Trophy Hunting: an enhancement to foreign wildlife conservation and survival.

Cecil the lion gained fame after he was killed by Safari Club International member Walter Palmer during an illegal hunt in Zimbabwe. Paula French/ZUMA.

Cecil the lion gained fame after he was killed by Safari Club International member Walter Palmer during an illegal hunt in Zimbabwe. Paula French/ZUMA.

Just the other day, I posted about Amerikka doing its best to reach shithole country status. Naturally, no matter how great a country truly is, there’s always the fucking idiot contingent who moans that they have higher taxes, so bad. I would be more than happy to pay taxes which went to the common good, that’s the point of taxes. Here in Ustates, taxes rarely go to the common good. They certainly don’t under the current regime. Taxes end up in the pockets of the obscenely wealthy and corrupt. Today brings you a fine example of where tax dollars in this shithole go.

The Trump administration has launched a commission at the Interior Department to promote big-game trophy hunting and the “economic benefits that result from US citizens traveling to foreign nations to engage in hunting.” The council, which will cost taxpayers $250,000 a year, is charged with making recommendations to Secretary Ryan Zinke about removing barriers to importing trophy hunting animals—such as the recently overturned ban on elephant and lion trophies from some countries—and relaxing legal restrictions on hunting and importing endangered species.

Anyone impressed by this? Anyone happy about having their pocket picked for this utterly immoral, corrupt bullshit? Wait, it gets worse.

The members of the International Wildlife Conservation Council, which is holding its first meeting Friday, include a reality-TV safari hunting guide, a former beauty queen, gun industry representatives, members and affiliates of a controversial trophy hunting group, and a veterinarian associated with an exotic animal breeding facility in Florida that sells endangered animals to roadside zoos.

“It’s really embarrassing,” says Masha Kalinina, the international trade policy specialist for the wildlife department at the Humane Society International. “I just question the qualifications of each and every one of these people. Notably missing from this trophy hunting council are legitimate representatives of the conservation community with proper scientific credentials and a record of successful conservation programs, along with wildlife law enforcement experts and biologists who have no financial stake in promoting trophy hunting.”

The council’s charter calls hunting “an enhancement to foreign wildlife conservation and survival.” Along with pushing to relax imports of trophy animals, it will also review the way the US complies with an international treaty designed to protect endangered plants and animals that guides regulation of the exotic animal trade. But the membership of the council seems heavily weighted toward people who think the best way to conserve wildlife is to kill it.

Indeed, the country’s largest trophy-hunting lobby seems to have an outsized role on the council. Of the 16 IWCC members, at least 10 have an affiliation with Safari Club International, which represents wealthy big-game hunters who often tangle with the Fish and Wildlife Service over permits to import of game trophies from overseas, particularly for endangered species. The advocacy group, with 50,000 members, frequently lobbies Congress and federal agencies to fight environmental regulations. It sued to overturn the Obama-era ban on importing elephant and lion trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Trump administration ended the ban earlier this month, despite the president’s earlier objections and comments that elephant hunting is a “horror show.”

Those members include Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist and asshole extraordinaire who killed Cecil the Lion.

The principal deputy director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Greg Sheehan, who is effectively running the agency in the absence of a congressionally confirmed director, oversees the IWCC. He is an SCI member and attended the group’s convention in Las Vegas last month when it awarded its “professional hunter of the year” honors to a South African man who has been fined for leading hunts of endangered black rhinos.

It gets much worse from there. It’s a sickening read, and its symptomatic of the rot spreading out like gangrene from the current regime to poison everything. Those people who want to point to higher taxes in other countries, countries which provide healthcare, free education, and many other benefits to their citizens, you need to shut the fuck up when tax dollars here go to such evil, corrupt enterprise.

Mother Jones has the full story, with all the relevant links, and you can read about all the members of this “council”.

Gosh, How Responsible!

Dennis Alexander. SOURCE: KSBW.

More students get hurt, by someone who is oh so responsible with guns, you betcha.

A teacher who also serves as a reserve police officer accidentally fired a gun inside a Seaside High School classroom Tuesday, police said, and three students were injured.

Dennis Alexander was teaching a course about gun safety for his Administration of Justice class when his gun went off at 1:20 p.m. Alexander was pointing his gun at the ceiling when it fired. Pieces of the ceiling fell to the ground.

