'I'm Just Trying to Troll People and Make Them Feel Really Bad.'

Don’t miss last week’s links, collected here: “The 2 Most Disgusting, Soul-Crushing Stories From Last Week (And 81 Competitors)” and Monday’s round-up here: “Man Sent By ISIS to Rape Pit Bull In Neighbor’s Yard? Clown Thugs Terrorize Paris?” See shocking stories you think should should be included? Tweet them to @DaveSwindle.

At Vice Tuesday:

1. THE GUY TROLLING INSTAGRAM WITH HUNDREDS OF PHOTOS OF ANIMAL CORPSES

VICE: What happened to you as a child? Why do you need to make everybody hate you?
Deadanimalsikilled: Maybe I just didn’t get enough attention. Maybe if people cared about me more, I wouldn’t be forced to post such terrible pictures.

Where do you get the photos?
I usually get the images from Yahoo, because I thought that it would be harder for people to find them on Google and realize I was fake. I don’t know if that logic makes sense. I’m just trying to troll people and make them feel really bad.

It seems like they’re trying to make you feel bad, too. How long have you been doing this?
I’ve been doing running Deadanimalsikilled since October 2013. I started with a mouse, and I’m working my way up into larger and larger game. I feel like that’s what a serial killer would do. First a rat, then a crow, and so on.

I get a lot of death threats. People want me dead.

Via Drudge Tuesday:

2. Ann Romney Blasts Dem For Sexist Slur… 

3. ‘Escort whore out the door’…

4. Pope Blesses Exorcists…

At Breitbart:

5. Police Won’t Say If Alleged Killers of 9-Year-Old Girl Are Illegal Immigrants

6. David Axelrod: Gun Violence More of a Threat Than Ebola

At Mother Jones:

7. Buzz Kill: Pot Growers May Be Wiping Out This Cute Furry Mammal

Fishers are forest-dwelling, cat-sized mammals—and one of the only known predators of porcupines—that were nearly wiped out by trapping and logging during the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of the current threats to the fishers are familiar, like wildfires and logging. But FWS found the misuse of rodenticides, more commonly known as rat poison, to be a “relatively recent and troubling threat.” There are now about 4,000 fishers left in dispersed pockets in California, Oregon, and Washington. FWS cited a study that found rat poison in the blood of 85 percent of fishers studied between 2012 and 2014.

The rise in rodenticide usage stems partly from the proliferation of “trespass grows,” or hidden spots in public parks, forests, and tribal lands where marijuana growers cultivate their goods. Each year, the United States grows about 22 million pounds of marijuana, and nearly half of the cannabis eradicated by law enforcement comes from trespass grows. It’s difficult to overstate how much the grows contribute to the weed industry: In 2013, 72 percent of the outdoor plants seized by law enforcement in California came from trespass grows.

At Salon:

8. Driving to an abortion clinic in Texas is really expensive

9. Police say they can’t stop child molester from hanging out with “Honey Boo Boo” kids

 TMZ reports that McDaniel is only legally prohibited from spending time with Shannon’s daughter Anna Cardwell, whom he forced to engage in oral sex when she was 8 years old. McDaniel subsequently served 10 years in prison on other charges, and reportedly rekindled his relationship with Shannon when he was released in March.

According to law enforcement officials, McDaniel has not been in violation of legal requirements that he stay away from Cardwell, who is now 20 and has a child of her own.

Daily Beast Lead stories Tuesday:

10. Sex, Murder, and Adoption: The Wild Trial of the Polo King

11. The Ghosts of Gaza: Israel’s Soldier Suicides

At the Atlantic Wire:

12. When It Goes Down, Facebook Loses $24,420 Per Minute

At Jezebel:

13. Death Becomes Her: The Dark Arts of Crepe and Mourning

At Campus Reform, via Susan L.M. Goldberg:

14. Students organize ‘Sh*t-In,’ ‘Gender Inclusive Bathroom Challenge’

“Having non-gender neutral bathrooms makes them (transgender and gender-fluid students) afraid and uncomfortable. It is not fair to that population of students to have to think about that on a daily basis,” Kayla Caddell, a student participating in the challenge told Daily Emerald, UO’s student newspaper. “It has checked my privilege in a way I didn’t expect it would.”

Elle Mallon, the Gender and Sexual Diversity advocate for Associated Students of OU (ASUO), led the challenge, alongside Maure Smith-Benanti, director of LGBT Education and Support Services. The pair hopes the challenge will combat the discrimination and discomfort facing non-conforming students.

“We find that restrooms and lockers rooms are the places where transgender people encounter aggression and micro-aggression,” Smith-Benanti told the Daily Emerald. “The most important thing is everyone needs a safe place to do their business.”

At Truth Revolt:

15. BEN SHAPIRO: Turn Down for What?

On the way to the airport the other day, my Uber driver, an elderly Russian chap, turned on a Top 40 radio station. Not being one to complain, I actually sat and listened to the lyrics. The song blasting through the speakers of the late-model Honda Civic was titled “Habits.” The singer, a young, presumably wealthy Swede named Tove Lo (actual name: Tove Nilsson), warbles about her need to visit sex clubs, do drugs, “binge on all my Twinkies, throw up in the tub.” She laments that she “drank up all my money.”

Why? Well, she explains, “You’re gone and I gotta stay high all the time.”

