Category: [Idiots]

Of course

Haven’t said anything about that hantavirus outbreak so far, but, well, how could I not now that I know Mushroom Cock’s got his most qualified man on the case, in the great tradition of RFK Jr.:

A new virus is killing people as global health organizations work to control its spread and convince the public that the hantavirus outbreak is just an outbreak — not another pandemic. Americans can rest assured that Dr. Brian Christine, a penile implant specialist and assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, is on the case.
According to a Friday report from CNN’s KFile, Christine — an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps — is a surgical urologist with virtually no experience in public health. He once hosted an “Erection Connection” video series on YouTube, and spread conspiracies about the Covid-19 vaccine during the Biden administration. He is now one of the Trump administration’s top officials in charge of infectious disease policy. […]
This week, Christine gave an update on the conditions of potentially infected passengers who were repatriated to a Nebraska medical center after being evacuated from the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. “At the Department of Health and Human Services, our approach is grounded in science and it’s grounded in transparency,” he said. “This is what strong public health system looks like, experienced professionals, seamless coordination, and a shared commitment to protecting the American people. We’ll continue to follow the science. We will stay vigilant.”
It’s a vastly different tone from the attitude he took during the Covid-19 pandemic. During Christine’s confirmation hearings before the Senate, The Washington Post reported that the urologist had claimed there was “no question” that Covid-19 and the subsequent government response had been used to tilt the 2020 election in Biden’s favor, and suggested vaccines were part of a larger plot to exert control over the American population.

Apparently it’s OK to follow the science when it’s not an election year, or something like that.

Bullshitfront?

Australian director Phillip Noyce shoots feature film for Saudi Arabia celebrating ‘heroism of security men in combating drugs’

The acclaimed Australian film-maker Phillip Noyce is being paid by the Saudi regime to make a feature film portraying the repressive state’s narcotics officers as heroes.
The Watchful Eyes, based on a real Saudi ministry of interior narcotics case, is billed as a dramatic depiction of the “heroism of security men in combating drugs”.
Saudi authorities executed 356 people last year, including 243 for drug-related cases, and analysts say an increase in the kingdom’s execution rate is largely due to its “war on drugs”.
Noyce has enjoyed a decades-long career with directing credits including the 1970s classic Newsfront, Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Bone Collector. […]
Noyce said he had accepted the job “for the challenge of working outside my comfort zone” and for the opportunity “to investigate a previously closed society” but did not address specific questions about the ethics of making a film paid for by the Saudi regime.
Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the Saudi government used its huge investments in sport and entertainment as part of a strategy to whitewash its human rights record.
“Given the subject matter of this film from what’s publicly available, combined with the reality of the rights abuses that have been so inextricably linked with this new war on drugs by the Saudi government, it’s really, really disturbing the role that these narratives may play in covering up the reality of these executions that have just been served the last few years,” Shea said.

Yeah, this looks like the same sort of bullshit as the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and I’m as disappointed in Noyce as I was in some of the people who did thar. Noyce himself doesn’t seem overly hyped about his own work:

Noyce described The Watchful Eyes as “a low-budget kidnapping thriller”.
“Gritty and raw and shot entirely in Arabic, I don’t think the movie will attract any tourists to Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Asked about the country’s human rights record and executions for drug offences, Noyce said: “I guess the story could be edited to send an anti-drug message, but the story I shot was told from the highly emotional point of view of the lead detective in the hunt for a missing child.
“Surprisingly, Sela never once interfered from a creative point of view.”

Probably not, cos I imagine they wouldn’t have needed to; they would’ve made sure they had all the creative control right from the beginning. And if Sela weren’t doing that, someone in government/the royal family would’ve been. I know that in real terms there’s been any number of Hollywood films over the decades that have performed the same function, but they don’t seem as bad as this does…

Good advice, I presume

Friend posted this on Facebook. It is, remarkably, quite real. I further presume that one of those top 5 guns is not the one you shot the faithless bitch with, which I presume you did (and then got rid of the gun) after she dumped you and now you’re building up an arsenal in case she comes back from the dead for revenge, cos I can’t see why else she appears as a zombie in the video thumbnail…

Geography lesson

Mark… my brother in Christ… mate… you’re only going to be a state senator if you even get that far. Even as a proper US senator, though, this would be somewhat beyond you. Hagia Sophia is in fucking TURKEY, and not even that goon Graham can do shit about it. Erdogan reopened it as mosque in the face of opposition from within his own country amd the UN. You think he gives a fuck about a trifling racist cunt like YOU? And it’s been a mosque since before the US was even a country, for fuck’s sake. It’s not exactly a new thing. I mean, Erdogan making it a mosque again in 2020 after Ataturk turned it into a museum in 1935 is probably not a good sign of Turkey’s health as a secular country, but if this Dixieland pissant thinks he’s going to stop him Islamising the place, he’s delusional…

Product placement

I’ve seen a few people commenting on this:

…a tweet from the US Department of Homeland Security marking the occasion of Easter with a picture of whatisname on the cross and the text from Luke 23:46 with a crucifix above it. And there is indeed much that could be said about this, particularly the inappropriateness of a US government department ignoring the whole church & state separation thing to the fact that the current regime likely wouldn’t even let their putative saviour into the US to begin with, but it was cartoonist Tom Tomorrow who pointed out on Bluesky the most… interesting thing about it; namely, the way the crucifix above the text was placed right over the Lord’s crotch. And… yeah, there it be. I don’t really know what else to say about it.

