Vice’s Gritty Multimedia Reboot of “A Christmas Carol” Met With Universal Praise

Christopher Cantwell, praised by critics for his re-imagining of Ebeneezer Scrooge as a cowardly neo-Nazi (YouTube)

By JONATHAN KIM     August 17, 2017

LOS ANGELES – The first chapter of Vice Media’s gritty re-imagining of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” was released on YouTube earlier this week. Titled “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the take-no-prisoners reboot of the beloved Christmas classic was followed up yesterday by its second half, “Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space.”

The multimedia endeavor has garnered near universal acclaim, with critics and viewers alike praising the filmmakers for so perfectly capturing the texture and relevance of the original work without resorting to cynicism or melodrama. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for RogerEbert.com, said that the film’s first half “Perfectly re-packages the violence, detachment and hubris of the original protagonist’s worldview; instead of the pleas of street urchins stomped out underfoot by the capitalist greed of Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are witness to the weary humanity of Charlottesville’s citizens as they struggle with the evil and callousness of white supremacy and neo-Nazi violence. The bewildered rage of a bespectacled black man – his spirit crushed by watching James Alex Fields, Jr murder and maim wholesale a crowd of local counter-protesters – bears more weight and truth than a thousand Tiny Tims.”

The film reinterprets Ebeneezer Scrooge as Christopher Cantwell, a man whose hate for immigrants, liberals, and black Americans is matched only by his childlike preoccupation with violence. We watch Cantwell eagerly anticipate violent opposition, his eyes lighting up with glee any time he thinks a counter-protester might push or shove one of his neo-Nazi compatriots, so that he might unleash righteous retaliatory fury. At one point, Cantwell waxes on about the fantasy of someday being forced to kill a dangerous adversary with one of his six different firearms, all of which he puts on jubilant display for the audience in a scene more reminiscent of a child showing off his toy collection. Cantwell’s words barely veil his obvious desire to foment violence so that he might strike down his deadly opponents.

Cantwell’s deadly opponents never materialize. Like most protests in the United States and throughout the Western world, the violence never escalates to the small-arms-fire battle that Cantwell and his friends wish it would. Armed militiamen, coated in tactical armor and sporting semi-automatic rifles, stand as impotent as clusters of carolers might have in Dickens’s original version; full of spirit, but unable to satisfy any purpose.

It is these images of white men, armed and postured for action in the name of their racial superiority, that drives the narrative of the first half of the film, with Cantwell’s disdain and nearly Vaudevillian lack of understanding of the black experience in America matched only by his mania for perceived oppression. It is this total ignorance of American culture, and his narrow, paranoid preoccupation with unnumbered imaginary antagonists that perfectly set up the second half of this masterpiece.

“Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space” is the exquisite followup to the film’s first part, and features a tearful and terrified Cantwell, suddenly faced with the consequences of his actions and beliefs, bawling helplessly at the prospect of being in trouble with the law.

The messaging is obvious: Cantwell shows utter disdain for minorities in the United States, who must face the reality of increased and fatally-disproportionate law enforcement action on a daily basis, but when he himself is suddenly in the position of possibly facing an arrest warrant, his bravado crumbles immediately, and he lacks the basic emotional strength and resolve that the minorities he so despises manage to muster when placed in the exact same situation. One need look only as far as the shooting of Philandro Castille and witness the staunch resolve of Diamond Reynolds as she stared down the smoking barrel of a trigger-happy officer’s gun, and one sees the grimly comic difference. Cantwell shouldn’t be anywhere near the kitchen, because forget the heat… even the thought of an open flame brings him to tears.

Some critics felt that the second half’s outcome was a little too on the nose, but conceded that the raw, pathetic emotion on display more than made up for its rote narrative shortcomings.

While critics fawned over this daring re-imagining of “A Christmas Carol,” they are universally unimpressed with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s half-baked reboot of the Cold War, hoping that the production will fizzle before it reaches completion.

Mike Pence Caught Measuring Oval Office for New Drapes

Vice President Mike Pence caught in the Oval Office on Monday, claiming he totally forgot to grab this folder from the President’s desk earlier (Shealah Craighead)

By ELAINE KULINSKA    August 17, 2017

WASHINGTON – Amidst reports of internal strife at all levels of the Trump administration this week, White House aides report that Vice President Mike Pence has more than once been caught measuring the Oval Office windows for new drapes.

