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Any time someone brings up a wrestler’s legitimate sports background: “Okay, Sooner.”

A cop in my town went viral in Tennessee because he posted a Facebook video detailing why he’s quitting the force at the end of the month. No, it’s not because Black Lives Matter or anything like that. It’s because he fears retaliation from people he has arrested, is tired of his brothers and sisters in the force being murdered “because of the uniform they’re wearing”, and because of the way cops are being treated right now. It’s a big ol’ sob story copaganda thing. The thing that stood out to me is the cognitive dissonance to state “It’s an eerie feeling that you go anywhere and you feel like there’s a person following you.” Then he talks about how being married to a cop is one of the hardest jobs in the world because they might not even come home. You mean, like what black people face every day? You wear a uniform you can take off - they can’t shed their skin. This dude can get fucked, for real.

God damn it. Put a Spoiler on all NSFW links people. Jesus. ?

Standing offer to anyone in Texas: y'all get arrested, you call me and I'll take care of it if you trade me wrestling tapes.

Here is their 'brutal' kick exchange at least

So would Wilde and Mendoza be known as Santos' Little Helpers?

Giving up is a good way of honoring that flag.

Vicious and Delicious were the shit.

I think a reasonable reform that can be done is to abolish asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft for the police, and that money that they steal is often used to buy ridiculous military equipment for police use. And to defend yourself against asset forfeiture is extraordinarily difficult and specialized. Oh, and there's no exclusionary rule in asset forfeiture, so the cops can literally do an illegal search that would get shut down and does get shut down in criminal court and still be justified in stealing the money. It's insanity. And I know defund the police is popular, but I think "Disarm the Police" actually makes more sense. No more tanks and machine guns for cops!

This is long but a must read.

I am an HU alumnus and I slept in a bathtub in a hotel room during the first night of the Greekfest riots of '88 where Va Beach cops decided that using tear gas on black kids would be preferable to just letting them party like white kids at Daytona Beach did, so I know they can't be trusted. And just when I believe I am satisfied with my stance, I think about my kid brother huddled under the desk in his office with his students while Seung Hui Cho was gunning people down in the hallway no more than 200 feet from where they were bunkered in and wondered if tactically armed police ready to respond to the shooter would've made a difference. One less dead person is better than one more grave to dig. It's a really hard call.

I know you weren’t trying to justify its general use, and I agree that any kind of police department is going to require some kind of tactical arsenal. The difference between that and a free-for-all arms race rationalized by real and imagined threats that only benefits BAE Systems and Raytheon executives is my concern. And since the reasoning behind it often ventures into specious dog whistle territory and not the pragmatic position you have on it, I have a hard time believing they can be trusted with the equipment.

Should have just had Ford run in and beat on them both while they were lying there waiting for Nyla to climb the ropes. That would have looked worlds better.

Enjoyed the Blood Orange segment. Quen selling while getting his shit in even to his own detriment was really good stuff. Best he's looked yet, even if it wasn't near in quality to the Bucks upset, it showed me more from him than that tag match did. He CAN work a wrestling match with a story and selling. That corkscrew DDT thing was dope. Cody resorting to working a body part, including a pre-existing injury, is a good way of putting over the kids by selling his desperation AND PLANTING THE FUCKING SEEDS for a Cody heel turn. Very much the "just a show" it seemed to be on paper but it did well to give some lower card guys time and personality. These are important but I do wish they threw us something a bit more. Ultimately though, I'd rather them be cautious than kill off important matches.

I don't know what the fuck you do but whatever that Stray world is I wanna be in it.

I agree to a certain extent, but that's not really what I am talking about. The proliferation of hardcore guns amongst private citizens in general has caused police forces to arm themselves in kind. No normal beat cop in Vegas would've had the firepower to deal with that bumper stock shooter a while ago and every second he's waiting for back-up, people on the street are getting massacred. He's got to go in with what he has so he doesn't look like that cowardly sheriff in Florida, even if what he packing cannot match up with what the shooter has. Incidents like this are rare but they are costly enough to cause police to think that prepping for the Gunfight at the OK Corral for every call for service is a necessity.