A news release from the Seaside Police Department said no one suffered “serious injuries.” One 17-year-old boy suffered moderate injuries when fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged into his neck, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW.

The teacher had just told the class that he wanted to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, when the gun fired, according to Gonzales. “It’s the craziest thing. It could have been very bad,” Gonzales said. The teacher was about to use the gun for a demonstration about how to disarm someone, according to Gonzales.

Everyone in the classroom was stunned, and the teacher, who is a reserve officer for the Sand City Police Department, apologized.

But no one at the school checked to make sure that all of the students were uninjured, Gonzales said. The school day resumed as normal, and Seaside Police Department officers launched an investigation. The 17-year-old boy’s parents were shocked when he returned home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck. The student’s parents rushed him to a hospital for X-rays. “He’s shaken up, but he’s going to be OK,” Gonzales told KSBW. “I’m just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it.”

Alexander was placed on administrative leave from his teaching position at Seaside High School, and he was also placed on administrative leave at the Sand City Police Department.

There you have it. A cop. A teacher. And a gun in school ends up hurting students, go figure. One of these days, I’m going to eyeroll so hard my spine’s gonna pop out. The full story is here.

Space Force!!1!

Spaceballs.

The fucking moron has decided the military is not bloated enough, no. We need…SPACE FORCE!

Donald Trump addressed Marines at Miramar Air Station in San Diego on Tuesday.

In addition to touting record-breaking military spending and promising a raise to the military he also laid out plans for a space army.

“We should have a new force called the Space Force. It’s like the Army and the Navy, but for space, because we’re spending a lot of money on space,” he said. “I said maybe we need a new force, I was not really serious, then I said ‘what a great idea.’ Maybe we’ll have to do that.”

“My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea,” he said.

Right. As if funneling yet more money into the military machine that is Amerikka isn’t bad enough, the Tiny Tyrant has come up with Spaceballs, because that’s what it would be, if we’re going to pretend this would actually go anywhere. Thankfully, it won’t, but fuck knows just how much money will be blown on such idiocy. I’ll bet NASA just can’t wait for a phone call from the Tiny Tyrant and his genius ideas for Space Force. Ah well, let the mockery begin! You can see some select responses at Raw Story.

Sunday Facepalm.

Wikimedia Commons.

Someone who bills herself “Montreal Healthy Girl” has some news for us all: “CANCER IS ACTUALLY A GOOD THING!!!” Did you get those extra exclamation marks? Obviously all manner of truthy, because serious emphasis. I’d dearly like to give this person one hell of a smack, to say the least.

So what is Cancer exactly and what the hell can we do about it when we are faced with a paralysing fear of death? The following may surprise you, but finding out you have the big C is not as terrifyingly final as we are taught to think. Contrary to popular belief and misinformation, CANCER IS ACTUALLY A GOOD THING!!! It is your body’s way of defending itself against a poisonous internal environment and without it, most of us would die long before our diagnosis.

Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s obvious this stupid twit does not know one thing about cancer, nor did she bother with actually getting acquainted with anyone who happens to have cancer. Most people are aware that cure rates are up for many types of cancer, and many people with stage IV cancers are living their lives for decades past diagnosis. CANCER IS NOT A GOOD THING. IT’S A BAD THING WHICH REQUIRES PROPER TREATMENT FROM PEOPLE WITH ACTUAL MEDICAL DEGREES.  Cancer does not save you from early death due to a “poisonous internal environment”.  Cancer cells are terrifyingly magnificent, and out of all the things on this planet, they play the game of evolution best. There are so many different types of cancer cells, it’s dizzying, and no, all cancers are not treated the same; they cannot be. For each type of cancer, it’s a different game. If you want a thorough understanding of how cancer cells work, read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Cancer cells are rogues, and they excel at reproducing and mutating. Some cancers tend to be low aggression, like mine (colorectal cancer), others are incredibly aggressive and scary as fuck. As always, with any cancer, your best bet is early detection, and prevention, like not smoking, which cuts your chances of lung cancer way down. It never hurts to eat healthy and get at least moderate exercise, but those things will not guarantee you’ll never hear “it’s cancer.” The older you get, the more likely there will be an incidence of cancer. Get those screening tests! Cancer is not the result of an “imbalance” or the body being too “acidic”, which is the fucking stupid twit’s answer to cancer and how to get it to “reverse itself”. This sort of crap is incredibly dangerous, and leads to people dying.  Please, if you hear “it’s cancer”, do not fall for this sort of crap. I’m the last person to say that cancer treatment is any sort of fucking fun, it isn’t. It’s a right pain in the ass (literally in my case), and the side effects are nasty. It’s better than death, which is what you’ll get with Ms. Healthy Girl and those like her. In the case of someone like myself, with colon cancer, you might actually live for quite a while without treatment, being that it’s not an overly aggressive cancer. But there will pain. Enormous, bad pain. Pain which will get worse. And by the time you drag your sorry ass to an actual physician, it will likely to be too damn late.