Tumblr: still partying like it’s 2018

I’ve been maintaining a blog on Tumblr in some form or other since 2010 as a bit of a side thing. The current version is almost as old as this thing, cos Tumblr in their usual infinite wisdom decided the previous one must be destroyed for some reason or other. Accordingly, I haven’t posted anything to it myself, only reposts of other people’s stuff. Let other people take the risk.

And I thought Tumblr had started being a bit more reasonable about adult content; after the infamous (and not altogether effective) porn ban of late 2018, I thought it was making at least some progress by introducing “mature content” tags that users could apply themselves. Not the best solution, but better than outlawing the stuff entirely, which was what they tried in 2018…

Unfortunately, as I’ve seen tonight, Tumblr seems to have decided to go back to 2018 and start applying those tags themselves according to their own judgement… meaning that I’ve now got a bunch of stuff tagged as “potentially mature” and, as in 2018, at least a certain amount of that is actually bugger all of the sort… but I’m more bothered by the things they’ve flagged as definitely “mature”, cos they’ve apparently gone beyond what they did in 2018; back then they replaced the dirty dirty smut with a note that the post had contained dirty dirty smut but had now been hidden to protect everyone (including the blog owner), but now it looks like they’re not even doing that… not only do you have no option to request a review, the content is completely hidden now. Not even a sign that it was there at all. The odd thing is, those things are still visible in the mass post editor, but when I click on them from there, Tumblr just gives me the “not found” page.

So, not for the first time, I’m querying the whole point of me being on Tumblr; feels like a slightly pointless enterprise not just because I’ve got this thing now, but because the whole point of me making it a reblog-only thing was so I wouldn’t be affected again by Tumblr’s decisions about this stuff and, well, here I am affected anyway. I just liked the idea of having a corner of the Internet that people who actually know me in real life don’t know about (apart from one, I think). Mind you, no one who actually knows me in real life ever remarks to me about anything I post here, either, so I’ve kind of got that obscure corner anyway…

Loaves and fishes…?

Another book I spotted online. I don’t know what we can say about the diet of someone who may or may not have even existed in the first place, but, even if we assume that he did, Jesus’ diet didn’t make him, you know, live longer… unless, of course, you accept that he is still alive in heaven and/or has always existed as the second person of God, in which case(s) I don’t think his diet has had much to do with his longevity. And he certainly wouldn’t have been eating those tomatoes on the cover, given they didn’t make it to the middle east until the 1800s…

Possibly not

Found on Tumblr:

Jeane Dixon was a psychic who became notable for predicting the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1956, in that she predicted the Democrat candidate would win the 1960 election but be murdered in his first term. Which, of course, is what happened, except that at some point before that election Jeane changed her mind and said Richard Nixon would win. Whoops. Apparently several years later, when Nixon finally did become president, she further predicted Nixon would survive the Watergate scandal and stage a great comeback. Whoops again.

Dixon apparently had a ton of similarly unsuccessful forecasts; her Wiki entry notes that she was right about Robert Kennedy’s assassination (wish she could’ve warned us about his worthless son, THAT would’ve been useful), but also there’s no source given for that story so it could be about as believable as her prediction that world war 3 would kick off in 1958. I don’t know whose “rise” she was predicting in the above book, apparently published in 1975, but history suggests she was wrong there too, cos 1999 was not a notably peaceful year (but there was another Kennedy death). She went on to be one of Nancy Reagan’s astrologers in the 80s; I can only assume Nancy was unaware of Jeane’s track record…

The queen is deaf

Morrissey cancels Valencia concert after being left in ‘catatonic state’ by city noise

British singer Morrissey has cancelled a concert in Valencia after being left sleep-deprived during the city’s notoriously noisy Las Fallas festival.
A statement on his website said: “Having travelled for two days by road, Morrissey reached the hotel in Valencia late on Wednesday. Any form of sleep or rest throughout the night was impossible due to festival noise/loud techno singing/megaphone announcements.”
The statement went on to say that “this experience has left Morrissey in a catatonic state”, and that he would not be performing.
Morrissey is due to perform in two other Spanish cities, Zaragoza and Seville, on 14 and 16 March respectively.
His team insisted that the Valencia concert hadn’t been cancelled but that “circumstances made it impossible to perform”. The singer produced recordings of the noise to justify the decision. The cheapest tickets for tonight’s scheduled show at Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia cost €103 (£88).
In a later communique, Morrissey wrote that his hotel was an “indescribable hell. It will take me one year to recover. And that is an understatement.”

Well if he’s going to need that much time to get over this attack of the vapours, that doesn’t bode well for those other two Spanish shows, does it? As the article notes, he’s booked 21 shows to promote this new album of his and he’s already cancelled five and postponed a sixth, which I’m sure will be properly called off in due course. Never change, Steven Patrick…