole and doesn’t once intervene, even as the guy clearly demonstrates his willingness to endure pain to save his own life. He passed, you dick! Call off the murder!

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At one point, Kramer leaves a victim in a chair designed to drill into the man’s head if the detectives following him don’t call off the case. What kind of zest for life is that supposed to test? Drills don’t magically stop working when they hit a brain thinking about how it hates dying.

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In the history of Jigsaw’s arts and crafts murder spree, only a small handful of people are actually tested on how much they appreciate life. The rest of them are killed in pointlessly unpleasant ways. It’s like Jigsaw created the world’s most infantile, half-baked philosophy solely to justify thousands of hours of death trap construction and bicycling puppet maintenance. How did they make eight movies about that, and only seven about an evil Leprechaun?

Jordan Breeding also writes for Paste Magazine, the Twitter, himself, and with a dirty, dirty spray can in various back alleys. Mike Bedard does a lot more than point out flaws in movies. He also makes his own. Here’s a short he made about Indiana Jones saying it’s okay to punch Nazis. If you like what you see, then follow him on Twitter. Dan Hopper is an editor for Cracked, previously for CollegeHumor and BestWeekEver.tv. He fires off consistent A-minus tweets at @DanHopp.

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'Biggest Case on the Planet' Pits Kids vs. Climate Change

Join us in The People v. Climate Change and share an environmental portrait of someone taking positive steps to protect the Earth on YourShot or social media. Use #MyClimateAction to share a first-person perspective on how we as humans face climate change.

Levi Draheim is a nine-year-old science geek. He founded an environmental club as a fourth grader and gives talks about climate change to audiences of grown-ups. His home is on a slender barrier island on Florida’s Atlantic coast, 21 miles south of Cape Canaveral and a five-minute walk from the beach. By mid-century, his sandy childhood playground could be submerged by rising seas. He will be just 42.

Nathan Baring is 15 and a high school sophomore in Fairbanks, Alaska—120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. He loves cold weather sports and skis, ice skates, and plays hockey. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Now the first winter snows that Baring once celebrated as early as August in Fairbanks arrive as late as November.

By 2050, Arctic sea ice will have virtually disappeared, and temperatures in the interior, surrounding Fairbanks, will have risen by an additional 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, altering the boreal forest ecosystem. Nathan will be 48.

“I can deal with a few days of rain in February when it’s supposed to be 40 below,” he says. “But I can’t deal with the idea that what my parents experienced and what I have experienced will not exist for my children. I am a winter person. I won’t sit idly by and watch winter vanish.”

Baring and Draheim so lack confidence that they will inherit a healthy planet that they are suing the United States government for failing to adequately protect the Earth from the effects of climate change. They are among a group of 21 youths who claim the federal government’s promotion of fossil fuel production and its indifference to the risks posed by greenhouse gas emissions have resulted in “a dangerous destabilizing climate system” that threatens the survival of future generations. That lapse violates, the court papers argue, their fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. The lawsuit also argues that the government violated the public trust doctrine, a legal concept grounded in ancient law that holds the government is responsible for protecting public resources, such as land and water—or in this case, the climate system—for public use.

The kids’ lawsuit was joined by acclaimed NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who began studying climate change in the 1970s and whose granddaughter, Sophie, is among the 21 young plaintiffs.

“In my opinion, this lawsuit is made necessary by the at-best schizophrenic, if not suicidal nature of U.S. climate and energy policy,” he told the court.

Last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Anne Aiken agreed with the youths’ claim. Her sweeping 54-page opinion laid the foundation for what looks to be a groundbreaking trial later this year. In her ruling, Aiken established, in effect, a new right for these children and teens: a right to expect they could live in a stable climate.

“I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society,” Aiken wrote. “Just as marriage is the foundation of the family, a stable climate system is quite literally the foundation of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”

She made clear that “this lawsuit is not about proving that climate change is happening or that human activity is driving it. For purposes of this motion, those facts are undisputed.”