I won’t link you to the idiot’s fucking page, because this infuriates me no end, but I will link you to Jonathan Jarry at McGill, who has plenty to say about this dangerous fucking mess of a person.

Trump’s CPAC…

Activists watch President Donald Trump address CPAC 2018. (Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch).

Activists watch President Donald Trump address CPAC 2018. (Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch).

If you’re curious about the latest happenings in the Lunatic Fringe, Right Wing Watch has all the details, and they aren’t pretty.

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference was—to borrow a phrase—“low-energy.” Except, that is, when it came to praising President Trump. CPAC has historically been a measure of what people and ideas are allowed into the conservative movement’s big tent. This year, the ideology that seemed to matter most was love of Trump.

Trump’s influence on the larger conservative movement was apparent on stage at CPAC, but it played out also in the surrounding circus at the Gaylord convention center in National Harbor, Maryland, where white nationalists rubbed elbows with “New Right” internet celebrities and far-right European politicians, many of them echoing Trump’s talking points.

On the conference’s schedule, more traditional conservative fare about the joys of capitalism and national security threats was mixed in with sessions dedicated to aggrandizing Trump.

There’s a long article about all the comings and goings, who’s there and what they’re up to, along with all the nonsense being spewed at RWW.

Sunday Facepalm: All Ya Need Is Nice.

thirddrawerdown.com.

Star Parker, yet another conservative idiot, has decided on her defense of guns in the wake of the last school shooting. Those darn students weren’t nice enough to the shooter! We don’t need gun control or any sort of reform, no. What we need is niceness! We are all responsible for every dude walking around with a growing grudge, a tantrum, and a gun. You betcha. As to blaming the students:

“Well, not necessarily one individual student, but we can call for gun control if we want to as a nation, we can call for more federal laws if we want to as a nation, but usually when you’re faced with tragedy, you first check yourself,” Parker said. “We have forgotten how to just look inwardly. We’ve become such a nation of victims that we’ve forgotten to say, ‘Wait a minute, what could I have done?’”

[…]

“Well, perhaps said ‘hello,’ perhaps said ‘I’m sorry to hear your dad died,’” Parker said. “This is a very small community of people we’re talking about. This is not the responsibility of Washington, D.C., or the NRA. This is the responsibility of people that are closest to someone to be able to look them in the eye as an individual. So the challenge of this whole nation of victims is that now it’s not about us anymore, it’s about somebody else, our problems are somebody else’s fault. Well, no, actually, this is a very small community, someone must have saw his sadness, someone must have known his dad died.”

Ms. Parker didn’t listen to the students talking. Ms. Parker certainly didn’t listen to Ms. Emma Gonzalez, who pointed out, strongly, that they knew that kid. They knew what he was like. They knew his desire for violence, his propensity for cruelty. They did speak out, they tried to tell people, they tried to warn people, but no one listened well enough to what they had to say, and now a lot of kids are dead. Sometimes, reaching out to a person can make all the difference in the world, but simply being ‘nice’ isn’t enough to reach anyone. If you’re going to extend ‘nice’, it needs to go further than that; and there are people you can’t reach in any way. The shooter in this case was primed to go off for years, but it was ignored by everyone except the students. The students wanted to know why people like his neighbours ignored him wandering around with a fucking gun. How about you answer that one, Ms. Parker? I would have loved to see you walk up to a kid wandering about with a gun and be ‘nice’ to him.

[…]

“Well, they expelled him probably because he was acting out,” she said, “and he was acting out probably because he didn’t have any friends—you know, whoever sat next to him in class, they’d better not be the ones who are protesting out there today.”

They expelled him because he was a danger to others, you fucking idiot. Sitting next to someone in class does not make you friends, and friendship is not a one way street. Christ, I loathe conservatives.

