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#'professor!! magneto just tried to blow up the white house it's all over the news!!!!'
thecomicsnexus · 5 years
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DAYS OF FUTURE PAST UNCANNY X-MEN #141-142 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 1981 BY CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOHN BYRNE, TERRY AUSTIN AND GLYNIS WEIN
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SYNOPSIS (FROM MARVEL DATABASE)
In the 21st Century, New York City had become a nightmarish environment run by mutant-discriminatory Sentinels. Kate Pryde a mutant slave, is out on what is supposed to be a medical run, when she is attacked by the Rogue Pack, human scavengers who hate mutants. She is rescued by Wolverine, who is now part of the Canadian resistance against the Sentinels. He has come to warn Kate that there are plans to launch a full scale nuclear assault on America if the Sentinels are not stopped. Understanding this, Kate hopes their gamble works and is given the last component of a device Kate has slowly been smuggling into the concentration camp she has spent most of her adult life.
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When she returns to the South Bronx facility where she lives, she makes it through a Sentinel security sweep and walks past the cemetery of dead heroes and mutants all slaughtered for trying to stop the Sentinel invasion. She meets up with her husband Colossus and the last surviving members of the X-Men: Storm, Rachel Summers, Franklin Richards, and Magneto, who is now crippled and relies on a wheelchair to get around. In their private quarters, the last of the X-Men put together the last component of a device that will jam the power dampeners that prevent them from using their powers. With her mutant abilities available to her, Rachel would then use her vast telepathic powers to send Kate's consciousness back in time.
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The date is October 30, 1980, and the X-Men are in yet another training session in the Danger Room. Their newest member Sprite walks in, unaware that the session is in full swing. Realizing the inexperienced X-Man is in the room, the other X-Men break their concentration to save Kitty from harm before Nightcrawler can teleport to the emergency shut-off switch. After, Kitty is scolded for entering the Danger Room when a training session was in progress. When Nightcrawler tries to lighten the mood, Kitty instinctively flinches in fear. When the X-Men go up to the control room to prepare for Kitty's first Danger Room session, Nightcrawler admits that seeing Kitty flinch like that hurts but he is confident that the girl will soon warm up to him.
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When Kitty's session begins, she concentrates enough to activate her phasing powers and walks through the obstacle course with her eyes closed. None of the traps that Xavier had set up to try and stop her from getting to the other side of the Danger Room seem to stop her, which causes the X-Men to burst with laughter at the fact that Kitty is easily walking through Xavier's obstacle course. However, when Kitty goes to exit the room she is struck by some strange force and collapses. When they rush her to the infirmary they scan her brain for a mental attack and find that her brain patterns have changed, having become more complex. When Kitty wakes up, she surprises Nightcrawler by hugging him and is happy to see him and the other X-Men alive.
Kitty, or Kate as she begins to refer to herself, shocks them all with this: She is really the mind of her older self from 30 years in the future. She explains that she has come back in time to prevent the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from murdering US Senator Robert Kelly, Professor Xavier, and Moira MacTaggert during a hearing on the potential dangers of mutants. Their murders will bring about a the apocalyptic future in which she lives in. Although the X-Men (except for Wolverine) are not so quick to fully believe this story, they decide to go and check on the Professor anyway. Aboard one of Warren Worthington's aircraft, they fly toward Washington DC. Along the way, Kate tells them how these assassinations would increase anti-mutant hysteria and by 1984, an anti-mutant President would be voted into the White House who would pass the Mutant Control Act. Soon, almost every mutant and super-human in North America would be wiped out by the Sentinels. The robots were meant to protect humanity, however, they would soon enslave the entire United States. She explains how her friends in the future had sent her mind back to her younger body, as she would have been the only one who hadn't been prepared with psychic defenses by Professor X at that point. She also tells them that the surviving X-Men in the future were also planning on shutting down the Sentinel's operation in North America in order to avoid nuclear war in case she failed her mission in the past.
