So what did he know…

About Hillary Clinton and the DNC?

Glee actor Mark Salling is dead of an apparent suicide, according to law enforcement … TMZ has learned. We’re told his body was found near a riverbed in Sunland … the area where he lived. We do not yet know the manner of death. We’re told he may have died after hanging himself.  We’ve learned the address where Salling was found dead near a little league field adjacent to a creek. 

Well, we’ve been expecting a sudden onset of suicides among the Hollywood set. What is that now, three? Four?

Stoked

Ran into a friendly acquaintance of mine at the gym. We’ve played against each other for years; he is quite a bit younger but was permitted to play in our veteran’s league because he was a professional referee or something. I was never quite clear on what the deal was, to be honest.

Anyhow, he had told me he was up for promotion to Serie A in the coming season, so when I saw him, I didn’t even say anything, I just raised an eyebrow. He smiled and pumped his fist; the league not only came through with the promotion to the top level but had him rated highest in the second league through the first half of the season. He’s smart, athletic, and multilingual, so I have absolutely no doubt he’ll be doing Champion’s League and the Euros before too long.

Competitive bastard too. I marked him for an entire game in an indoor tournament and had to throw everything plus the kitchen sink at him to keep him from scoring… and just barely managed to do that.

Smells like Girlbusters

SJWs are running their usual routine of breathlessly talking up a heavily converged product that they know the mainstream audience isn’t going to like very much.

Ash Crossan, Entertainment Tonight video producer
Ladies and gentlemen we have an AMAZING villain. #BlackPanther was so good I can’t breathe. AND DANAI GURIRA HOLY F@$&?!?!? I LOVE this movie.

Geeks of Color
Black Panther is the best MCU movie ever. I was blown away from start to finish and I’m not even being biased. This was by far the best marvel movie to date. Thank you, Ryan Coogler!

jen yamato@jenyamato
BLACK PANTHER is incredible, kinetic, purposeful. A superhero movie about why representation & identity matters, and how tragic it is when those things are denied to people. The 1st MCU movie about something real; Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger had me weeping and he’s the VILLAIN

Nate Brail@NateBrail
Black Panther is the best Marvel Film ever made. Nothing compares to it. Michael B. Jordan and Letitia Wright steal the show. The visuals are incredible. Go see it.

Adam B. Vary of Buzzfeed
BLACK PANTHER is just astonishing. Ryan Coogler has harnessed the superhero movie — and a really fun one! — to explore profound ideas and create vivid images of black excellence that so rarely ever make it to a giant Hollywood movie. Wow wow wow!

Peter Sciretta, owner/editor at Slashfilm
Black Panther looks, feels and sounds unlike any Marvel film to date. A visual feast. Wakanda is amazingly realized, the antagonist actually has an arc with emotional motivations. Marvels most political movie. So good.

IndieWire senior film critic David Ehrlich
BLACK PANTHER is like a Marvel movie, but better. the action is predictably awful, but this is the first MCU film that has an actual sense of identity & history & musicality. Wakanda is alive. whole cast is great but the women (and the war rhinos) steal the show — Danai Gurira!

Huffington Post Black Voices associate editor Taryn Finley
I’m so excited to see #BlackPanther again when I’m with friends. Not only did it live up to the hype, it exceeded expectations and exuded #BlackExcellence with every scene.

ReBecca Theodore-Vachon, Film/TV contributor Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, NYTimes, Roger Ebert, The Urban Daily
The representation of Black women in #BlackPanther made me feel seen. Seen in a way other superhero movies have not done well.

Now, perhaps the movie is genuinely good. Perhaps this time, the critics can be trusted and they aren’t simply blowing more SJW smoke up the collective posteriors of the moviegoing public. But the safe bet is that these critics are converged and have therefore lost their ability to perform their primary function of reviewing movies and it won’t be long before they are blaming racism, America, and the Alt-Right for the failure of the movie to bring in as much revenue as anticipated.

This is a really big deal to them, because they know that if Black Panther fails, there won’t be another big money diversity movie for another generation or two of movie-making. So it is not even remotely surprising that they are uniformly praising it the biggest and bestest and most importantest movie ever made.

HAMMER OF THE WITCHES by Kai Wai Cheah

The terror is daimonic. The sorcery is real.

But enough bullets will kill even the most dangerous supernatural operator.

The Hexenhammer underground has aided the operators of the Nemesis Program in their war against the global supernatural terror campaign, but now Hexenhammer is accused of being the terrorist group responsible for carrying out a spectacular massacre in Greece.

Now Luke Landon must decide if Eve and her fellow underground members should be put down or if they have been set up for destruction by a conspiracy so big and powerful that it may have penetrated Nemesis itself.