The whole mess and video is at RWW. In other, depressing news, the Dominionists of the Theocalypse have descended on CPAC, all of them staying at the Trump Hotel to sing their praises to the Tiny Tyrant. You can read the whole sorry thing here.

Black People Excited About Black Panther: BAD!

A dude by the name of Ben Shapiro is all manner of upset about people being excited about Black Panther. Naturally, he misses the point, by a whole damn universe. Most of his screeth* seems to be a lament over the lack of gratefulness being displayed in this excitement. Black people should be grateful, dammit, for all the great and wonderful things white people have done for them! On your knees, slaves! Oh, er…stop being so excited! I’m not going to be able to get everything in, it’s a fairly long screeth, so full of wypipo gone wrong that it’s extremely difficult to take, and that’s a serious understatement. Shapiro is one of those fucking idiots who make you ache for the ability to reach through your screen and smack him into last Sunday. And I’ll just add that I’m over the top excited about Black Panther m’self, but I can hardly share in the excitement born of such outstanding representation, because I’m not black. That said, I don’t have any problems understanding The Excitement.

“Everyone in the media is talking about the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity, or at least since Caitlyn Jenner became a woman—a transgender woman—and that, of course, is the release of ‘Black Panther’. It is so deeply important,” Shapiro said, mockingly.

No, not one single person is talking about the movie as if it were the most important thing ever in the history of humanity, you sniveling dipshit. Black Panther is deeply important – look at how damn long it’s taken to get a mainstream movie comprised of a mostly black cast, especially when no one is able to say that tokenism has gone out of Hollywood.

“We’ve heard it’s deeply important to millions of black Americans, who after all were not liberated from slavery 200 years ago and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation, have not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States. None of that has mattered up till they made a Marvel movie about a superhero who is black in a country filled with black people. ‘Blade’ was not enough. ‘Catwoman’ with Halle Berry, no. OK, Wakanda is where it is,” Shapiro said.

He continued sarcastically, “This is the most important moment in black American history, not Martin Luther King, not Frederick Douglass, not the Civil War, not the end of Jim Crow, none of that, not Brown vs. Board—the most important thing is that Chadwick Boseman puts claws on his hands and a mask on his face and runs around jumping off cars in CGI fashion—deeply, deeply important. Black children everywhere will now believe that they too can be superheroes who jump off cars in fictional countries.”

Oh my. Hey, sniveling dipshit! You left a little something out – all those things? They wouldn’t have been necessary if white people deciding that forcibly kidnapping people and putting them into slavery hadn’t been done in the first place. You don’t get fucking points for taking centuries to correct your massive mistakes. As for the the movies Blade and Catwoman, you wouldn’t have noticed that outside the main characters, most of the cast was comprised of white people. That’s because you expect to see white people, as far as you’re concerned, that’s only right and proper. What a fucking surprise that people of colour would like to see themselves reflected in the same way, and not always have to settle for tokenism.

“We heard this about Barack Obama when he was elected, too. ‘Now that Obama has been president, black Americans will feel like they too can be presidents. It’s a transformative moment.’ Yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist and that black people are still systemically discriminated against and that black people are still victims in America society. So, it turns out it didn’t mean anything,” Shapiro said.

Yes, it was a transformative moment. Just like the portraits too, because generations of children to come will be able to read about a black president, and they will see black people represented in the sea of white in the white house. (White, white everywhere.) Having such transformative moments in regard to representation and the hope of future achievement is not a magic fucking wand, you wannabe Voldemort. Whitemort? Yeah, I’ll go with that one. It does not magically erase systemic racism, localised bigotry, or victimisation. Those are still with us, and unfortunately, with the Tiny Tyrant, we’re seeing a vicious, cancerous rise in hatred. The difference such transformative moments make cannot be accurately estimated; they represent hope, strength, and change. They represent inclusion and acceptance, and you just have to try and take that away, by demeaning black people in every way your tiny, atrophied brain can come up with. You aren’t worth spitting on, Mr. Shapiro.

“Sorry to break it to you folks, Wakanda is not a real place,” Shapiro said. “It does not exist.”

Well, thank you ever so much for that whitesplaination, Mr. Shapiro. I’m ever so sure that not one black person could possibly figure that one out minus your help. What a flaming doucheweasel.

You can read the whole thing, and watch video at RWW.

*Screeth: screed + froth.

Colour Me Treasonous.