Recent events – including the President’s handling of the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville over the weekend, Presidential adviser Steve Bannon’s erratic interview with the press, GOP allies abandoning the President, and too many de-staffings, falsehoods, and unhinged press briefings to adequately summarize in one article – have shaken the administration from top to bottom. During this intense period of confusion, several White House aides disclosed to reporters that Mike Pence has been spending an inordinate amount of time strolling the halls adjacent to the Oval Office.

“I don’t usually see the Vice President around here,” confided one aide on condition of anonymity, “but this week I’ve already run into him maybe five or six times.”

Pence was reportedly caught with a tape measure, balanced precariously on the sill of one of the Oval Office’s windows, and did not notice when the aide entered the room. When the aide asked Pence what he was doing, Pence nearly lost his footing, arms pinwheeling.

Recovering, Pence told the aide that he was simply using the tape measure to reach a pen that he had accidentally thrown up there, earlier. Pence hastily exited the Oval Office, but not before casually asking if the aide felt that maybe the room could use a different carpet.

Employees at Washington’s local IKEA confirmed that they had spotted Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan hand-in-hand as they strolled through the furniture section.

Remains of James Woods’s Career Unearthed on Twitter

James Woods’s Career at the height of its relevance (left), and some of the remains of James Woods’s Career discovered on Twitter (Universal Pictures/FBI)

By JONATHAN KIM    August 17, 2017

WASHINGTON – The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Computer Forensics Lab confirmed today that the remains of the career unearthed on Twitter earlier this year belonged to actor James Woods.

James Woods’s career was still thriving through the 1990s, but then familiar patterns started to emerge,  explained Special Agent Tia Wong.

“When we first started investigating, we started to look for telltale signs,” said Wong. “Our techs had discovered some fragments of Tweets complaining about millennials and ‘special snowflakes’ and Colin Kaepernick, and those are generally strong indications that we’re following a trail of breadcrumbs left by a career that might be in danger of dying.”

“It’s frequently the case with a lot of these older, whiter, male, North American celebrities that their careers reach a point where the career itself is unable to continue to adapt and cope with new stimulus,” Wong continued. “If you look at the careers of people like Patrick Stewart, Betty White… even more contemporary cases like the careers of Sarah Silverman, and even Louis C.K. – whose career is actually a bit of an outlier, given predispositional factors – you can see a propensity for adaptation and even revitalization at times. The particular form of stagnation we’ve discovered in the case of James Woods’s career only seems to occur in white men, typically from the United States or Canada.”

Wong identified key warning signs to look out for. “You want to pay attention: Is the career starting to falter a bit because it can’t handle differing, emerging viewpoints? This typically manifests itself as attacking ‘safe spaces,’ without really understanding what a safe space is, attacking people as being ‘too sensitive,’ or ‘triggered.'” Wong added, “You’ll also see a fixation on cartoonish, old-fashioned masculinity that rewards stubbornness, an unwillingness to absorb new ideas, or the idea that people around you have somehow become ‘weak.’ You’ll especially see these warning signs in stand-up careers as they begin to disintegrate.”

Wong pointed to James Woods’s case. A white male Canadian actor who found popularity in the 1980s appearing in films like Videodrome, Woods started showing signs of a moribund career by the early 2000s. “We’ve managed to follow forensic trails as far back as 2006, thanks to a fragmented social media presence, but we can only wonder that if maybe people had seriously been paying attention to James Wood’s career, maybe these signs could have been caught, sooner.”

Aside from revealing more odious behaviors – including suing the family of a dead Twitter user for $10 million because the deceased called Woods a cocaine addict – Woods’s Twitter also displayed a few strong indicators that researchers consider red flags for impending career death.

“The big one is this Tweet where Woods complains about ‘political correctness,'” Wong said, indicating a Tweet where Woods whined, “[The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] is not a club, nor a propaganda platform, nor an exercise in political correctness,” in response to criticisms that the Academy Awards had routinely passed over people of color… a reaction that Wong pointed out, “Implies that only white people are the ones actually worthy of recognition, while people of color lack the necessary talent and skill to excel. It’s symptoms like this that point to inevitable career death.”

Wong elaborated upon the tendency of dying careers to latch onto “political correctness,” saying, “I can’t say for certain why these careers inevitably attach themselves to this notion of ‘political correctness,’ that’s not really my department. A prevailing theory is that the career latches on as a means of sustenance, but ‘political correctness’ has been latched onto for so long that it simply can’t support any more careers at this point. I mean, we’re talking about something that careers have been latching onto for about forty years; you simply can’t whine about ‘political correctness’ over and over and over for that long before it becomes unsustainable.”