HAMMER OF THE WITCHES is the second volume of The Covenant Chronicles, the supernatural Mil-SF series by Kai Wai Cheah, Hugo-nominated author of Flashpoint: Titan.

From the reviews of its predecessor, NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS.

  • This is an excellent fantasy/MilSF book. Fast paced; excellent battle scenes.
  • Cheah does a great job at building this world with lots of details and complexity. It’s a good read and one I had a hard time putting down.
  • Fans of books by Larry Correia and Jim Butcher should find themes in this book that they will enjoy. Character development is stronger than Larry’s earlier but not as strong as his current work.
  • Call of Duty meets Grimnoir Chronicles. If you like Larry Corriea’s Grimnoir series, and the world he has created, you will like the world this book inhabits. 
  • This book came out of nowhere. It’s… very different than anything I’ve read. The author has done some amazing world-building, where magic has been introduced to the ancient world, and changed the course of ancient Persia, Greece and Rome, and the modern world follows from there. 

Corruption and circled wagons

The Deep State’s best efforts to hide its corrupt and illegal behavior are failing:

A U.S. House committee voted Monday to seek White House clearance to publicly release a classified Republican memo that alleges bias and counterintelligence abuses in government surveillance of people surrounding President Donald Trump, members of the panel said.

Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the majority-Republican panel decided to seek release of the memo on a party-line vote. The Republican majority refused along party lines to disclose a competing memo written by Democrats.

“This is an effort to circle the wagons around the White House and distract from the Russia probe,” Schiff said…. Releasing the memo has become a cause for conservative congressional Republicans, who say the FBI and the Justice Department pursued the investigation of possible Russian ties to the Trump presidential campaign under false pretenses. Schiff has countered that the memo is part of a Republican effort designed to distract from, and undermine, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and whether those around Trump colluded in it.

Disclosure of the memo requires White House approval because the document is based on classified information. Now, the Trump administration will have up to five days to review the document for national security concerns, though it could be released at any point. Even if the administration objects, the full House could hold a rare closed-door vote on whether to publicly disclose the memo anyway.

It will be interesting to see if what is in the memo is as bad as people are suggesting, or if it is simply more smoke that may or may not be indicative of anything substantive. Regardless, one hopes the Trump administration puts it out for public review as quickly as possible.

The key tell from Schiff is his use of the phrase “circle the wagons”. Remember, SJWs always project, and they are reliably guilty of committing the crimes of which they accuse others. There is no need to “distract from the Russia probe”. Everyone has known for months that there is nothing to be found there except for collusion between the Clinton Campaign, the FBI, and the NSA.

The only significant thing here is the discovery that there isn’t even one honest Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. If there are allegations of serious corruption and criminality in the memo and all of them voted to keep the memo under wraps, they are going to face some serious questions about their own corruption.

Forget moderation, stand up and fight!

I’m not going to pretend that this new SJW-swarming is unexpected… or that it isn’t mildly amusing, especially in light of how soon after our initial exchange it happened. But that doesn’t make it right, or anything that we will ignore. The thing is, you can either learn from someone else’s example or through your own experience. Ethan van Sciver, the talented DC artist whom you may recall lecturing me about the importance of being nice and civil and respectful to SJWs, is presently learning the lessons of Social Justice the hard way. Moderation won’t save you. Civility won’t save you. Nothing will save you except standing up to them and fighting them openly, because they are all offense, no defense.

Because they don’t need your permission to attack you, and if they can’t find an excuse to do so, they will manufacture one.

Asher Elbein @asher_elbein
I’ve been watching the Ethan Van Sciver harassment of @darrylayo over the weekend, and hearing stuff about him for a lot longer. I’d like to write about it for The Atlantic, so I’m putting out a call: if you’ve been harassed by him or his trolls, DMs and email are open.

Brendan H. Wright@BrendanWasright
Comics is worse for having Ethan Van Sciver in it. The fact that one of the major publishers’ major artists faces no consequences for sustained racist attacks on a fellow artist says about all one needs to know about DC. He has no place among decent people.

Tim Doyle@NakatomiTim
Ethan Van Sciver is tweeting artistic collaboration with deeply transphobic, woman hating, Milo-loving, darling of the Alt-Right-Jordan Peterson…In case you needed more evidence EVS is a disgusting trash fire of a human.