These aren’t the people they’re arming themselves to take on. The overlap in the Venn diagram between them and the racist loose cannon militia guys who are itching to murder someone makes an almost perfect circle. We'd need to dismantle the entire system and create actual public safety programs or else it’s always going to be packed with cruel reactionaries who think that they’re an occupying army.

Thoughts on the first half of the show (trying to watch the rest later!) Really good tag match between FTR and B&B. Best I've seen B&B look so far. While I liked Jericho on commentary with Tony a few weeks back, I don't think he worked that well in a four-man booth. Just too much of him stepping on everyone else to get his shit in, and just YELLING to damn much. I enjoyed the women's match except for the legdrop spot, which took too long to set up and made the babyfaces look like morons who couldn't figure out how to get off the ropes. Funny how a beltshot finish can look so great when you rarely do it. I really did not want to harp on Ross this week but god damn. Someone quite obviously told JR to stop noting women's size and instead to use the word "strong" instead of "big" or "built like a linebacker." There was a point where Statlander did a bodypress and Ross noted how she was a "BIG WOWMAN" and then quickly corrected it to "STRONG WOWMAN." Later, she did a moonsault and you could hear the gears turning as he did his internal find and replace, noting how that was an impressive move for such a STRONG WOWMAN, which makes zero sense. "Big" makes sense in that case but he's clearly been told to substitute it. He's working on it but couldn't help noting that Statlander is "pushing a buck seventy five." God damn JR. And that's not even factual, as it's obvious she's losing weight. I liked the six man for what it was, clearly just a quick match to set up an angle. Nice, brutal beating by The Inner Circle.

I beat the story mode of SoR4 yesterday, and am pretty pleased with myself.

A very solid show. FTR vs. Butcher / Blade was weird as both teams were teetering between tweener and heel. It was cool to see them finish off B&B with the Brainbuster's spike piledriver while the Brainbusters were out in the audience. Ladies tag was perfectly fine and it was obviously there to give Penelope Ford some ring time since she is as green as grass. Nyla Rose is fucking awesome. What is the best way to get me to love workers I absolutely hate? Give Kip Sabian and Jimmy Havoc a Chikara sounding tag-team name like the SUPERBAD DEATH SQUAD~! Orange Cassidy bled buckets, so I am good with the finish of the six man tag. I have been hit in the back with a bag of Clementines before and that shit hurt. I am not sure if I'd have signed up to get brained with a gigantic sack of oranges. You may as well have hit Cassidy with a pillow case stuffed with doorknobs. Not safe. Poor Sammy. Even a high profile win over Colt Cabana is just a means to tease Colt joining Dark Order. And after that, the man can't even celebrate without Matt fucking Hardy getting in his business. I am good with Moxley and Cage paying tribute to the parking lot brawl between Jerry Lawler and Eddie Gilbert. I hate the look of the TNT belt, but as long as Cody is going to use it to get guys like Jungle Boy and Marq Quen over with the audience, I can accept it. And yeah. Cody = Ring Psychology. Oh, so you think you have a speed advantage, Marq Quen? If so, then I'll just do my best to re-injure the ankle you kayfabe injured last week! One day, someone might remember that Cody was only barred from challenging for the AEW title as long as Jericho was holding the title... which he isn't anymore.

So IWTV is worth checking out tonight. The mixtape for BLM is a good mix of black wrestlers with most I never saw before. And they're trying to get more eyes on the live stream as that somehow helps with the donations they're doing.

All I know if you play as a kitty with a cyberpunk backpack and that is all I need to know.

The thing is by now, everyone has had time to build a case on Calvillo. Plus, when she stepped up in competition at 115, she certainly wasn't as dominant. She's not fighting Amanda Cooper anymore, who was a decent striker but pretty bad on the ground. Flyweight isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but Jessica Eye is probably the best gatekeeper the division has right now. She's basically what Yushin Okami was for five years at middleweight: Not remotely close to a match for the champion, but super tough for almost everyone else. For what Eye lacks in technique, she makes up with dogged determination. If the read on Calvillo is that she is a front runner, Eye can just try to out work her.