And Aikens added: “Federal courts too often have been cautious and overly deferential in the arena of environmental law and the world has suffered for it.”

Mary Wood, a University of Oregon environmental law professor who pioneered the concept that the atmosphere should be treated as part of the public trust, calls the lawsuit “the biggest case on the planet.”

“This claim challenges the government’s entire fossil-fuel philosophy. The whole thing,” Wood says. “The scientists, on the other hand, are saying if we continue on our path without drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, we are going to leave a barren planet that will not support broad human survival. You could not get claims more grave than that.”

Two Administrations (and Industry) Respond

The lawsuit originally was filed against the Obama administration, which sought to have the case dismissed because the courts are “ill-suited” to oversee “a phenomenon that spans the globe,” according to court papers.

“Climate change is a very serious problem,” Sean Duffy, a Justice Department lawyer told the court last September. “We do not question the science. Climate change threatens our environment and our ecosystems. It alters our climate systems and it will only worsen over time. It is the result of man-made emissions. Now where (the parties) disagree is as to who determines how to address climate change in the first instance. Our position is that Congress and the Executive Branch should address climate change in the first instance and should do so by coordinating with other nations.”

Several groups representing the fossil-fuel industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, joined the lawsuit as intervenors, but disagreed “to the extent of climate change, to the emissions that cause it, and to other scientific principles,” Quin Sorenson, a lawyer representing the industry, argued in court.

The case could prove even more consequential with the change of administration because of President Trump’s efforts to roll back climate regulations put in place by his predecessor. Last week, the Trump administration shifted course on the case and asked that a federal appeals court review Judge Aiken’s decision to proceed to trial.

“Whatever happens next, this is a case to watch,” says Michael Burger, a Columbia University law professor and specialist in climate law. “It’s out there, ahead of the curve. And given the change in administration and President Trump’s views on climate change, this may be a potential hook to keep things moving along the climate change front. It may be the opening salvo in what will be an increasing number of lawsuits that take a rights-based approach to climate change in the United States.”

Building on History

In challenging the government’s role in climate change on constitutional grounds Julia Olson, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, harkens to the realm of historic Supreme Court cases that established new constitutional protections in situations when Congress failed to act. Those cases include the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned segregation in public schools and the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage.

The climate change lawsuit makes essentially a straightforward request. It asks a federal judge to order the government to write a recovery plan to reduce carbon emissions to 350 parts per million by 2100 (down from 400 parts per million) and stabilize the climate system.

The courts are needed to step in, Olson argued, because the government has not—despite knowing for more than 50 years that the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming.

Olson first tuned in to the climate change threat when, eight months pregnant with her youngest child, she watched An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar-winning climate change documentary at her local moviehouse.

“There is something about carrying life inside your body that is transformative and gives you a different kind of perspective on the world,” she says.

She founded Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit with a mission to protect children from climate change, and now serves as executive director. The trust is assisting in the case. Olson has also filed climate change lawsuits in each of the 50 states, which are proceeding separately. She has won cases in Washington, Massachusetts, and New Mexico.

Similar lawsuits, brought by other lawyers, are playing out in other nations, including Belgium and New Zealand, and have been won in Pakistan, Austria and South Africa. Last year, a Dutch court ordered the government to reduce carbon emissions by a quarter within the next five years.

Olson’s clients in the federal suit range in age from nine to 20. They are media savvy environmental activists who understand the power of connecting the future effects of climate change to the people who will have to live with them.

Kiran Oommen, 19, a student at Seattle University, says he joined the lawsuit because it gives voice to his generation.

“We have little or no representation in the government, yet the effects of climate change will affect us more than anyone else,” he says. “This is a way we can speak for ourselves and stand up for our future.”

Aji Piper, 16, is a high school student in Seattle who plants trees around the city and is an avid letter-writer to the state’s polluting industries. He adds: “Once you start involving children, people start listening more. My role in the case is to sit there in court.”