That godsdamned tiny, jumped up wannabe dictator is talking treason. Why? Oooooh, get this: people didn’t applaud.

Donald Trump on Monday suggested that Democrats could be guilty of treason because of their reaction to his State of the Union address.

Trump complained during a speech in Ohio that Democrats had not applauded during his State of the Union. The president said it was “un-American” of Democrats not to give him an ovation when he spoke about topics like unemployment.

“It was bad energy… even on positive news, really positive news, they were like death, and un-American,” he said.

“Someone said ‘treasonous.’ I guess, why not?” Trump added. “Can you call that treason? Why not. I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

“But you look at that, and it is really very, very sad.”

NOT ENOUGH FUCK YOU. Paint me treason colour, drape me in a treason flag, complete with all the treason accessories, and I’ll parade them all over the damn place. I already have one hell of an attitude going about all the tainted, toxic positivity crap, and now there’s this.

For the record, Donny Dipshit, no, you cannot call that treason. For fuck’s sake, have someone look it up in a dictionary and explain it to you, you brainless lump. “I guess, why not?” Aaauuuugggh. Because words have meanings. Concepts have meaning. You. Do. NOT. Get. To. Do. Whatever. You. Want.

There’s video at RawStory, if you want to punish yourself.

Sunday Facepalm.

Courtesy Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax.

Virginia drivers can already get a state-issued license plate to show their support for the National Rifle Association, but a push for a “Stop Gun Violence” specialty plate took a contentious turn this week in the House of Delegates.

[…]

“We’re the snowflakes,” said Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, the plate’s sponsor. “But these guys see ‘gun violence’ on anything and they go ballistic.”

During floor debate Thursday, Gilbert said Simon was trying to make a political point that goes beyond “a little ol’ license plate bill.”

“It is him trying to build a narrative that gun violence is somehow different from regular violence,” Gilbert said, asking Simon why the license plate couldn’t raise awareness of violence generally.

So…you want a plate which says “stop violence”? Apparently Mr. Gilbert didn’t notice that he himself made a distinction between gun violence and “regular” violence. Perhaps republican assholes could get together and put out a degrees of violence pamphlet, assigning points or something. At least that waste of time would prevent them from doing harm for a while. The fact of the matter is that gun violence is indeed different. You can kill a whole lot of people very quickly with a gun. If nothing else, I’d think being able to kill cops with guns might have given these assholes pause, but no. As an aside, Mr. Simon deserves a smack for his word play.

The legislation filed to create the anti-gun violence plate would’ve imposed a standard $10 plate fee. But Republicans argued it should cost $25, the rate for revenue-generating plates that raise money for a social cause.

Republicans argued that cause should be mental health, prompting Simon to accuse the GOP of hijacking the plate’s message.

“To buy into the myth that this is a mental health problem and that these license plates ought to be used to solve a mental health problem unfairly stigmatizes people living with mental illness,” Simon said. “It unfairly characterizes it.”

Oh yes, it perpetuates stigma, and it’s a very unfair, malicious, and lazy conclusion that so many people run to and take refuge in, whenever there’s another major shooting. Othering is terribly convenient for those who refuse to pay attention to the problem staring them in the face.

Simon said he filed the bill on behalf of a constituent, 65-year-old retired microbiologist Carol Luten, who gathered the 450 prepaid applications required before the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles will consider issuing a specialty plate. That constituent’s concerns go well beyond the mass shootings that draw headlines and focus more on everyday gun violence, such as children dying because an adult left a firearm unattended, Simon said.

“The people putting this plate in ought to have a say about what that plate means and where the funds from it go,” Simon said.

Simon suggested the money from the plate could go toward domestic violence prevention, but Republicans voted to direct the money to mental health on a 50-48 party-line vote.

Of course they did. Nothing like sticking to their narrative that guns are just harmless instruments.

The two House Republicans currently running for Congress — Dels. Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge, and Nick Freitas, R-Culpeper — voted against the plate.

“Obviously none of us support gun violence,” Freitas said. “The issue that I think a lot of us have is this idea of putting the focus on an instrument as opposed to a focus on the crime.”

Right, you want to focus on the crime. The problem there being…the fucking crime. By the time you’re focusing on that, at least one person is dead. Some of us find value in trying to make it a hell of a lot more difficult for someone to commit murder. For every brand of ugly immorality, you can count on republicans. Bet they are all “good” christians, too.

The full story is at Richmond.com.