When I heard its name I was immediately ? Just call it a fucking bat please.

As far as Gone With The Wind goes, it really needs a disclaimer about how historically inaccurate it was, because there are, to this day, millions of people who think that's what race relations were "really like" back then.

Yes, to clarify, I meant Turner Broadcasting. Not Ted personally. And yeah, think of it as the difference between a television show produced by a network and a show independently produced by a production company that then sells it to a network. Although like Mister TV pointed out, it’s really one large umbrella and it’s just about how the money is allocated. The benefit to the execs at Turner Broadcasting with Thunder is that they didn't have to report the costs under their part of the umbrella (WCW did) but they still get the advertising revenue. The important thing is that it’s instructive that those WCW figures don’t really tell the entire story and there’s context to why their fortunes seemed to have shifted dramatically in a year’s time.

Given he died 6 years ago - probably not

I don't think Ted Turner personally paid for the production, most likely the cost of Nitro's production was covered by Turner Broadcasting's budget while Thunder and the other shows were covered by WCW's budget. Even though everything is "owned" by the same company they're set-up in ultra convoluted ways for ultra convoluted reasons.

They're really starting to get on a roll. Solid and entertaining show. Lionheart Chris Jericho on commentary makes everything that much better. FTR-B&B made for a nice debut for Harwood/Wheeler. Nice touch with the legends taking notes. So much better than regular crowd shots. La la loved the Power and Glory Powerplex - tho the splash looked a bit awkward and painful. Shatter Machine didn't quite hit the mark either, but they finished strong with the stuff piledriver. As much as I dig them (moreso Butcher), I have no issue with where the Butcher/Blade are at. They have good presence, but they still have some kinks to work out. At some point they'll get themselves a manager who'll guide them, if not to the top, onto a winning streak. Post match was alright, but r the Bucks going heel? I'm pretty new to FTR other than a trio of their classic NXT bouts. I might be jumping the shark a little, but I feel like these guys could not only have some great matches but also be legitimate big draws. Statlander/Shida-Nyla/Ford was fine. That double knee was an impressive clip, but the set-up of this move of having somebody stay draped in position makes no sense. Quick fix here, have Ford hold them there. But that's not happening from the inexperienced Penelope. I like Ford, but she's nowhere near ready to be pushed. Nyla on the otherhand is improving all the time, and I think it's a bit overlooked. I was preparing to FFWD some of this, but Jericho on commentary kept me locked. The Darby-Hawk piece was fine, but could have used a tighter edit. Baker video was a bit redundant. Besties-IC was also good. I dug it, but would have prefered the OC bit where he looks to match power with the bigger man (see his indie tag bout against Scott Steiner) rather than the simple hands up to the pockets bit. That's not so much a complaint as OC is money and continues to shine. The post match was good too, but like a lot of things on the show (OC in general) reminds me of the obvious - how much better wrestling is with a hot crowd. They really need to teach Schiavone how much more effective the visuals are without his overselling. 'Blood Oranges' did you get that? OC-Jericho has the makings of something special. Sammy-Colt had nice flow and action. The overbooked post match worked just fine. Loved seeing Uno and Grayson back! I hope this indicates a loosening of travel restrictions that brings us the Death Triangle back to Dynamite soon. Janela segment... I agree. I'm also really badly wanting to see Janela play his natural role as a heel. And in a Freebird situation as a manager/wrestler. Cage/Taz-Mox segment was solid. Quen-Cody was fun. Told a good story. Quen got reeled in a little and looked tighter than the often sloppy PP tag matches. Cody's starting this silver belt run beautifully. I don't see a Cody heel turn so imminently. He's working the tweener (as far as in ring) very well. I think ppl sometimes forget what an incredible babyface promo he is. Yeah, eventually he's gonna be a heel, but a turn now would be completely unnecessary. This is the most I've looked forward to a Hager match. To be honest, he's been slowly winning me over. Ha, I think it was the poem at the pep rally that really elevated him. This show over the past couple weeks, even without a substantial crowd, is starting to feel like what they so nicely had going pre-pandemic. Lots of reason to care about things. It's really a simple thing, but I just like that they're building to and announcing the matches for the next week and the weeks to come. It makes the show feel like there's some forward motion and reason.