The next song featured a rapper named Lil Jon screaming loudly at the listener that it is “Fire up that loud, another round of shots. … TURN DOWN FOR WHAT!” Translation: We’re drunk and crazed, and we won’t stop being drunk and crazed. The music video, as described by creator Daniel Kwan explores, “this other universe where dudes are so pumped up on their own d***s — and they’re so into their testosterone — that the way that the show that is by breaking s*** with their d***s.” The video, which shows a young man crashing through ceilings and into furniture as his erect penis swivels wildly in his pants, currently has nearly 130 million views on YouTube.

No wonder Tove Lo needs to stay high all the time.

The end of Western civilization, it turns out, comes with both a bang and a whimper. The bang: endless sex, animalistic, primal, without strings. As Adam Levine whines, “Baby, I’m preying on you tonight, hunt you down, eat you alive, just like animals, animals, like animals.” In 1971, according to the National Survey of Young Women, 30.4 percent of young women aged 15-19 living in metropolitan areas reported having premarital sex. By 1979, that number was 49.8 percent. Today, 62 percent of young women overall have had premarital sex according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 1950, men’s median age of first marriage stood at 22.8; today, it stands at 28.2. More people having sex younger, and without commitment is not a recipe for societal happiness.

16. Johnny Cash’s Son Arrested for Stripping at Airport

17. Dolly Parton to Christian Fans:Stop Judging Gays

18. Police: Man Beheads Woman, Jumps in Front of Train

19. Ben Shapiro: Debunking The Myth of Michael Brown, Gentle Giant

Now, a new autopsy report revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – the same newspaper that originally termed Brown a “Gentle Giant” – showed that Brown’s body had a “graze wound” on his thumb; the wound contained matter “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm.” That can only happen at close range – so close, in fact, that there was no stippling – a patterning of gunpowder that will not appear within an inch of the gun barrel. In other words, as San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Judy Melinek said, “this guy is reaching for the gun.”

The autopsy backs up the altercation at the car as well – Brown’s skin was found on the exterior of the vehicle.  CNN reports that blood from Michael Brown was found on Wilson’s uniform, police car, and gun.

The autopsy even shows that Brown was not shot with his hands up. According to the autopsy report, the gunshot wound to St. Michael’s “upper dorsal right arm” demonstrated that the direction of the shot was “slightly upward, backward and leftward.” That means, according to Melinek, the shot “traveled from the back of the arm to the inner arm, which means Brown’s palms could not have been facing Wilson.”

At the Daily Mail:

20. ‘Fake orgasms and don’t eat too much’: How a $1,000-an-hour escort rose to the top by playing the ‘perfect woman’ for Wall Street’s wealthiest men 

Svetlana Z, as she refers to herself, moved to New York from Chelyabinsk, Russia, when she was 19 years old and had $300 to her name. Lured by the promise of quick money, she entered the escort industry and soon made a small fortune by catering to investment bankers, 90per cent of them married.

‘Mostly, I offered understanding,’ she wrote for Medium. ‘The truth is, even for guys who hire me for three or four hours, the sex usually only takes about 15 minutes.’ Not bad for $1,000 an hour.

Svetlana – who describes herself as 5ft 7in, 119lbs, with long legs, hazel eyes, full lips and a slender figure –  remarks that when it did come to sex, however short-lived, massaging her client’s ego was key.

Around 98per cent of men wanted to go down on her, and 80per cent of them would ask if she had come, or insist she had multiple orgasms before they did. This wasn’t about her pleasure, of course, it was their need to ‘prove themselves.’

21. Investigator who led probe into Secret Service prostitution scandal resigns ‘after HE was caught with a hooker in Florida’

22. Halloween really IS evil, says Vatican, and should be replaced with HOLYWEEN so children can dress up as saints and pray

23. Predator accused of sexually assaulting six women in cross-country crime spree is caught in New York after crashing into the Hudson River

24. My $7m-a-year investment banker husband forced me to have sex with drug firm boss in foursome at the Ritz hotel after cocaine binge, claims his wife

At Patheos:

25. Serving God in the Business of Death

Caleb Wilde is that rare breed of death writer who doesn’t write about death from the perspective of someone dying or someone having buried a loved one. A sixth generation funeral director in small-town Pennsylvania, Wilde’s popular blog, Confessions of a Funeral Director, has earned him a wide following and appearances at Ted-X and on “20/20” for its frank, funny, and sensitive posts about a universal, yet taboo topic. On the day we talked to Wilde, he was in the midst of two funerals. Our interview by Christine A. Scheller, about his primary work and his death education efforts, has been edited for length and clarity.

Christine A. Scheller: You take death seriously, but also include a lot of humor in your writing about it. Why do you think our culture is so generally death avoidant, but embracing of the macabre at Halloween?

Caleb Wilde: We are in an obsessive state of denial about death and work really hard to make sure it stays a comfortable distance from us. And so, it’s possible that Halloween connects to a number of things that we obsessively attempt to push to the side. It’s a holiday that lets us embrace some degree of spirituality and some degree of death acceptance.

Like a valve for a topic that it’s not OK to talk about?

Yes, but we’re still controlling the conversation to a degree during Halloween. Most of it is what I would call death porn, where it’s not a realistic picture of the experience of death and dying. It’s a stylized picture. It captures something that is only a mirror of what’s real.

What, if any, are the dangers of this sort of pornographic portrayal of death?

It gives us a false sense of intimacy with a topic that we’re still avoiding. The same dangers that exist with pornography exist with death porn. It’s a way that we can experience death, so we think, without some of the emotional and intimate ties. And so, it produces a false sense of intimacy with death.

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image illustration via shutterstock / motttive