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Back in the year 2013: Rachel, Franklin and Peter manage to escape from their concentration camp thanks to Magneto sacrificing his life so that they can escape. Carrying Kate's unconscious body, they meet up with Wolverine who leads them through the sewers in the hopes of reaching the Baxter Building, where the Sentinels have set up their primary operations since taking over America. As they move through the tunnels the Sentinels rip through the ceiling above to get them. Their first blast kills Franklin, incinerating his body. The remaining X-Men fight back, and despite their ages, manage to defeat all of the Sentinels facing them before continuing on their trek to the Fantastic Four's old headquarters.
Meanwhile, back in the present, at the Pentagon, Raven Darkhölme enters her private office and reverts back to her natural form -- that of Mystique, the mutant terrorist. She has gathered the mutants Destiny, Blob, Pyro and Avalanche into a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants for the purpose of assassinating Senator Kelly. When checking with Destiny's precognitive powers, Destiny informs her that some unknown factor makes the future hard for her to read. Despite this, and despite in fighting between Blob, Pyro and Avalanche, they move on to enact their plans.
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Later at the United States Senate, the hearing over mutants is in full order and Senator Kelly is questioning Moira MacTaggert when the X-Men arrive in their civilian guises. When the Professor telepathically asks them what's going on, Storm imparts the information that she gathered from Kate. Just then, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants smashes through the wall and before they can attack Kelly and the others, the X-Men change into their costumes and step in their way to stop them.
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In the present, the X-Men have appeared at the US Senate to stop the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from assassinating Senator Robert Kelly. They have been led there by the adult mind of Kate Pryde who's mind has been projected into the body of her young self from 30 years in the future. While in this same future where the assassination of Kelly would lead to the passage of the Mutant Registration Act and the enslavement of all mutants, the last surviving X-Men head toward the Baxter Building to stop their Sentinel overlords before the rest of the world attempts to nuke America.
1980: The Brotherhood easily knocks past the security and attempts to attack Senator Kelly, but the X-Men get in their way. As the two groups battle each other, Wolverine attempts to gut Pyro with his claws, but is stopped by Storm. As the battle rages, a security guard leads Professor Xavier and Moira MacTaggert away, only to gas them as she is really Mystique in disguise. With Xavier and MacTaggert as hostages, Mystique checks what their future is like with Destiny. Destiny still cannot see past the interference that prevents her from seeing the course history is destined to take. Destiny is unaware that it is the adult mind of Kate Pryde existing in the body of her younger self that is causing the interference.
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2013: The last X-Men arrive just outside the Baxter Building, former headquarters to the Fantastic Four and now the primary nerve center of the Sentinel forces that rule America. With Rachel staying behind to watch over Kate's unconscious body, Storm, Colossus and Wolverine go into action. Storm easily disables the Sentinel that is guarding the door, granting the team access to the building. Once inside, Wolverine uses one of the Fantastic Four's old signal belts to gain access to the private elevator that would lead them up to the FF's old headquarters. As they ride the elevator up, they prepare to face the greatest challenge of their lives.
1980: As the battle continues to rage, Storm gets down on herself for not being as good a leader as Cyclops when she failed to see that battling indoors is not helping their fight. Using her mutant powers, Storm creates a wind that blows the Brotherhood and X-Men outside of the Senate building where their battle continues. The battle becomes more complicated with the arrival of the National Guard with some tanks and soldiers which the Brotherhood easily exploit. When soldier arrives with a flame thrower, Pyro uses his powers to turn it's flame into a giant fire monster that grabs hold of Wolverine. Storm manages to generate powerful enough wind to blast the flame monster apart before it can seriously harm him. When Wolverine is approached by who he thinks is Nightcrawler, another Nightcrawler lunges at the other and a fight ensues. Unable to tell them apart due to the damage done to his enhanced senses from being burned, Wolverine decides to dive into the middle of the fight with his claws. Storm stops him and manages to order him to put his claws away. Wolverine, hating to be ordered around, complies but warns Storm that the argument isn't over. They are soon attacked by Blob and Avalanche.