My guess is he was planning to retire anyway, but now this lets him shift the narrative from "so-so race car driver retires" to "TRUE PATRIOT CHOOSES VALUES OVER CAREER~!" Maybe soak the rubes for some cash on the way out too.

THIS RIGHT HERE. I got pulled over making a left on green a few months ago and the cop told me it was red. It's a turn I make every singe weekday so I knew it was green. Even though I argued with him (THAT is white privilege -- I didn't get shot or arrested for arguing), he didn't give me a ticket. Quite obviously, he was just on a fishing expedition. I can't even remember the last time I was pulled over for something even approaching justified. Twice I've been pulled over for speeding on 4-5 lane roads with nobody else on the road, once at 9-10 at night, once at 5 in the morning. Like who the fuck was I endangering? When I went to traffic court, I was really struck by the militarization of police. Every cop who came in was bald or sporting a high and tight, had a very obvious and blocky semiautomatic (Glock?), wore their black vest on the outside with more pouches than a Rob Liefeld comic, combat boots, the whole deal. How are you supposed to gain trust instead of fear when you look like an occupying force? When did every cop, even traffic cops, start dressing like the SWAT team? When I was a kid, the cops literally walked a beat in my neighborhood (East Baltimore). They wore regular pants, cop hat, white button up shirt with a discreet white vest under it, and a more low profile revolver. They talked to people in the neighborhood. You knew them and they knew you. Not anymore. The whole role has changed.

Space Mountain doesn't use anything other than futuristic stuff. It's SPLASH Mountain that uses Song of the South stuff (including being built around Brer Rabbit to begin with). I mean, if you're gonna go after stuff that has bad depictions, we're gonna be here awhile (pretty much EVERYTHING before oh, today).

Tony Khan on here 12 years ago.

While I enjoyed the segment overall, Tony's repeated insistence that they were blood oranges got me to chuckle a lot.

Also worth mentioning that he has popped up on Kana's youtube channel a couple of times. Even cooked takoyaki for her.

