The two actors were in town promoting their Mezcal brand “Dos Hombres” (Mezcal is an alcoholic beverage made from agave) and doing a bottle signing at a Total Wine & Spirits off of 75 hwy when they met TikTok user and Dallasite @Varietis1. After what appears to have been a short introduction Variestis apparently told them about his brother-in-law Aaron who has never seen the award-winning and critically acclaimed show.

Watch the Video here:

@varietis1

My brother in law hasn’t watched Breaking Bad…

♬ original sound – Varietis

The two actors talk to the camera as if they are talking to Aaron, the brother-in-law who has never seen Breaking Bad, and hilariously pester him asking “What are you in to?” and “Still watching what, anime?”.

The video exploded in popularity on TikTok and has racked up 5.3 million views so far.

User @Varietis1 also shared another video of the two men arriving for the signing event and showcasing the experience of meeting the two actors, which appears to have required camping out overnight.

@varietis1 We met @bryancranstonofficial and @aaronpaul at a @doshombres bottle signing in Dallas! #bryancranston #aaronpaul #walterwhite #jessiepinkman #breakingbad #doshombres #tequila #bettercallsaul ♬ original sound – Varietis

Featured photo a screenshot from the above embedded video

The post [Video] Bryan Cranston & Aaron Paul Send a TikTok to Someone Who Has Never Seen Breaking Bad After Meeting a Fan in a Dallas, TX Parking Lot appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Editor’s note: This is a dated video from 2015. It is being shared to show the foundation of the early beginnings of an American social movement which has extended to trying to abolish police departments and ‘cancel’ public figures, and likely has been part of the cause of riots across the nation. Versions of this video are currently going viral on TikTok and other platforms.

Back in 2015 there was a movement on the campus of the University of California Irvine to ban the American flag from flying. It was nearly successful.

A group of students under the guise of “inclusion” determined that the flag should be banned because it made some students feel uncomfortable or left out.

Documentary filmmaker and sometimes satirist Ami Horowitz was able to interview one of the student leaders of this movement, Matthew Guevara, who in the video is portrayed as the single student leading the movement. The original video only gained 59,033 views on YouTube when it was published, but has since been cropped and re-edited by various other outlets gaining likely hundreds of thousands of more views over the ensuring 7-year period.

Watch the Full Original Video Here:

This video and the small movement at UC Irvine are part of the very beginnings of the so called “inclusive” movement and the “cancel culture” movement. A movement which seeks to force gender pronouns on society as well as deems all Caucausian-Americans as racist simply for existing and which has seen countless intellectuals lose their positions for refusing to play along with the new rules it attempts to apply. It is for this reason, and the recent virality, we felt it was necessary to provide the video here.

In the video you can hear the disgust the student leader has for the United States and the vile way he discusses our country as equal to that of the Nazi regime in 1930s-1940s Germany. He even goes so far as to say he wants to use his education to tear down the country.

Here is one version of the video going viral on TikTok:

@unbelievable_truthh America having every communities of color to be able to work and be protected! #ucirvine #usflag #bans #unbelievable ♬ original sound – Unbelievable

According to an article by Insider Higher Ed, the students trying to ban that American flag had a little bit of success getting a ban to pass through the Legislative Council of the student government in a 6 to 4 vote which barred the flag from being shown in the lobby of their student building. The resolution which passed demanded “that the student government offices should be ‘inclusive,’ that some people don’t feel included by the U.S. flag” and included phrases such as:

• “the American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism,”
• “freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible, can be interpreted as hate speech.”

The ban was quickly overturned in a veto by the Executive Cabinet of the Student Government, quashing the on-campus version of the movement.

The concept, however, of using the ideas of ‘inclusivity’ to ban what you hate or despise, spread like wildfire across California student social media and continued to catch on across the country over the ensuing years and during President Trump’s Presidency.

Ultimately, these ideas have been used to underpin other movements such as defunding the police, ‘Canceling’ public figures, renaming public buildings, banning users on Twitter, and tearing down statutes.

Whether or not the newer versions of this movement have merit is for you to decide.

The post [Video] University of California Irvine Student Says United States is Evil appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Bias Alert – One-sided: Fossil fuel industry / anti-green energy

Lithium Ion batteries often include a cathode made of refined cobalt, a mineral found in vast abundance in the Congo but not so much in the rest of the world. As a quick note to readers, the Congo is an African nation with a long history of war and slavery dating back to King Leopold II of Belgium who abused the natives to build his rubber empire for automotive tires.