Wolverine and Colossus create a level which allows them to toss the Blob at Avalanche, while Storm creates a monsoon rain around Pyro making it impossible for him to use his flames. While the real Nightcrawler lands a blow on his doppleganger, forcing Mystique to revert to her normal form. When Nightcrawler notices a resemblance between the two of them, Mystique tells Nightcrawler to ask his adopted mother Margali Szardos about that next time he sees her. When Angel swoops in, it distracts Nightcrawler enough to allow Mystique to escape. Realizing that Kate and Destiny are unaccounted for, the X-Men rush back into the Senate building hoping that they aren't too late.
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2013: Exiting the elevator in the Baxter Building, the X-Men spot a Sentinel working at one of the main computers. Wolverine orders Colossus to toss a Fastball special. However as Wolverine is hurtled toward the Sentinel it detects his presence and incinerates him with a laser blast, leaving nothing but a charred Adamantium skeleton. Storm takes down the Sentinel with a lightning bolt, however more Sentinels enter the room. One impales Storm through the torso with a harpoon. This one is destroyed by Colossus, however he soon dies as well. While down on the streets below, Rachel Summers listens to her friends die and sheds tears hoping that Kate succeeds on her mission in the past.
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1980: Destiny has cornered Senator Kelly in an office within the Senate and is about to shoot him with a crossbow. She is unaware that Kate Pryde is in the room, and just before Destiny can fire the fatal, history making shot, Kate uses her phasing powers to pass through Destiny. This disorients her enough to make her shot just miss Kelly's head by inches. With history changed, Kate's mind is shot back into the future and the strain causes Kitty to pass out. Storm arrives shortly after and takes Kitty away while Destiny is taken into police custody. Later aboard Warren's jet as it heads back to the X-Men's headquarters, Professor X probes Kitty's mind and finds no trace of her future self. Further, young Kitty has no memory of the battle either. When Warren asks the Professor if they indeed managed to change the future, the Professor can only say that time will tell.
REVIEW
Just like the Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past had a big impact for the X-Men, in all its adaptations. Mutants from the future just started to appear with this story. Nothing will be the same for the X-men.
This is also a very interesting story that fits the post-apocalyptic theme of the eighties. And as usual, it’s man’s fault. Instead of using nuclear energy, Claremont and Byrne use the Sentinels. If you think about it, this is almost like the plot from Terminator. Before that movie came out.
My only problem with the issues is typos. Many of them. But for the rest, this is a must-read story for any X-Men fan. And the most interesting thing about it is that it came out of nowhere. Unlike other Claremont long plots.
I give this story a score of 10
43 notes · View notes
trendingnewsb · 6 years
Text
5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention
Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.
So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.
5
The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs
Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.
youtube
The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.
Read Next
Get Your Head In The Game With This Xbox Live Gold Offer
The article says that between 2007 and 2012, there was something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program running out of the Pentagon, where at least one employee had the X-Files theme as their ringtone and their co-workers hated them for it. Their task was to investigate mysterious aerial phenomena. While there’s a good chance they had a rubber stamp that read “It’s just another damn drone from Walmart” so they wouldn’t have to write it out all the time, the AATIP’s creator, former Senator Harry Reid, fought to secure the program’s findings, fearing that the United States would be helpless to defend itself from the technologies it discovered. That’s the kind of shit you say to justify keeping Magneto in a plastic cell underground.
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the AATIP, referenced “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” And most of the program’s $22 million budget over five years went to an aerospace technology company owned by a billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who 100 percent believes aliens have visited earth. And that brings us to the pant-shitting part:
“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”
Ah, OK. So. WHAT THE FUCK. Is it just a rash, or a headache, or are these people District 9-ing and morphing into a new species that should be shot in the head?
Live Science tried debunking some of the article’s claims by asking scientists and professors what they thought about it. Their grand conclusion is that there is no way an alloy could be unidentified. Thanks, guys. Excellent observation. There’s no way there are things out there that we don’t know! is some shit-ass expertise. They didn’t even try explaining the claim that the alloys are physically affecting people who interact with them. And it’s hard to blame them. If I think about it for a second, my brain goes to scary places that make me want to hide under a bed and cry.