Kieran Shiach@KingImpulse
If you’ve been harassed by Ethan Van Sciver, Richard C. Meyer or their army of trolls and would like to talk about it, you can get in touch with either myself or @asher_elbein, in confidence, to tell your story.

davidbathsheba‏@hermanos
Ethan Van Sciver is what happens when an industry prizes professionalism over checking bad actors on sight.

darrylayo@darrylayo
All Ethan Van Sciver does is fuck with people, pick on people, attack people, direct others to attack people and occasionally draw I dunno, green lantern or some shit

Matt Santori@FotoCub
Yes. @DCComics needs to decide if putting Ethan Van Sciver on books is worth losing sales and promotion from sites that will refuse to review/advertise ANYTHING his name is on, as mine informed them directly.

Mark O. Stack@MarkOStack
I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know what I could add to the situation, but I really just added towards a culture of silence that lets bad people get away with things. Ethan Van Sciver is a bigot and a bully leading harassment campaigns. @DCComics should cut ties.

Layman@themightylayman
Is it my feed, or my imagination, or is the comics community growing weary of Ethan Van Sciver’s asshole antics and his fuckhead cadre of alt-right bullies?

This is a textbook swarming complete with the open appeals to the presumably amenable authorities at SJW-converged DC Comics. We’ll see if they’re successful or not; it doesn’t look like they are making much headway with either the media or the masses, but then, the obvious goal here is merely provide cover for their fellow SJWs at DC to pull the trigger. There is only one way to answer these people, and that is to fight back at every opportunity, show neither hesitation nor remorse, and defeat them resoundingly. Which is exactly what we have done and what we will continue to do. Speaking of SJW-swarms, thanks VERY much to all the 802 backers and counting, as we have just hit the fifth and final goal for Will Caligan’s Comic!

UPDATE: The campaign has ended. All goals achieved. A clean green sweep. Now THAT is what winning looks like! The first stage, anyway. The next win will be when the first Arkhaven comic illustrated by Will Caligan hits the market. And it will be glorious. Thanks very much to all 822 of you who made this happen!

Deputy Director down and out

The Deputy Director of the FBI is just stepping aside for no particular reason… the day after his boss read the 4-page memo about the “secret society”. That seems likely:

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has been attacked by President Donald Trump, stepped down Monday, multiple sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

McCabe will remain on the FBI payroll until he is eligible to retire with full benefits in mid-March, the sources said.

One source said McCabe was exercising his retirement eligibility and characterized his decision as “stepping aside.”

America losing interest in SJW “entertainment”

Apparently pedos, minstrels, and whores are of less interest than they used to be:

The CBS telecast is down a steep 21 percent from 2017 in early numbers, potentially spelling an all-time low. Sunday’s Bruno Mars-loving Grammy Awards took a steep ratings spill by the first-available metrics. The show, which ran a bloated three-and-a-half hours, was off an unfortunate 21 percent from 2017 in early numbers. Overnight returns from Nielsen Media give it a 12.7 rating among households — marking its biggest drop since the 2013, the year after the show swelled following the death of Whitney Houston.

I know it’s common for the old to bitch about the music of the young. But the thing is, there are plenty of young people putting out really good music today. They’re just not doing it through the converged corporate pop channel anymore.

Three-quarters of my car music is old. The other quarter is downloaded from Youtube. But this sort of thing will never be on the Grammies, because it isn’t SKWAK-Q featuring Jay-Z lip-syncing to synchronized pelvic thrusts by an unattractive woman with oversized buttocks and an expression that says “something smells really bad in here.”

Frankly, I’m astonished that anyone watches them anymore.

One… two… and now THREE!

Thanks to the nearly 700 backers of Will Caligan’s Comic, Book #3 is go. This means SIX MORE issues of illustrations by Will. As mentioned previously, Arkhaven Comics will ensure that all six issues – and the graphic novel – are professionally colored regardless of whether Stretch Goal 5 is hit or not.

Thanks also to the various professionals who are contributing their skills to the campaign. Their collective contributions in kind are of a similar scale to that being provided by the financial backers. To quote one of them: “$?$*! We’re doing EIGHTEEN issues? Well, all right then.”

So, which books do you want to see? Voting is tomorrow, so this is the place to discuss them. Chuck Dixon has said that the entire GREEN KNIGHT’S SQUIRE trilogy can be done in 12 issues. Can THE STARS COME BACK or ROCKY MOUNTAIN RETRIBUTION be done in 6? What about SWORD & FLOWER? Discuss amongst yourselves.

And no, whoever bought Valiant was not us.

Bleeding Cool has received a tip-off from a West Coast media source that Valiant Entertainment, publishers of comics such as X-O Manowar, Quantum & Woody, Bloodshot, Faith, Harbinger and Shadowman, has been sold in its entirety.

UPDATE: In answer to several questions, the campaign ends at ends at 12:41am EST tonight, i.e. shortly after midnight.