This is the first time I've watched AEW, this shit is on TSN so why not. I made notes throughout the evening. Oh god it's 2020 and I'm watching wrestling again. Butcher/Blade vs FTR I didn't see a face team out here, which was weird. Other than that the match was fine. Everything was executed well. I don't really think it needed this many near falls but it's not like they did anything too crazy. Lots of good double team moves. Announcers killed the best false finish with the old chestnut "this could be it", thanks for that. Post match stuff just seemed like a bunch of heels all acting like assholes to each other to me. Again, I'm a little confused by that. I've never seen Butcher/Blade, they have a cool look. Overall this was a good segment. I kinda missed this interview segment with Dustin. Didn't catch enough of it to comment. Rose/Ford vs Statlander/Shida Penelope Ford and Kip Sabin look like inseufferable douchebags, I love this entrance. I love Penelope Ford's forearm smashes a lot less. I didn't like the timing of the commercial break in the middle of your monster heel actually doing moves and not just sitting in a rest hold. Ford takes a sweet bump off a missile dropkick. That Nyla Rose move with the kneedrop on the ropes is wild, I've never seen anyone do that before. The end stretch was weird. The faces do the old "grab the leg from out of the ring" trick, which is good because they are faces. Then the heels do the same thing which is bad because they are heels. Then your champ does a job. Okay. The work was mostly fine here for execution but I didn't like the way this match was laid out, at all. It looked more like a move showcase than a match with much story, and I'm iffy on the finish which was the only part of the match that really told any story. Britt Baker is Karen, The Wrestler right? Is everyone in this company a heel? This was a good short package at selling what her character is about. I have no clue who anyone is in this Inner Circle vs Orange Cassidy and Best Friends match. At least the guy that came out in the Canadian tuxedo is selling something when he gets beat up on the ramp. The match is just filler to get to the angle. This felt like every indie midcard "do stuff" match ever. I don't care about this. People learned how to sell in the post-match, which was better than the actual match, but didn't fit when you put the two together at all. They could have accomplished exactly the same outcome with a run in on a promo, the match added nothing to this. Anyone who shows fear of Billy Gunn is banished from wrestling. I don't make the rules, I merely enforce them. Sammy Guevara vs Colt Cabana I didn't take a lot of notes on this but thought it was fine. I was actually watching the match instead of typing and deleting shit about people doing bad indie wrestling like I did for the last match, so this was a definite improvement. I've never seen Guevara before but he seems eminently punchable, which is a good quality in a heel wrestler. Colt Cabana is, indeed, still Colt Cabana. After the match some white guys into Warhammer 40K came out and helped Colt Cabana. Matt Hardy is here to talk about RESPECT. I looked up Guevara and he's 26, but he looks younger. He plays young punk pretty well. Hardy warns him to get away from Jericho. Matt Hardy is changing gimmicks mid-segment? This is very fucking weird without context. I didn't hate this. Overall the match and promo together were a good segment. I want to see where this goes. This Joey Janella segment committed one of my big peeves. The whole show is shot like "a wrestling show" but then this is shot like "a movie" for no obvious reason. Lucha Underground made this work by sticking to a consistent tone where every out of ring segment is a movie, you can't just do this shit because it looks cool. A lot of my problems with this show so far are production/agent stuff and not wrestler stuff. Jon Moxley is speaking. Taz is speaking. Brian Cage is clubbering. A red car does more selling than any of the guys in that six-man. This was a good old fashioned wrestling show segment. Marq Queen vs Cody for A Presigious Wrestling Championship The TNT belt looks like shit. I liked most of the actual match telling a story of the wild high flyer taking batshit crazy risks to try and wear out a bigger, more techincal guy. Honestly this kind of felt structured like what you'd want out of an earlier career Sabu match if Sabu wasn't the sloppiest fuck of all-time. Cody doesn't really control much of the match, instead picking shots here and there, letting Marq Queen highlight all the crazy shit he does. It worked pretty well. There was never any doubt Cody was going over but Marq got to showcase himself. The post-match brawl actually looked chaotic enough to be a proper one. There wasn't a lot of clean, obvious setups once The Shit starts going down, which is what you want. A bunch of referees broke this up but were nowhere to be seen when Jericho needed to get his shit in earlier. This is me yelling about production/agent shit and consistency again. Overall nothing on the show blew me away but I had a good time. It was 2 hours of pro wrestling I don't regret. For a show that was clearly "TV setting up a bigger, more important show later" I think it was alright.

I'm lily-white in lily whiteland and every cop who's ever pulled me over has done it without cause and/or been a total fucking dickhead who just outright lied to me several times. Only had one speeding ticket I deserved, the other 4 or so times were just random as hell because my car was there situations. Like, headlight goes out while at work(worked closing shift at a video store), cop pulls me over immediately after I drop a co-worker off. You saw people driving around with one headlight all the time back then. Acts like I should have gotten a new one from an auto parts store at 2 am somehow. The last time I got pulled over the cop lied to me about 5 times which I won't forget since I'm always sober and don't like being asked if I had been drinking by someone looking for a collar. When you don't even get a ticket or a warning, you know there was an ulterior motive to pulling you over. We are the land of drunken idiots after all. If I wasn't a white guy, with my views on cops and short temper(back then), I'd probably have been thrown in jail even if I didn't do anything. Disorderly conduct! Etc. I fear for my black relatives like crazy when they get older. The racial injustice and disparity has been pissing me off as long as I've been aware of it in my life, probably back to Rodney King when I was about 9 or 10, but now I don't know what I'd do if I was their parents being even more aware of how shitty things are than ever. All I can say is, never trust a cop even if you're the victim in a situation and all they do is lie, constantly. To anyone on here who has had to deal with this shit all your life just because of being born, I have no idea how you can deal with it. I'm rambling, but my point is made, I hope. I'll always have the backs of anyone who needs it if it comes down to it. I hope this shit changes in my lifetime.