The whole article makes it seem like there are a lot of high-ranking government officials who are certain aliens are real, that they have visited us, and we should probably fear what they might try to do to us. So on a day-to-day basis, you should feel a tinge of anxiety about your career, the well-being of your children, whether democracy will hold in America, and maybe also aliens with their poisonous ship junk.
4
A Man Spent Years Building His Own Submarine, Then Allegedly Used It To Brutally Murder A Journalist
Every once in a while, a sensational murder case — usually involving an attractive female victim — will take over the country for months. This case is weirder than every one of those combined, and nobody cared.
Peter Madsen had been building his own 55-foot submarine for years. We even wrote about his efforts back in 2010. Kim Wall was a freelance journalist who was just another in a long line to document Peter’s impressively productive waste of time. This sounds like the start of a quirky indie film.
But it’s fuckin’ not.
She set up an interview and two-hour test ride for August 10th, 2017. After the two hours were up, Wall’s boyfriend got suspicious that he hadn’t heard from her, so he called the police. Madsen was later rescued from his sinking submarine off the southern coast of Copenhagen — without Wall. Unless your passenger reveals their true kraken form, it’s weird to return to shore with fewer people than when you left. Madsen claimed that he dropped her off onshore hours earlier, which doesn’t quite align with the fact that her torso was found at sea days later.
At a pretrial hearing a couple of weeks later, Madsen testified that he buried Wall at sea after she was killed by a blow to the head from a 155-pound submarine hatch. Ah, the classic “She was murdered by the submarine, not me” defense. This did not hold up, as forensics found that her skull had no fractures and her throat had been either cut or strangled when she died. More of her body parts started washing up, and they concluded that her limbs had been forcibly removed with a saw and stuffed into plastic bags that were weighed down with metal pipes. She had also been stabbed 15 times.
Madsen’s trial is underway, and maybe it’s not getting any attention because everybody thinks they already know who did it? If so, doesn’t the fact that a man allegedly spent years building a murder submarine specifically so he could do this seem worthy of notice? What in the hell does it take to capture the national imagination these days?
3
There Is Now Software That Can Put Any Real Person Into Porn Videos, Including You Or Your Mom, Or Both
The future is NOW. Sadly, it’s only for creeps who want to jerk off to fake Scarlett Johansson porn. The technology that’s making it possible is called Deepfake. It’s an AI-driven software that can swap out a person’s face in video footage with someone else’s. Sometimes it’s convincing, other times it looks like their heads are painfully phasing in and out of reality.
That’s how you get Raiders Of The Lost Ark starring Nicolas Cage:
youtube
It’s also how you ruin the joke of an SNL sketch starring Nicolas Cage:
youtube
But it’s mostly for porn. And like all pursuits popular among sad lonely men, it was very popular on Reddit. Luckily, Reddit banned the Deepfakes subreddit not long after it was created — a bold moral stance for a site that lures you in with memes and then knocks you out with a one-two punch of white supremacy and misogyny. Bans on other big platforms like Discord, Twitter, and even PornHub soon followed, even though the underlying technology still exists for free on the internet.
What’s odd is that once it was banned across multiple sites, we reverted back to a pre-Deepfakes mindset, as if we don’t all live in the prologue of a new world where Donald Trump’s rumored pee tape might surface and the mere existence of Deepfakes would be enough for his supporters to call bullshit. We might one day look back at people on a subreddit putting Taylor Swift’s face on a porn star as innocent compared to a future in which a murderer whose face was clearly captured by security footage gets off scot-free because of the plausible deniability of Deepfakes. It’s a scary future where documented proof could be brushed away with a simple “That’s not me, that’s a fake — a deep fake” *winks at camera*.
Also, it means literally every woman who posts her face to the internet will wind up in a fake porn video / sex tape at some point. So there’s that, too.
2
A “Swatting” Prank Finally Got Someone Killed
You know what’s a real gut-busting joke that always leaves audiences rolling in the aisles? When SWAT teams charge into innocent people’s homes with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles drawn, intent on killing someone if it means stopping a hostage situation, all based on a tip obtained from a prank phone call. My sides! The sheer terror everyone involved must feel is making me pee a little!