“This is where he had a meltdown because Twitter was banning accounts engaged in racist harassment,” Wong said, pulling up a Tweet reading, “Since @Twitter is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll.”

“Bear in mind, this is in response to Twitter banning accounts that had engaged in hate speech,” Wong said. “Even more than whining about ‘political correctness,’ tantrums over private companies refusing to support bullying or harassment – or any threat to those particular forms of ‘free speech’ – are major warning signs of career morbidity.”

Wong said that while in recent years, experts have managed to detect patterns and start to pick out these warning signs of a dying career much earlier in the career’s trajectory, for many the research has come far too late.

“If we had been more acutely aware of these indicators, perhaps we could have saved not only James Woods’s career, but also Dane Cook’s,” lamented Wong.

At press time, the FBI and local emergency response teams had been dispatched to both Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan’s residences.

Predictable End-Result of Thirty Years of Conservative Media Policy Sworn in as President of the United States of America

Pictured: The predictable end-result of thirty years of conservative media policy. (AP)

 

By MIRANDA SAUNDERS  Jan. 20, 2017

WASHINGTON – The predictable end-result of thirty years of conservative media policy was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States this afternoon.

The predictable end-result of thirty years of conservative media policy was sworn in despite losing the election by 3 million popular votes, making the predictable end-result of thirty years of conservative media policy the fourth Presidential candidate to win the Presidency despite losing the vote, as well as the fourth Republican Presidential candidate to win the Presidency despite losing the vote.

While supporters were celebratory, the majority of politicians and members of the United States population proved to be extremely unhappy. Some lifelong Republicans expressed shock at the election of the predictable end-result of thirty years of conservative media policy – who is named Donald Trump – many having abstained from voting for either candidate.

“I honestly couldn’t bring myself to do it,” said Jennifer Knowles of Stockbridge, PA. “I’m a Republican through and through but I really couldn’t vote for a man who encourages violence against protesters and who invokes the same rhetoric as some of history’s worst dictators. On the other hand, I’ve been following Bill O’Reilly’s coverage of Hillary Clinton for years now and it couldn’t be more clear that she’s a criminal of the highest order who is a sociopath capable of eradicating any and all evidence of her most heinous crimes. I certainly could never vote for her.”

Others were quick to cite the insufferable attitudes of East-coast liberals for Trump’s victory.

“People around here are just sick and tired,” said Betty Stanton of Laramie, WY. “We’re sick and tired of the elitism of total strangers from New York City who we’ve never met. All you have to do is turn on Fox News to hear about how condescending these liberal elites are towards good, hardworking Americans like us. And don’t even get me started on those people out in Hollywood.”

John Smith, a Trump voter from Los Angeles who chose to retain his anonymity, confided, “Everyone I know personally out here is some screeching liberal stereotype and I simply can’t stand it, anymore. I’ve never really talked politics with my friends but it’s evident that they all fit neatly into the mold that Alex Jones always lays out on Infowars; they’re arrogant, entitled, fragile snowflakes, probably beyond any sort of reasonable discussion, which is why I’ve never even bothered discussing the issues with them.”

Others had more practical reasons for supporting the candidate. Daniel Wallace lives in Texas, a state where Governor Rick Perry refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, blocking the act from taking effect in his state.

“Obamacare is a total failure,” said Wallace. “I live in Texas and I can’t even afford health insurance. Glenn Beck was right about the Affordable Care Act all along; it’s just another attempt to impose socialism by Barack Hussein Obama.” Wallace went on to clarify, “And according to what I read on Breitbart, Trump already signed an executive order that just fixed healthcare for everyone, so I should be fine from now on, unless the Democrats ruin it.”

“I like to stay informed,” Shelby Wentworth of Mesa, AZ told reporters. “So I’m confident that when I say Hillary Clinton is by-and-large the most crooked, corrupt and dangerous human being alive, I’m not coming from a biased perspective. This is all factual stuff that anyone would know if they’d just listen to what Rush Limbaugh has had to say on the matter for the past twenty years.”

“You lost, get over it,” said Daniel Colton of Cheboygan, MI. “Get over yourselves, Trump won in a landslide. If you don’t believe me just check out the Sean Hannity Show.”

