Author: James R.

The idiot who owns and runs this site. He does not actually look like Jon Pertwee.

Whatever happened to Peter Dutton?

I was just thinking the other day about how we haven’t heard much from the erstwhile leader of the opposition since the last election, and lo, here he comes again:

The release of the Liberal Party’s review into its disastrous 2025 election campaign has been delayed because former opposition leader Peter Dutton claims elements of the report are defamatory to him and his staff.
The ABC has confirmed that Mr Dutton and other key players were given the report ahead of its release, which is usual practice.
However Mr Dutton has claimed in response that releasing it in its current form would be inappropriate because it contains claims about him and his staff he believes are defamatory, and has suggested its release carries legal risk for the Liberal Party.
The party’s secretariat has now held off on releasing the report in order to deal with the issues Mr Dutton has raised — with some believing he may sue the party if changes are not made. […]
The ABC understands Mr Dutton has told the party he is worried that his former chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish, is unfairly targeted in the report, and that his staff deserve protection. […]
One senior Liberal told the ABC the party’s review of its 2022 election loss was also critical of then-leader Scott Morrison, and accused Mr Dutton of holding himself and his office to a different standard.
The threat of potential legal action by a former party leader is also unusual and exposes a rift within the party.

I’m just wondering what might be “defamatory” in a report like this. I mean, the fact remains that the Coalition failed terribly at the last election. Someone has to take responsibility for that at some point. If Dutton thinks the report is unfair to his staff, then he can take it in their place, as he should anyway; he was a catastrophe of a candidate that even Australians weren’t stupid enough to vote for, and Australians voted Abbott and Morrison into power so that tells you how bad Dutton was. Ultimately YOU failed, Peter, rather than the people working for you… maybe let them decide if they want a legal battle.

Shittering prize

If we learned nothing else from this week in politics, it’s that there actually is one person with even less capacity for embarrassment than Mushroom Cock, and that person is Maria Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader, seen here giving his majesty her Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his commitment to Venezuela’s oil reserves… er, freedom or something. Yeah, she actually gave him the fucking thing and he’s kept it, BECAUSE OF FUCKING COURSE. What else would the cunt have done? This is all despite the fact that the Nobel committee swears up and down that she can’t actually do that cos the Nobel laureateship can’t be revoked, shared or transferred, and I bet there’s going to be some discussion very soon about changing that first detail if nothing else…

…And this grotestque show of fawning STILL won’t work for her. Trump’s got the prize, which is what he cares about, but Delcy Rodriguez has the leadership of the country and the oil, and that’s even more important. I have seen a conspiracy theory (which I personally find at least somewhat credible) floating about that the whole Maduro business was in fact instigated by Rodriguez and others in the United Socialist Party, that they’ve been working secretly with the US government for months to get the latter to remove Maduro on their behalf and let them take over, with obvious recompense and favours for the US. I think Machado’s going to have to pay Trump a lot more than that if she expects him to install her as his puppet instead.

In any case, the whole stupid affair has started producing memes of people giving Krasnov prizes on social media, and if we have to be stuck with generative AI then let it be used this if nothing else. The most inspired one I’ve seen so far is this little bit of genius:

Milli Donilli: fake singers, fake president

Parenthetically, this is not actually the first time this bullshit with the Nobel Prize has happened; in 1943 Knut Hamsun, famed Norwegian author and, er, Germanophile, shall we say, gave his own Nobel (for literature, awarded in 1920) to Joseph Goebbels in recognition of the Dritte Reich’s efforts to save Norway from itself in the early 1940s. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat but it does rhyme, and that’s kind of what I’m seeing here…

Such bloody awful poetry

Oooh, I just perpetrated another mix! An assortment of 80s stuff this time round.

    1. Big Audio Dynamite, C’Mon Every Beatbox (ext. vocal version)
    2. Bush Tetras, Too Many Creeps
    3. The Smiths, Frankly Mr Shankly
    4. REM, These Days
    5. Public Enemy, Rebel Without a Pause
    6. My Bloody Valentine, Thorn
    7. Sonic Youth, Eric’s Trip
    8. Alan Vega, Cry Fire
    9. China Crisis, King in a Catholic Style
    10. A Certain Ratio, Life’s a Scream
    11. The Sisters of Mercy, Possession
    12. Empty Quarter, Crucial Lover
    13. Single Gun Theory, Exorcise This Wasteland
    14. Bauhaus, The Sanity Assassin

Not now, Lovecraft

In the midst of everything else happening at the moment, I feel that the last thing we need right now is the discovery of the city of the Great Race of Yith and the half-polypous horrors from even greater antiquity that drove them to flee millions of years into the future and rendered the creatures their minds had inhabited extinct. Alternately, maybe extinction is exactly what we do need just now…

Actrually, the real story is just as interesting as Lovecraft’s (if not potentially a bit more alarming in a different way); this geologist reckons it’s actually a buried crater about 300 miles across, which would make it nearly three times the size of the Chicxulub crater which is thought to have been where the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs hit. If this was an impact crater (and unfortunately there’s no real evidence yet that it is, apparently that’ll require a lot of obtain either way), the rock that made it must have been a motherfucker of a thing to leave that much of a crater. Gilkson reckons that if he’s right about it being an impact crater, then it probably hit around 445m years ago, or about the time of a mass extinction that wiped out 85% of all life on Earth… but did it leave room for a species of “immense rugose cones ten feet high”? And are we better off not knowing for sure?

RIP Dilbert

News is just coming through that Scott Adams has checked out… he acknowledged less than a year ago that he had prostate cancer with bone metastasis, the same sort that Joe Biden has but Adams claimed he’d been living with it for longer than Biden had, or at any rate longer than Biden had admitted to having it… that was a fairly vicious story some conservative shitheads were spreading when Biden’s own diagnosis was announced last year, i.e. that he’d been living with it for a lot longer than that and had been Keeping It Secret From The American People, a heinous crime that the present incumbent is not currently also committing, being so open and honest about his increasing and increasingly obvious health issues as he is.

And you’d think that having the same kind of cancer as someone else would make you sympathetic towards them, you’d understand what they were suffering cos you were suffering the same. (Obviously I have that sort of sympathy when I read about other people suffering strokes like I did.) But Scott Adams was a mean-spirited prick who clearly couldn’t resist shitty point-scoring even in the midst of his own impending death. I regret having kind of liked Dilbert once. And I’ll bet Adams would’ve been livid to know that Biden outlived him. And because I am also a mean-spirited prick at times, I choose to see him off with this… adulterated edition of his most famous creation:

EDIT later on Wednesday…

I mean… you don’t even have to have a master’s in history (though I have a BA with history as a second major), you just need a bit of basic knowledge of what happened in the first half of the 20th century… and I feel sure Scott Adams had a good enough education to have known that at one point (he was born only 12 years after WW2 ended). I wonder when and how he forgot, just like too many others have forgotten the Nazis were the bad guys in that conflict.

Speaking of whom…

Because OF COURSE this White House would not only post a shitty AI picture in his memory, but they’d post one that… well, gets Dilbert wrong. OBVIOUSLY.