If you don’t think it’s funny, then you’re not one of the many teenagers who’ve performed this “prank” because they’ve yet to develop a tangible fear of how utterly screwed their lives will be if the 9-1-1 call is traced back to them. The targets tend to be Twitch streamers, since a SWAT team’s entrance can turn an Overwatch stream into the drug raid scene from Goodfellas. Dozens of celebrities have also been swatted, like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. Many of these people were lucky to not have been killed. SWAT teams have a long, horrific history of killing innocent people and/or their dogs during raids, in case you needed a cartoonishly ghoulish detail to further turn your stomach.
In an era when the media will drum up a moral panic over everything from violent video games to eating Tide Pods, you’d think this swatting thing would have been the subject of several congressional hearings by now. Especially since in December 2017, a swatting prank ended with someone dead, like every human who’d heard of swatting knew would eventually happen. Some random guys had placed a bet on the outcome of a Call Of Duty: WWII multiplayer match. An argument broke out, and one of the participants decided to get his just desserts by having a SWAT team sent to another person’s house. You know, as one does. The target of the swatting gave a false address. It was the home of a guy named Andrew Finch.
The person who initiated the swatting hired an intermediary to do it for them, Tyler Barriss. He was essentially a swatting hitman with a reputation for calling in swats on behalf of people who don’t want to get caught doing it themselves. And his Twitter handle was “SWauTistic,” because he’s a professional who believes in discretion. Barriss called the Wichita police and reported that someone at Finch’s house had shot their own father in the head and was holding their mother hostage. When Finch answered the knock at his door, a Wichita SWAT officer immediately pulled the trigger. Finch was unarmed and nonviolent. His friends say he didn’t even play video games.
Barriss has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, giving false alarm, and interference with a law enforcement officer. Finch’s mother is suing the Wichita Police Department. And even with a cop’s itchy trigger finger, there’s no denying that if Barriss had instead called and asked if Fincher’s refrigerator was running, he would still be alive today.
Swatting has become a dangerous trend which, unlike the aforementioned Tide Pod eating, is actually happening and is actually harming people. California State Senator Ted Lieu, New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, and Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark have all proposed anti-swatting legislation — all three have been swatted in response.
1
A Scandal Involving Cops Forcing Nude Photos From A Teenage Boy Ended In Suicide
Before I get into it, just know this story deals with the sexual molestation of a minor. So it’s not going to be as rip-roaringly funny as swatting.
17-year-old Trey Sims sent a video of his penis to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In the state of Virginia, this paradoxically made him the creator and victim of child pornography. The detective assigned to the case, David E. Abbott, obtained a warrant to take pictures of Sims’ penis to match it with the penis in the video, as if the police have a dick pic database that analyzes head-to-balls distance and pubic hair density to find a perfect match. Of course, all of this is necessary, since it’s so difficult to identify a dick when it doesn’t have a tattoo or a peg leg. Why that warrant wasn’t contested from the start is a mystery.
Another mystery is why, at one point, Abbott decided to start taking pictures of Sims’ penis with his personal cellphone.
Detective Abbot deemed the pictures insufficient, because somehow Sims couldn’t get erect with cops recording him masturbating. Which they had asked him to do, you know, so the pics would match the ones he was accused of sending. Wait, who is this law supposed to protect, again? Anyway, Abbot asked for a second state-sponsored permission slip to photograph a teenager’s erect penis. Abbott also threatened to force feed Sims erectile dysfunction pills, because he was determined to get a picture of a kid’s erect penis come hell or high water, goddamn it.
It was granted, but then halted after Sims’ lawyers made a big deal about the first dick pic photo shoot in the media, claiming the police had infringed upon Sims’ Fourth Amendment rights. That’s the one that prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, in essence calling James Madison an idiot for not foreseeing the need to include a line about the sovereignty of teenage dicks in the Constitution.