Author Siddharth Kara recently went on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to discuss his new book “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives” coming out in January of 2023 which is all about the cobalt supply chain and the horrific conditions of the laborers in the mines of the Congo which supplies the vast bulk of the global cobalt supply. During the podcast in the video version he shows a clip of one of the mines showing thousands of human miners digging at the ground with hands to unearth cobalt.

Watch the video here:

Viewers should start watching the video at timestamp 4:50 (linked above) and watch until 7:25 to see the video and hear the context.

According to Siddharth big tech companies need the cobalt from the Chinese-owned mines of the Congo so bad they use PR and Marketing spin to lie about the source of their materials. Before arriving at the mines he himself did not expect the conditions he found based on that information.

Texas-based Tesla Motors for their part started distancing themselves from rechargeable batteries that use cobalt last year and in an article from April of this year the website Electrek claimed half of all new Tesla cars were being built without using cobalt instead preferring iron-phosphate or “LFP” batteries. The problem with switching to LFP batteries is that they give cars a shorter range and are less efficient meaning Tesla is opening themselves up to competition from tech / automakers that stick with the cobalt-based batteries which the slave and child labor in the Congo mine with their bare hands and without protective equipment, medical care, or decent wages.

Other tech companies have started in the same direction too, but it seems there isn’t a better option in terms of battery capacity, efficiency, and weight just yet. That means devices like electric cars or semi trucks will either have to use cobalt batteries largely based on slave / child labor or suffer shorter ranges, andd evices like smartphones and electrical grid battery packs will have to do the same or have worse battery life.

In the video you can hear Siddharth refer to “artisianal miners” this is a fancy way of saying human labor used for mining as opposed to heavy machinery based mining. During the full podcast episode (and presumably in his book) he discusses how the mining operations themselves claim to use mostly heavy machinery equipment for the mining not thousands of humans hammering and digging at the dirt. He also says while there he heard stories about human miners being burried alive almost daily due to makeshift shafts without proper supports, workers with broken or disfigured limbs, and forced labor at these mines.

The mines he asserts are all owned by China and are protected by the Congo’s military the FARDC who patrol with kalashnikov’s ready to attack anyone sneaking into the area to unveil the truth of how the minerals are being mined.

As the world continues to use more battery-based tech in our cars, homes, and computers we will have to grapple with the lack of humanity that brings us the base materials for that world at some point.

The United States owns only one Cobalt mining operation on US soil which is located in Idaho. There are no US companies directly involved with cobalt mines in the Congo or with the horrific labor absuses uncovered in the video above.

Further Reading on the topic “Cobalt Mining”

• Global Cobalt Reserve Estimates (Statista) – https://www.statista.com/statistics/264930/global-cobalt-reserves/
• In Idaho, America’s first, and only, cobalt mine in decades is opening (OPB.org) – https://www.opb.org/article/2022/10/08/in-idaho-america-s-first-and-only-cobalt-mine-in-decades-is-opening/
• Testimony: China-backed cobalt mines in Congo exploit 40,000 child workers (Catholic News Agency) – https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251800/congo-cobalt-mines-china-child-labor
• The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush (The New Yorker) – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-of-congos-cobalt-rush
• Chinese Company Removed as Operator of Cobalt Mine in Congo (New York Times) – https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/world/congo-cobalt-mining-china.html
• Congo’s Cobalt Controversy (Global Edge) – https://globaledge.msu.edu/blog/post/57136/congos-cobalt-controversy
• One of World’s Biggest Cobalt Mines Is at Stake in Congo Fight (Bloomberg) – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-23/one-of-world-s-biggest-cobalt-mines-is-at-stake-in-congo-fight

Featured image a screenshot of the video embedded above

The post [Video] Slave Labor and Child Labor Exposed at Cobalt Mines in Africa Used for Rechargeable Vehicle Batteries appeared first on Texas Watcher.

The video starts off, as most of these types of videos do, after a verbal altercation had already broken out between customers and Waffle House employees working in the kitchen of what we suspect is the location at Parmer and Dessau in Austin, TX.

When we first start to see the video one customer is giving a hand gesture to a WH employee made popular in fight movies of the 1970’s to signify “come here and fight me” while an employee in the kitchen asks her and her 3 friends to leave the premises.