Facebook, Oh Facebook: L’Origine du monde. (NSFW)

L'Origine du monde, Gustave Courbet, 1866.

L’Origine du monde, Gustave Courbet, 1866.

L’Origine du Monde, The Origin of the World, is a famous and well known painting by Courbet. It’s a beautiful work, and housed at Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Facebook France decided that a small thumbnail of this work was deserving of censorship.

The dispute around Gustave Courbet‘s graphic 1866 oil painting “L’Origine du Monde” (The Origin of the World), has escalated with teacher is taking Facebook to a Parisian court over allegations of censorship. Frédéric Durand-Baïssas says the social media network blocked his account without notice when he posted a thumbnail with footage and information about the painting.

The incident took place in 2011 but it has taken years of wrangling to establish whether or not Facebook is liable to French law, as it regards itself as a U.S. company. The art-lover posted a clip of the Courbet work after the account of Danish sculptor Frode Steinicke went down for a similar violation of the website’s rules on nudity. The company reactivated Steinicke’s account, although without the allegedly offending piece.

“On the one hand, Facebook shows a total permissiveness regarding violence and ideas conveyed on the social network,” the teacher’s lawyer, Stéphane Cottineau, told the Associated Press in 2016. “And on the other hand, [it] shows an extreme prudishness regarding the body and nudity.”

I would think, at this point, with Facebook being up to their neck in unethical and questionable activities they refuse to do anything about might have given them a bit of a wake up call over their astonishing prudery. They don’t care about threats. They don’t care about people being harassed. They don’t care about people using their service to steal. They don’t care about fakery of any kind. Oh, but if there is even an implied nipple, they are on the case, you betcha! There isn’t even an attempt to understand that the rest of the world does not have such puritanical views. There is nothing wrong with the human body, and it’s past time Facebook stopped acting like it’s the biggest shame of all.

Via Raw Story.

Asshole vs Asshole: “Bloodsports”.

Screencap, Right Wing Watch.

The Nazis have a new gig on youtube, “bloodsports”, their um, rebranding of debates.

Over the past month, prominent alt-right personalities on YouTube have carved out platforms for themselves on a handful of popular livestreamed political debate channels, where they’ve engaged in debates against “classical liberal,” libertarian and “anti-social justice warrior” YouTube talkers.

The series of debates, which have been affectionately dubbed “bloodsports” by their participants, have provided the white nationalist alt-right with its latest chance to thrust itself into the political consciousness of young people and to appeal to members of some of the subcultures that have splintered from the movement in recent months.

The “bloodsports” phenomenon grew out of a fight about “race realism,” which is how some white supremacists refer to their pseudoscientific claims about racial superiority.

[…]

When the feuding between various pundits reached critical mass, alt-right figures who promote “race realism” and white nationalist advocates for the creation of ethnostates offered themselves up for debates with YouTube personalities who have channels much larger than their own. Taking advantage of the attention that the feud was providing, alt-right figures were able to secure spots on YouTube channels that boast hundreds of thousands of followers and to go up against some of YouTube’s biggest political commentators, such as Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”), who were eager to inject themselves into the public hype.

One of the most prominent channels hosting these debates belongs to Andy Warski, a YouTube personality who has grown increasingly sympathetic to the alt-right.

[…]

In the last few weeks, Warski has hosted debates featuring nearly every popular white nationalist YouTube figure, including J.F. Gariepy, Tara McCarthy, Richard Spencer, Colin Robertson (“Millennial Woes”), Greg Johnson, Peinovich, James Allsup, Nick Fuentes and Tim Gionet (“Baked Alaska”). More often than not, these white nationalist personalities have been paired against conservative opponents who offer incredibly weak pushback to their arguments. On only a few occasions have they faced true, strong counter-arguments. One of these debates—featuring Sargon of Akkad and Tarl Warwick (“Styxhexenhammer666”) debating Spencer and Gariepy—became the highest-trending live video on YouTube during its broadcast. Afterward, Spencer declared that he had “destroyed” in the debate.

Oh yes, Richard Punch My Face Spencer declared he destroyed skepticism. So, I guess no one can be skeptical about anything ever from now one. Right Wing Watch has the full rundown on the deepening youtube cesspit, it’s quite involved. You can read all about it here.

The Memo.

Screengrab.

Curious about all the republican upset over “The Memo”? Aaron Rupar at Think Progress has the answers. It all boils down to bullshit, but there’s little the rethugs love more than a pot of shit to stir about.