Editor’s Note: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the FCC’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan appointee, Mark S. Fowler. The Fairness Doctrine ensured equal media time for opposing political viewpoints and was introduced in 1949 to prevent media from becoming propaganda for any one political viewpoint.

 

Op-Ed: I’m Jamie Gilt, Pro-Gun Internet Celebrity, and I’m About to Get Shot in the Back By My 4 Year-Old Son

Jamie Gilt, posing with a child and a firearm in an image that boldly attempts to redefine irony (Jamie Gilt).

 

By JAMIE GILT    Mar. 10, 2016

Hi, all!  I’m Jamie Gilt, and if you know anything about me, you know I distrust our oppressive government, I love horses, and I fully encourage everyone to own guns and – moreover – teach their children the proper and safe use of firearms.
 

There are all kinds of unfair, pernicious myths surrounding guns and gun owners.
 

Some like to characterize us as smug bullies more obsessed with rubbing our 2nd Amendment rights in the faces of anyone who disagrees with us than we are with the actual safety of innocent people in our own country.
 

Some say that we self-identify so strongly with gun ownership that we refuse to accept the statistical reality that the United States has the highest rate of firearms-related homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths among all developed First World countries.

 

Some people think it’s crass and borderline evil to constantly trot out the completely-irrelevant nuance between an “assault rifle” and a “sporting rifle,” rather than address the indisputable fact – like actual adults – that sporting rifles are regularly responsible for the grisliest mass shootings carried out in our country.

 

Well, you all know me, you know I believe first and foremost in gun safety, which is why I’ve trained my 4 year-old son to be utterly proficient in the use of firearms, something you naysayers would never accept because you insist upon characterizing gun evangelists like myself as at best irresponsible and at worst, callous and self-absorbed.

 

Well, I’m sitting here in my truck, with my 4 year-old son in the back seat, and I’m here to tell you that OH SHIT!  OH MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!

 

HOLY SHITTING FUCK!  HOLY SHITTING FUCK THAT HURTS!  FUCK THAT HURTS!!!  FUCKING FUCKING FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

 

Oh Christ!  Oh sweet Jesus Christ!  Oh God!  Oh God!  Oh, don’t let me die, here!  Oh God!

 

Honey!  Oh fucking shitting FUCK, my back!  Honey, put mommy’s gun down!  Mommy’s not angry… mommy just needs you to put the gun down, she just needs you to put the handgun that she left sitting next to you – loaded – in the back seat down, and not shoot mommy in the GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING BACK AGAIN!

 

Don’t cry… don’t cry, honey.  I said don’t CRY!  I’M the one who was SHOT!!!  What are YOU crying for???

 

Oh sweet Lord… oh sweet Lord in Heaven… if you see me through this I swear, I swear I will NOT learn a single thing from this experience and I’ll continue to champion unfettered gun ownership throughout the United States like an irresponsible narcissist.

 

I swear.

 

Holy SHIT this hurts!

 

Editor’s Note:  Jamie Gilt is an outspoken proponent for gun ownership who was actually, literally shot in the back by her own 4 year-old son.  That’s a thing that really happened in the real world.  She survived and, to date, has learned nothing from the incident.

 

 

Justice Scalia Offers Dissenting Opinion on Fisher v University of Texas

Justice Antonin Scalia (left) and Justice Clarence Thomas discuss Fisher v University of Texas (Jordan Hamilton/AP)

By ELAINE KULINSKA    Dec. 18, 2015

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, after hearing opinions from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, weighed in with his dissenting opinion on Fisher v University of Texas, today.

“Oh shooda, ah, manga wanjee kohkpah.  Peecha wahnjee kohkpa tahng nahngee toochantkee troi,” began Scalia, addressing the lawsuit that has seen an academically-average white student attempt to claim discrimination for not getting into the college of her choice.

Scalia reaffirmed his initial view of the case, saying that “Yoobah koh ra doh ka mallo wampa mah yass ka chung kawah wookiee,” implying that he had not been convinced by the defense’s arguments.

“Ya koon tacha poonoo nee sah, gee,” Scalia added, “Pah. Manga wonjee kohkpa, oong Jedi. Chool kanya wee shaja mee-choo.”

Scalia, who is well-known for being a strict constructionist as well as an iron-fisted Hutt crime lord from the planet Tatooine, reminded his fellow justices that “Il yabba ma dookee mahs tah, icht boong cheekoh pahn na green nahp meet’noh toh pohnkee dohkoh lah choya!”