The person recording the video, @rbaylor_74 on Twitter, appears to be joking about a fight possibly breaking out with a friend and how he just wants a waffle before the first part of the video cuts off.

Watch the video here:

The craziest Waffle House fight in Austin TX straight up WWE match pic.twitter.com/njEusM6SfR

— Wallstreet_Ray (@rbaylor_74) December 22, 2022

The video starts back up abruptly and shows the same woman from before standing on the Waffle House counter top and physically trying to attack one of the Waffle House employees before climbing back down and walking off seemingly looking for a better spot to climb up on the counter. As she attempts to reposition herself an employee holds a coffee pot aimed at her and eventually hurls it at the assailant when it shatters on the back of a chair.

At this time the woman is joined by one of her 3 friends who runs to help her fight and climbs up where the coffee pot was just shattered and the woman who appears to be the instigator also starts climbing on the counter. The friend who joined her wearing a gray t-shirt slips and falls on to the floor of the Waffle House kitchen while trying to throw an object at the staff. When she hits the ground a female employee starts punching her, the other woman climbs back down and has a pan thrown at her by another female WH employee.

At the same time the other 2 friends, who had been uninvolved, enter the kitchen via the employee entrance and start attacking the female employee punching their friend. Another Waffle House employee who had helped the woman off of the kitchen floor releases her and the woman gangs up on the female employee along with one of her friends who had entered the kitchen to attack the female employee. The two male employees notice this and start doing their best to block punches being thrown by the women at their coworker.

During the fray our cameraman races out of the store along with other patrons and we see nothing but the floor and chairs until he gets back outside. Once he starts filming the fight again we see the woman who originally started the fight walking around the customer side of the kitchen pointing and saying something but we can’t hear her as the cameraman is saying in a falsetto voice “y’all wylin'” over and over again. At this point we can also see that the the Waffle House employees have successfully gotten the 3 aggressive women in the kitchen almost out but the gray t-shirt woman has grabbed the female employees hair and is holding on as the men try to part the two. While yanking on her hair the gray t-shirt woman attempts to throw over the shoulder punches to the woman’s head but she appears to block them effectively.

At this point viewers should notice the woman who appears to have originally instigated the fight with the staff is no longer in the shot and has either gone outdoors or is out of sight near the doorway. Her friends left behind in an altercation that is ongoing.

The Waffle House staff manage to eventually get the gray t-shirt woman to let go of their coworker’s hair and the fight begins to wind down. This is when the moment that has gone viral occurs.

As the gray t-shirt woman and her friends start to walk away she picks up a chair and flings it at the female Waffle House employee who deflects it with ease in a way reminescient of a superhero deflecting a bullet or missile. The gray t-shirt woman is not yet done though and tries a second, feeble, attempt at hurling a chair which misses the mark entirely.

This is where the video ends but we are not certain about how the fight ultimately ended.

The Internet Reacts

John Cena from the WWE/WWF was spliced into a clip as the person throwing the chair:

I hate the internet sometimes lol pic.twitter.com/uGYhxQVpAf

— Lance (@BornAKang) December 30, 2022

The video has been edited into an Avengers-esqe fight:

Waffle House in Austin fights back Texas Avengers style. from texas

And someone made an anime drawing of the Waffle House employee who grabbed the thrown chair in mid-air

Found this floating around the internet and I'm sharing it lol pic.twitter.com/8gIy0M2tBr

— ZOMBIE T 800 (@ApacheZombie) December 31, 2022

p.s. we do not endorse the /r/Texas subreddit where the content above is embedded from. There are signs this subreddit might be ran by non-Texans or at least not fairly represent all Texans according to Texas is Life, a media organization that tracks and monitors places on social media where Texans congregate.

Social Commentary:

Please note the follow constitutes opinions and not facts. These are aggregates of commentary around this event from across social media.

1. Are the number of retail / fast food / quick service assaults on the rise? Social Media is full of examples of people physically trying to attack employees over simple misunderstandings or slow/poor service. This has been noted since the Popeye’s spicy chicken sandwich in 2019 caused fights at restaurants over low availability.

The answer to this is difficult since there are no official metrics to go off of from sources like the FBI. Howevever, Waffle House has been the butt of jokes related to late night fights for decades and there may be some truth to it. Best bet is to avoid places with negative reputations like this or if you find yourself in the situation to simply leave as many patrons in this incident did. As an employee of an establishment your best bet is to be physically and mentally fit and maybe to take some kind of fight training just in case.