Charges against Sims were eventually dropped after he served probation. And with that out of the way, it was time to sue Abbott. But the focal point of the lawsuit shifted from Abbott to Claiborne T. Richardson II, the guy who approved both warrants. This shift happened after Abbott shot himself in his goddamned front yard right before county police officers were going to arrest him on suspicion of molesting boys when he was a youth hockey coach. I just want to reiterate here that this story was barely a blip on the national media’s radar.
Sims’ lawsuit was thrown out when a judge said that Richardson and Abbott were immune, since the Fourth Amendment surprisingly makes no mention of cops taking pictures of a teen’s penis. Everyone up and down the chain kept coming up with creative interpretations of the law to protect a dead detective who killed himself to avoid charges of molesting a minor. The common argument was that Abbott was just following orders. But he was the one who asked for the warrant. Has your head exploded yet?
After four years of this shit, the Fourth Circuit Court sided with Sims, finally deciding that teenage penises are in fact covered by the Fourth Amendment. See? Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
Luis’ brain feels funny after he played with unknown alloys. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.
A previous version of the column stated that Andrew Finch was playing Call of Duty and had been directly involved in the online argument before he was swatted. That was incorrect. The text has been changed to reflect that.
Uhhh … have a stress ball or several.
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For more stories you should have heard about but probably didn’t, check out 29 Pieces Of Good News That Got Choked Out By Trump Stories and 7 Pieces Of Good News About Huge Stories (No One Told You).
Has anyone told you we’re on Facebook?
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-crazy-recent-news-stories-that-didnt-get-enough-attention/
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trendingnewsb · 6 years
Text
5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention
Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.
So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.
5
The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs
Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.
youtube
The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.
Read Next
Get Your Head In The Game With This Xbox Live Gold Offer
The article says that between 2007 and 2012, there was something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program running out of the Pentagon, where at least one employee had the X-Files theme as their ringtone and their co-workers hated them for it. Their task was to investigate mysterious aerial phenomena. While there’s a good chance they had a rubber stamp that read “It’s just another damn drone from Walmart” so they wouldn’t have to write it out all the time, the AATIP’s creator, former Senator Harry Reid, fought to secure the program’s findings, fearing that the United States would be helpless to defend itself from the technologies it discovered. That’s the kind of shit you say to justify keeping Magneto in a plastic cell underground.
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the AATIP, referenced “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” And most of the program’s $22 million budget over five years went to an aerospace technology company owned by a billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who 100 percent believes aliens have visited earth. And that brings us to the pant-shitting part:
“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”
Ah, OK. So. WHAT THE FUCK. Is it just a rash, or a headache, or are these people District 9-ing and morphing into a new species that should be shot in the head?
Live Science tried debunking some of the article’s claims by asking scientists and professors what they thought about it. Their grand conclusion is that there is no way an alloy could be unidentified. Thanks, guys. Excellent observation. There’s no way there are things out there that we don’t know! is some shit-ass expertise. They didn’t even try explaining the claim that the alloys are physically affecting people who interact with them. And it’s hard to blame them. If I think about it for a second, my brain goes to scary places that make me want to hide under a bed and cry.
The whole article makes it seem like there are a lot of high-ranking government officials who are certain aliens are real, that they have visited us, and we should probably fear what they might try to do to us. So on a day-to-day basis, you should feel a tinge of anxiety about your career, the well-being of your children, whether democracy will hold in America, and maybe also aliens with their poisonous ship junk.
4
A Man Spent Years Building His Own Submarine, Then Allegedly Used It To Brutally Murder A Journalist
Every once in a while, a sensational murder case — usually involving an attractive female victim — will take over the country for months. This case is weirder than every one of those combined, and nobody cared.
Peter Madsen had been building his own 55-foot submarine for years. We even wrote about his efforts back in 2010. Kim Wall was a freelance journalist who was just another in a long line to document Peter’s impressively productive waste of time. This sounds like the start of a quirky indie film.
But it’s fuckin’ not.
She set up an interview and two-hour test ride for August 10th, 2017. After the two hours were up, Wall’s boyfriend got suspicious that he hadn’t heard from her, so he called the police. Madsen was later rescued from his sinking submarine off the southern coast of Copenhagen — without Wall. Unless your passenger reveals their true kraken form, it’s weird to return to shore with fewer people than when you left. Madsen claimed that he dropped her off onshore hours earlier, which doesn’t quite align with the fact that her torso was found at sea days later.