The climate kids, as the group is known, also are living the full menu of drought, deluge, heat, and extreme weather events that are rapidly becoming the unnerving norm. Not only has sea-level rise killed any long-term future Levi Draheim might have envisioned on Florida’s Space Coast, but he has to cope with toxic algae blooms like the outbreak that befouled beaches last July and monster storms, such as Hurricane Matthew, which barreled up the Florida coast last October and eroded away much of the sand on his beach.

Journey Zephier, 16, lives in Kauai, Hawaii, where ocean acidification is killing coral reefs and coastal fisheries. Miko Vergun, 16, who lives in the Portland, Oregon, suburb of Beaverton, fears she may never be able to visit her native Marshall Islands in the remote Pacific Ocean before they disappear beneath the swells. Tidal flooding, she says in court papers, is so frequent now that a fifth of the population has already moved away.

Last August, Jayden Foytlin, 14, awoke one morning to flood waters seeping into her bedroom in Rayne, Louisiana, as a rainstorm that lasted two weeks flooded more than 60,000 homes and killed 13 people. Foytlin’s home was soon awash in sewage. The Foytlins do not live in the flood plain, yet the raging waters destroyed their home and all of their belongings.

“This flood has been called a thousand-year event,” Foytlin told the court. “Yet within the last two years, I have read about eight ‘500-year’ events. In less than two years, there have been nine flood events that are not even supposed to happen in my lifetime. My family and I feel very vulnerable.”

Winning the War?

Despite winning a trial, prevailing ultimately remains an uphill climb. Columbia’s Burger says Judge Aiken’s unprecedented order that the case go to trial “is a great opinion for environmental law.”

But, he warns: “As it moves up on appeal and ultimately to the Supreme Court, the chances get less and less that that opinion survives in its current form.”

To date, courts have never recognized a constitutional right to even a natural environment free of pollutants, let alone to a stable climate.

After Judge Aiken ruled, proponents urged Obama to settle the case before Trump took office. Obama declined. The government also declined to ask for an appellate review of her order; government lawyers instead proceeded toward trial. Seven days before Trump was sworn in as president, government lawyers added a routine brief to the court file that may complicate the Trump administration’s effort to argue the science and halt the trial.

In the brief, government lawyers conceded nearly every point on which the plaintiffs’ case against the government was constructed. These admissions include the government’s role in promoting the development of fossil fuels and its belief that greenhouse gases are at “unprecedentedly high levels compared to the past 800,000 years ... and pose risks to human health and welfare.”

The government went so far as to point out where the plaintiffs had understated the evidence against the government in court papers. They then corrected the figures, raising them upwards.

“They recognized the importance of this case and tried to make sure when the Obama administration left, that the government’s position was clear and the court shouldn’t spend time in trial worrying about facts that should not be contested,” says Phil Gregory, the plaintiffs’ co-counsel.

The Trump Team Changes Tack

Now, the Trump administration appears to have reversed course. Last week, government lawyers asked Judge Aiken to grant their request that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals review her order. Halting the trial, the lawyers wrote, could avoid litigation that “is unprecedented in its scope, in its potential to be protracted, expensive and disruptive to the continuing operation of the United States Government.”

The appellate review is unlikely to be granted, because the decision is up to Judge Aiken, the judge who ordered the trial to proceed. In common practice, appeals courts decline to consider appeals until a trial concludes.

In a separate motion, government lawyers are also fighting a request by the youth’s lawyers that the Justice Department preserve all documents relevant to the lawsuit, including information on climate change, energy, and emissions.

Even if a review is granted, it may be difficult for the Trump administration to reverse the government’s statements and acknowledgements about climate change that are already part of the record. Still, the new administration’s position on the subject is becoming increasingly clear. Two days after the government’s motions were filed, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt swept aside established science on the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming and declared that “carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

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