Scalia then swallowed a Klatooine paddy frog whole, before licking his lips with his enormous tongue and patting his expansive green belly.  He concluded his opinion by paraphrasing a previous statement on the issue of college admissions and affirmative action, saying, “Like I said before, blacks would be better off in slower schools, anyways.”

Scalia then departed for the Pit of Carkoon, where he intends to oversee the execution of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo from the comfort of his personal pleasure barge.

White Person Too Dumb to Understand Discrimination Upset She Didn’t Get Into a Better School

Abigail Fisher (left), about to say something pretty dumb while attorney Bert Rein waits his turn (Toni Cheade/AP)

By ELAINE KULINSKA    Dec. 17, 2015

AUSTIN, TX – Abigail Fisher, a very dumb white person from Texas accustomed to getting whatever she wants pretty much all the time, met the press today ahead of going before the Supreme Court of the United States for a second time.

Abigail, who suffers from an inability to understand even slightly-nuanced concepts like discrimination, addressed the press.

“White people in the United States – especially in my home state of Texas – have suffered discrimination for far too long.”

Abigail’s struggle and ensuing court battle – arguably one of the dumbest to go before the United States Supreme Court in its two hundred and twenty-five year history – hinges entirely upon the fact that she didn’t get something that she wanted this one time.

Rejected from the University of Texas for not satisfying academic standards, Abigail reiterated the dumbness of her struggle by reminding the press that, “The year I was rejected, other people were accepted… people who aren’t me.  Some of those people weren’t white. If that doesn’t prove that the college was engaged in systemic discrimination against whites, I don’t know what does.  I’m not dumb, that’s outright racism.”

Abigail, who is dumb, then took questions from the press.

When asked how she could consider her rejection from the University of Texas racial discrimination when only five applicants of color were accepted, while 168 applicants of color who possessed Abigail’s same academic qualifications were likewise rejected, Abigail simply stared into space until a reporter snapped his fingers in front of Abigail’s face.

Startled, Abigail shrieked, having clearly forgotten where she was.  Her attorney, Bert Rein, frantically ushered her from the room.

After the Supreme Court of the United States hears Abigail’s case, it will hear arguments from Bruce Godfrey, a Texas man suing Denmark-based LEGO Group after he suffered medical complications from eating an entire Star Wars-themed play set manufactured by the company.

Obama Struggles to Maintain Growing Number of False Flag Operations

President Barack Obama, suffering from exhaustion, poses as the parent of a phony shooting victim during a phone interview with the Washington Post (Jordan Hamilton/AP)

By MIRANDA SAUNDERS   Dec. 16, 2015

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has been working night and day in order to plan, co-ordinate, and manage a staggering number of false flag operations, sources close to the President say.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one source related, “It’s crazy. I’ve never seen someone work so hard. As everyone knows, the growing number of mass shootings in the United States are all phony, staged operations planned by the government in an effort to undermine the 2nd Amendment and strip the population of its right to bear arms, but the feeling around the office is that the President is pushing himself far too hard on this one.”

With such shootings appearing to occur nearly daily in the United States, the orchestration and staging of such events in a way to make them believable to the American public requires an unparalleled number of personnel and man hours, but as resources became stretched, the President himself was forced to take over direct management of the operations.

“Normally, we would have teams of handlers, media specialists, actors to play the “shooters,” the “victims,” the “families,” the “witnesses,” entire offices dedicated to just maintaining the illusion that all of these people and events are actually real, but then we encounter the issue of having to pay all those people, we have to provide overhead, we have to ensure that none of the thousands of people involved in the conspiracy ever decide to blow the whistle. Eventually, just ensuring that the management layer remains intact required as much management as the actual operations, themselves. Finally, the President decided to just take over the orchestration of these false flag operations himself, cutting out all the middle-men.”

Of course, dissolving an ongoing conspiracy of such magnitude is a full-time job unto itself. “We had to let a lot of people go,” our source confided, “but President Obama has been careful to maintain good relationships with all involved and it goes without saying that everyone had to sign an NDA.  We’re confident that for the remainder of his life, President Obama will be able to micro-manage the details of this entire operation to ensure the truth never actually comes out.”  The source added, “But man… the poor guy is really burning the candle at both ends.”

As of press time, the President was unable to provide comment. Our source told us that the President – bleary-eyed and running purely on caffeine – had just climbed into a pickup truck in order to grudgingly drive to a mall in Arkansas, saying that he would “Just do this one my damn self.”