My dad was an assistant DA for 30 years, for about 20 of those he was the chief trial attorney. He prosecuted everything from minor assaults to capital murder and worked with the police daily. When I was about 12 he sat me down and talked to me about how to deal with the police. You know what he told me? Don't trust the cops. Some might be good people and some might be bad, but you should never assume they're on your side or are trying to help you. Be respectful and polite so you don't give them any excuses, but don't say a thing without a lawyer or let them search anything without a warrant. This was to a tiny, non-threatening white kid who shared a very distinctive last name with someone all the cops knew. My older brother, who is black, got a very different and even more intense talk. I've got some complicated feelings now about my dad's career (as does he) but he had very few illusions about who he was working with.

When I was 17 I got pulled over in a small town that is surrounded by Austin but technically separate. It's wealthy and at least back then was whiter than white. I was passing through late at night on my way to drop my girlfriend off, and got caught maybe 10 miles over the speed limit. The cop was, and I'm being generous here, an idiot. Tried to tell me I didn't have a driver's license because I had a dual motorcycle/driver's license. After about 30 minutes of bullshit he gave up, ticketed me for speeding, and pissed off. When I got back in the truck, my girlfriend's first words were something like "Damn, I though you two were gonna get in a fight". Apparently I must've been pretty aggressive in my arguments, probably stupidly so. I've thought about that night a lot the last two weeks, and how it might've gone differently if I hadn't been the stereotypical all American white kid with a blonde girl in the passenger seat. Now I've got a five year old son who is going to need the Hispanic version of talk at some point, probably with the additional "you're giant, and people are afraid of folks your size" bit. I'll do part of it, but as my wife pointed out last night some of it needs to come from somebody has experienced the things I never will.

Well, that is an interesting braintrust, whatever happens. Potentially, they could be to shoot style what DDT is to comedy, and BJW is to deathmatch wrestling, mixing a more stylized variant with relatively conventional pro wrestling. Or they could go all the way with their niche. Either way, at least it's an identity. Wrestle-1 also always did produce good youtube content, which made them very easy to legally follow. They should bring along whomever was behind that work. It's also vaguely relevant now, so I'll post this, which rules.

In my area, a 60 year old white guy attacked some teenagers who were posting flyers. I'm glad they got him. Old white guys are going nuts right now (full disclosure, I'm a middle aged white guy). I saw a story on the news last night praising a black cop in DC for conducting a class on how young black men should act when stopped by police. Rule 1 was "do not escalate." I understand the practicality of it but this just makes me sick. It's like holding a class for women in bad relationships to teach them how not to get hit. "Rule 1: make sure dinner is on the table and don't talk back." How about teaching the cops how not to be lunatics instead? Philando Castile didn't escalate. He literally told the cop "I have a licensed firearm in the car" and Barney Fife over there fucking executed him on the spot. Breonna Taylor didn't escalate. She was SLEEPING. Is this cop a racist who thinks African Americans by nature just don't know how to act right? Or does he understand that the cops are racist who see every black person as a threat but he's thrown up his hands, given up, and decided it's easier to teach blacks to lie down and take it instead of trying to change the culture? It's one or the other and it just fucking sucks that this cop has to teach people how to try to stay alive in a horrendously flawed system instead of working to change it.

My 15-year-old daughter organized a peaceful protest in the small, rich, conservative town she lives in with her mom. Apparently it went pretty well, with a few dozen other high school kids, but they got flipped off by a number of older white men. Pure fucking class, right there. Proud of my little badass

I dare someone tell them to get out of the street. Double dare, even.