2. Was this a racially motivated incident? It is hard to tell since it appears only one person in this case was caucasian (the female Waffle House employee) and the rest appear to be of other ethnic backgrounds including the customers involved in the fight. Random people on the internet have tried to make this claim but it doesn’t hold water when we take into account that she was defended by her non-white colleagues and that nearly all of the people filming were also non-white and had been there for the entirety but none of them mentioned this as a motivating factor. There’s also the fact that at the start of the video the main woman instigating the fight is arguing with an African-American female WH employee and no the caucasias one who has a chair thrown at her later.

Our cameraman above (Wallstreet Ray on Twitter) simply noted that they were getting wild and appears to be directing that commentary at the group of female customers causing the disturbance at the beginning. It is safe to assume without any new evidence that this was likely caused by another issue, perhaps alcohol and slow service? (but that is purely conjecture)

Many who make this claim might only be seeing the short and edit “Avengers” cut above and are then drawing from their own biases an inaccurate conclusion.

3. No one tried to help the staff, why? Not one single soul in the restaurant or outside did much of anything to try and help the staff who were being assaulted. A large majority simply left to avoid getting harmed themselves and started filming, ostensibly for social media clout and prestige. Our cameraman might have done the most as he tried telling the attacking customers at the end to stop because they were probably going to go to jail, but that feels light compared to what would have prevented this altercation or stopped it much faster.

Is social media popularity that important that you can’t help staff stop a clear assault? Or might there also be a fear of reprisal on social media for getting involved? A fear of a lawsuit if you cause harm?

One thing seems certain, our society is designed to make it easy and valuable to simply do nothing or film while shouting the n-word into your phone (as one African-American young man did during this incident) and is also designed to make it invaluable and likely expensive to intervene in an assault.

There are no heroes in America any more.

4. Will Waffle House employees start carrying weapons to defend themselves? If you worked at a Waffle House and saw this video and realized that if a fight breaks out because you cooked a waffle too slowly or the eggs weren’t done correctly or whatever the reasoning for this was – you might find yourself wanting to learn how to easily defend yourself in such a situation. Bear spray? Stun gun? Concealed pistol? One thing is certain, in Texas those starting future altercations should consider that the employees might be armed and the law will side with them for defending themselves.

Featured photo a compilation of screenshots from the video embedded above

The post [Video] Customers Started a Fight With Waffle House Employees in Austin, TX appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Apple Store employees can be heard telling customers to “back up” and “let them go” clearing the customers to the edges of the open format store while the thieves run amuck snatching any Apple products they can see. At one point an Apple employee actually waks up to a customer and phsyical moves them out of the way to make it easier for one of the thieves to get to some products.

Watch the Video on TikTok Here:

@ppvtahoe

NEWS RELEASE: Apple store in California this past Friday. My video was removed and restored but its not working so I re uploaded.

♬ original sound – ppvtahoe

Watch the Video on Twitter Here:

where I’m from 10 folks would have tackled these thieves & held them until they were in handcuffs — today folks make watermarked TikToks

We are truly lost as a society pic.twitter.com/bNqxbA7Irs

— @jason (@Jason) December 3, 2022

The video was first uploaded by user PPVTahoe to his TikTok account where it has so far racked up 4.6 million views. It was then uploaded to Twitter by another user and shared by famed Silicon Valley startup founder Jason Calcanis where it has accumulated 3.8 million views so far. Jason is the founder of Inside and Launch both of which are headquartered in San Francisco, CA he has founded and sold startups since the Dot-Com Era.

Featured photo a screenshot of the above embedded video

The post [Video] Thieves in California Steal Thousands of Dollars of Merchandise from an Apple Store While Employees Tell Customers to Not Get Involved appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Watch the Video Here:

Discuss the video on Reddit here:

Rock Climber Fights Off Bear Attack from CrazyFuckingVideos

Why was the bear attacking the climber? This appears to be a momma bear protecting her cub which we can see towards the end of the video just before the two of them run off. The momma bear was at the top of the cliff and her cub was below the climber initially meaning the climber had separated them. Bears tend to interpret this as a potential attack on their young. She was likely trying to scare or fight off the human to keep him from hurting her cub. When the climber fights at her she starts looking around and eventually finds her cub and the two of them take off.