At a pretrial hearing a couple of weeks later, Madsen testified that he buried Wall at sea after she was killed by a blow to the head from a 155-pound submarine hatch. Ah, the classic “She was murdered by the submarine, not me” defense. This did not hold up, as forensics found that her skull had no fractures and her throat had been either cut or strangled when she died. More of her body parts started washing up, and they concluded that her limbs had been forcibly removed with a saw and stuffed into plastic bags that were weighed down with metal pipes. She had also been stabbed 15 times.
Madsen’s trial is underway, and maybe it’s not getting any attention because everybody thinks they already know who did it? If so, doesn’t the fact that a man allegedly spent years building a murder submarine specifically so he could do this seem worthy of notice? What in the hell does it take to capture the national imagination these days?
3
There Is Now Software That Can Put Any Real Person Into Porn Videos, Including You Or Your Mom, Or Both
The future is NOW. Sadly, it’s only for creeps who want to jerk off to fake Scarlett Johansson porn. The technology that’s making it possible is called Deepfake. It’s an AI-driven software that can swap out a person’s face in video footage with someone else’s. Sometimes it’s convincing, other times it looks like their heads are painfully phasing in and out of reality.
That’s how you get Raiders Of The Lost Ark starring Nicolas Cage:
youtube
It’s also how you ruin the joke of an SNL sketch starring Nicolas Cage:
youtube
But it’s mostly for porn. And like all pursuits popular among sad lonely men, it was very popular on Reddit. Luckily, Reddit banned the Deepfakes subreddit not long after it was created — a bold moral stance for a site that lures you in with memes and then knocks you out with a one-two punch of white supremacy and misogyny. Bans on other big platforms like Discord, Twitter, and even PornHub soon followed, even though the underlying technology still exists for free on the internet.
What’s odd is that once it was banned across multiple sites, we reverted back to a pre-Deepfakes mindset, as if we don’t all live in the prologue of a new world where Donald Trump’s rumored pee tape might surface and the mere existence of Deepfakes would be enough for his supporters to call bullshit. We might one day look back at people on a subreddit putting Taylor Swift’s face on a porn star as innocent compared to a future in which a murderer whose face was clearly captured by security footage gets off scot-free because of the plausible deniability of Deepfakes. It’s a scary future where documented proof could be brushed away with a simple “That’s not me, that’s a fake — a deep fake” *winks at camera*.
Also, it means literally every woman who posts her face to the internet will wind up in a fake porn video / sex tape at some point. So there’s that, too.
2
A “Swatting” Prank Finally Got Someone Killed
You know what’s a real gut-busting joke that always leaves audiences rolling in the aisles? When SWAT teams charge into innocent people’s homes with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles drawn, intent on killing someone if it means stopping a hostage situation, all based on a tip obtained from a prank phone call. My sides! The sheer terror everyone involved must feel is making me pee a little!
If you don’t think it’s funny, then you’re not one of the many teenagers who’ve performed this “prank” because they’ve yet to develop a tangible fear of how utterly screwed their lives will be if the 9-1-1 call is traced back to them. The targets tend to be Twitch streamers, since a SWAT team’s entrance can turn an Overwatch stream into the drug raid scene from Goodfellas. Dozens of celebrities have also been swatted, like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. Many of these people were lucky to not have been killed. SWAT teams have a long, horrific history of killing innocent people and/or their dogs during raids, in case you needed a cartoonishly ghoulish detail to further turn your stomach.
In an era when the media will drum up a moral panic over everything from violent video games to eating Tide Pods, you’d think this swatting thing would have been the subject of several congressional hearings by now. Especially since in December 2017, a swatting prank ended with someone dead, like every human who’d heard of swatting knew would eventually happen. Some random guys had placed a bet on the outcome of a Call Of Duty: WWII multiplayer match. An argument broke out, and one of the participants decided to get his just desserts by having a SWAT team sent to another person’s house. You know, as one does. The target of the swatting gave a false address. It was the home of a guy named Andrew Finch.