House Republicans and right-wing media outlets are up in arms about a classified memo purportedly detailing misconduct related to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia.

After reviewing it on Thursday, a number of Trump-supporting Republicans flooded the airwaves on Fox News. On Hannity, Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) called for Mueller to be fired, with Gaetz characterizing the special counsel’s investigation as “a lie built on corruption” and akin to “a palace coup.” On Friday morning, Fox & Friends spun the story as “worse than Watergate.”

The truth about the new ‘top secret’ memo Republicans can’t stop talking about.

That Ol’ White Magic.

If you know who to credit, say so.

Mike Cernovich, nazi, is all concerned about nefarious black magic, in Hollywood of course. And elsewhere, I suppose. But he has the secret! White magic, it’s the only good magic.

Mike Cernovich, the self-appointed leader of a movement he calls the “New Right” and a promoter of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, told viewers last night that he believed “dark magic” was to blame for what he claimed is rampant pedophilia among political, Hollywood and “deep state” elites.

In the middle of the stream, Cernovich went a tangent to discuss the magical forces he believes to be at work in the world, as well as his personal magical practice.

“Everything I do is alchemy. That’s why I believe in magic. Not black magic, not the satanic magic that they practice in Hollywood and that the deep state practices and that the media practice. I believe in good magic, light magic, alchametic magic,” Cernovich said. “Alchametic magic is ‘How do I create something out of nothing purely through manifesting my will through power and light, which is value.’ That’s white magic. That’s alchametic magic.”

Okay, dude, alchametic is not a word. Alchemistic is a word. So, right from the start, you’re making up words, pulling shit right outta your arse. As for ‘creating something through manifesting your will through power and light’, yeah, I hate to break this to you, but that doesn’t mean one damn thing. It certainly doesn’t have any value whatsoever, outside your own head. If your “white” magic is so grand, why does it have zero effect? You’re going to have to have something much more solid than power and light. I have power and light too, it’s called electricity. Wonderful stuff, that.

Cernovich went on to explain that he believed the turn of phrase “emotional vampire,” which refers to people that others perceive to be emotionally draining or unpleasant to those around them, is a form of “black magic and that is the magic that is taught by our culture.”

“Whether you know it or not, you’re practicing magic,” Cernovich said, “but you’re practicing the dark, demonic magic—the parasitic magic.”

Oh FFS. Y’know, Mike, some people are just plain assholes. I’d think you, of all people, would know that. Assholes tend to accentuate the negative, true enough. Other people are assholes magnified, abusive, using, manipulative, lots of people like that walking about. And yet other people are dysfunctional in some way, which tends to have a stressful effect on those around them. That’s part and parcel of life, and it doesn’t have one thing to do with magic. Anyone can make the decision to cut ties with toxic people, that’s not magic, but it tends to really make your life better. You could be described as an “emotional vampire”, Mike, given what a toxic fucking asshole you are, inciting people, encouraging bigotry and hatred, lying, and inciting violence.

He went on to tell listeners that this same “black magic” was the motivation behind the supposed “deep state,” an unseen government apparatus that controls the country, and its supposed obsession with pedophilia.

“People go, ‘Well why are there so many pedophiles in deep state? Why are there so many pedophiles in politics and Hollywood?’ Because that’s the darkest magic you can ever practice. Torturing children, as many people in Hollywood do, is how you practice the highest levels of dark magic,” Cernovich said.

A fine example of you being a manipulative, toxic liar. The reason you nasty assholes constantly parrot ‘pedophilia!’ is because that, more than anything else, is likely to get people to pay attention and get upset. People get very emotional about that subject, and rightly so, but it can’t be stated enough how wrong what you are doing is, just screeching ‘pedophiles!’ with absolutely no basis for doing so. There are enough crimes committed against children as it is, every moment of every day, and you spend all your time making people get worked up about non-existent acts. So, you’re adding to damage and crimes committed against children, because you distract and detract from those who actually do such things. You never manage to mention how many children in “good christian” families are being raped by a family member. No, it’s always these nebulous “elite” characters, who, despite having tons of money and powerful positions, just can’t manage without practicing “the darkest of dark magic, oooogabooooga”. No.

Why don’t you start working on “alchameticing” yourself into a decent person, Mike? That ought to keep you busy.

You can read the full mess at RWW.