This is the absolute best outcome when an outdoors person comes across a momma bear. Both the bear and the human survived with minor injuries and the cub was safe and sound.

Conservation status: This article is about the Japanese Black Bear a subspecies of Ursus thibetanus. Japanese Black Bears are a critically endangered species of bears that currently only inhabit 2 islands of Japan Honshu and Shikoku. They once inhabited the island of Kyushu but no wild bear sightings have been seen there since 1987. The creator of this video states that it happened on Mt. Futago which is on the island of Kyushu, if confirmed this would be amazing news.

Map to Mt. Futago on Kyushu Island

Featured photo a compilation of two images, a photo licensed under CC BY 2.0 and a screenshot from the above embedded video on YouTube.

Photo of a Japanese Black Bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) by Flickr user Pelican. Original photo titled Ueno zoo, Tokyo, Japan shared under the CC BY 2.0 license. Small modifications were made including resizing and cropping from the original.

The post [Video] A Rock Climber in Japan Fights Off a Bear Attack While Climbing appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Tampa Bay Completely Receded As Hurricane Ian Approaches from interestingasfuck

Water receding is typical of strong hurricanes, tsunamis, and typhoons and residents in communities near areas prone to these natural events are trained to evacuate if the sea recedes dramatically like this.

Who stayed behind to take this video? Not really sure, but we hope they are safe.

For comparison here is a photo showing Tampa Bay at normal tide versus the recedeing water leading up to Ian’s landfall.

Featured image a screenshot of the video embedded above

The post [Video] Tampa Bay is Nearly Dry Before Hurricane Ian Makes Landfall appeared first on Texas Watcher.

Members of the Maasai tribe of East Africa used a trampoline for the first time and the video is racking up views like crazy. The Maasai have a ritual dance “adumu” where they dance by jumping up and down. Since jumping is so important them culturally they thought they should try to use a trampoline.

We are from the Maasai tribe and this was our first time on a trampoline… from funny

These members of the Maasai have taken on a social media project to help show how their tribe lives to the outside world and learn about the modern world around them as well. In the comments on this video there were quite a few instances of this sharing across cultural boundaries, here are a few we found interesting.

The post [Video] Members of the Maasai Tribe of East Africa Jump on a Trampoline for the First Time appeared first on Texas Watcher.

A woman is on a tree stand hunting when a black bear starts to climb up the ladder. She says “No no. Bears do not climb ladders!” then laughs and tells the bear to get down, talking to the bear like it’s her dog or cat.

The bear keeps climbing using it’s mouth to grip the bar above it and pull itself up while using its front and rear paws to stabilize itself on the ladder.

Finally she gets the bear to start moving down and says “good boy, good boy”

It seems obvious that the bear is familar to her in some way, but that doesn’t feel right. She appears to be out hunting and the bear also appears to be hunting but gives up when she stands tall on top of the tree stand.

Watch the video on TikTok here:

@bearsandmore2

♬ sonido original – Bears

Featured photos a compilation of screenshots from the above embedded video

The post [Video] A Black Bear Climbs a Tree Stand With a Hunter on it appeared first on Texas Watcher.

A video was recently posted to the WTF subreddit showing a two-story Hummer H1. This isn’t a camera trick as you can see people walking around the vehicle. the video hit the top of the subreddit racking up thousans of upvotes and views.

Dubai… WTF from WTF

This is the largest Hummer H1 in the world. It is 46ft long, 20ft wide, and 21.6ft tall. The massive monster truck version of a Hummer is called the Hummer H1 X3. It was comissions by Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, a billionaire member of the Emirati Royal Family of the United Arab Emerites for his museum of off roading vehicles called the “Sharjah Off Road History Museum”.

[Editor’s note: The video was shot in or near Dubai, but the Hummer H1 X3 can be found in Sharjah, a city north of Dubai]

The video you see above is from when the massive Hummer was driven to the museum after completion down public roads.

This isn’t just a Hummer H1 scaled up, in fact outside of apperances the two have little in common. The X3 is based on the frame of U.S. Army LARC-LX steel-hulled amphibious cargo vehicle and runs on 4 diesel engines. Since it is so massive the two-story vehicle is actually a building on wheels complete with a bathroom and a sitting room where guests can take in a 360 degree view from the vehicle.

Featured photo a compilation of screenshots from the video embedded above

The post [Video] World’s Biggest Hummer is a Two-Story Hummer H1 in Dubai appeared first on Texas Watcher.