The person who initiated the swatting hired an intermediary to do it for them, Tyler Barriss. He was essentially a swatting hitman with a reputation for calling in swats on behalf of people who don’t want to get caught doing it themselves. And his Twitter handle was “SWauTistic,” because he’s a professional who believes in discretion. Barriss called the Wichita police and reported that someone at Finch’s house had shot their own father in the head and was holding their mother hostage. When Finch answered the knock at his door, a Wichita SWAT officer immediately pulled the trigger. Finch was unarmed and nonviolent. His friends say he didn’t even play video games.
Barriss has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, giving false alarm, and interference with a law enforcement officer. Finch’s mother is suing the Wichita Police Department. And even with a cop’s itchy trigger finger, there’s no denying that if Barriss had instead called and asked if Fincher’s refrigerator was running, he would still be alive today.
Swatting has become a dangerous trend which, unlike the aforementioned Tide Pod eating, is actually happening and is actually harming people. California State Senator Ted Lieu, New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, and Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark have all proposed anti-swatting legislation — all three have been swatted in response.
1
A Scandal Involving Cops Forcing Nude Photos From A Teenage Boy Ended In Suicide
Before I get into it, just know this story deals with the sexual molestation of a minor. So it’s not going to be as rip-roaringly funny as swatting.
17-year-old Trey Sims sent a video of his penis to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In the state of Virginia, this paradoxically made him the creator and victim of child pornography. The detective assigned to the case, David E. Abbott, obtained a warrant to take pictures of Sims’ penis to match it with the penis in the video, as if the police have a dick pic database that analyzes head-to-balls distance and pubic hair density to find a perfect match. Of course, all of this is necessary, since it’s so difficult to identify a dick when it doesn’t have a tattoo or a peg leg. Why that warrant wasn’t contested from the start is a mystery.
Another mystery is why, at one point, Abbott decided to start taking pictures of Sims’ penis with his personal cellphone.
Detective Abbot deemed the pictures insufficient, because somehow Sims couldn’t get erect with cops recording him masturbating. Which they had asked him to do, you know, so the pics would match the ones he was accused of sending. Wait, who is this law supposed to protect, again? Anyway, Abbot asked for a second state-sponsored permission slip to photograph a teenager’s erect penis. Abbott also threatened to force feed Sims erectile dysfunction pills, because he was determined to get a picture of a kid’s erect penis come hell or high water, goddamn it.
It was granted, but then halted after Sims’ lawyers made a big deal about the first dick pic photo shoot in the media, claiming the police had infringed upon Sims’ Fourth Amendment rights. That’s the one that prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, in essence calling James Madison an idiot for not foreseeing the need to include a line about the sovereignty of teenage dicks in the Constitution.
Charges against Sims were eventually dropped after he served probation. And with that out of the way, it was time to sue Abbott. But the focal point of the lawsuit shifted from Abbott to Claiborne T. Richardson II, the guy who approved both warrants. This shift happened after Abbott shot himself in his goddamned front yard right before county police officers were going to arrest him on suspicion of molesting boys when he was a youth hockey coach. I just want to reiterate here that this story was barely a blip on the national media’s radar.
Sims’ lawsuit was thrown out when a judge said that Richardson and Abbott were immune, since the Fourth Amendment surprisingly makes no mention of cops taking pictures of a teen’s penis. Everyone up and down the chain kept coming up with creative interpretations of the law to protect a dead detective who killed himself to avoid charges of molesting a minor. The common argument was that Abbott was just following orders. But he was the one who asked for the warrant. Has your head exploded yet?
After four years of this shit, the Fourth Circuit Court sided with Sims, finally deciding that teenage penises are in fact covered by the Fourth Amendment. See? Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
Luis’ brain feels funny after he played with unknown alloys. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.
A previous version of the column stated that Andrew Finch was playing Call of Duty and had been directly involved in the online argument before he was swatted. That was incorrect. The text has been changed to reflect that.
Uhhh … have a stress ball or several.
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