Month: April 2023

Dutton gets vocal

In news that surprises no one…

The Liberal Party has announced its formal opposition to the federal government’s model for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, after a party room meeting in Canberra.
Australians will vote later this year on whether an independent advisory body for First Nations people should be enshrined in the constitution.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said while the Opposition supported recognition of First Nations people in the constitution, it does not support a constitutionally enshrined consultative body.
“The Liberal Party resolved today to say yes to constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians,” he said.

Weird how the Liberal Party was in power for nine years and never made any moves that I can remember to actually make that a thing during that time, which I think would’ve been an actually popular move on their part… or is this something they’ve only come up with in the last few days so they don’t look like complete racists? Either way, the party might be OK with the Constitution acknowledging that, yeah, those darkies actually were here before white people after all, but heaven forfend they ever be given the opportunity to determine their future or advise the government on matters that affect them…

Not for the first time, our satirical media nails it succinctly. Also, remember when this cunt had hair? It wasn’t THAT long ago…

As far as the whole Voice thing goes, I will confess to being in two minds about it, insofar as I see no real reason to oppose it in theory (whether or not it needs constitutional enshrinement is something I have no idea about, although, again, I’m not necessarily opposed to it) but I do question how it’ll actually operate in practice… this being the text of the proposed amendment:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

I read that as saying that Parliament will, essentially, define exactly what the Voice even is and what it’ll be able to do, and I have a feeling somehow that might wind up being not much… and I’ve no doubt Parliament will make sure they’ll be under no obligation to actually do anything the Voice might suggest they do if their advice goes against whatever the government was intending to do anyway. I don’t really trust either Labor or Liberal (and especially not the latter) to not fuck it up one way or another. But there’s still no guarantee the referendum will succeed anyway, although the Voice advocates have at least apparently learned from the Republic debacle of ’99; the latter made the somewhat crucial mistake of asking “do you want this particular version of a republic” rather than “do you want a republic at all”… at least the Voice’s advocates are starting from the question “do you think the Voice is a good idea”, so that might actually carry it to success. I suppose we’ll find out some time later in the year…

So I was wrong about something…

The other day when it was announced that a certain former president of the US would indeed be indicted for various naughty things, I said I couldn’t envisage Lord Dampnut just going quietly. To my barely expressible surprise, that wound up being exactly what he did… and I’m damned if I can understand why. Cos he’s so full of bluster in his missives online, but come the big day and he just… gives in? I’m not getting it. News that he had in fact gone quietly came through just as I was finally going to bed last night, so I just did that and decided to see what had happened when I got up again. And, well, nothing much had in fact happened; there was some noise outside the court, but Chump himself seems to have basically just rocked up, gone through the formalities, said “not guilty”, and then pissed off back to Mar-a-Lago, whence he doesn’t need to return until December. Not entirely a non-event, but not far off in the end. Weird.

Oh, but I did like this when I saw it on Facebook:

Greetings from Carcosa

I was browsing Tumblr the other night and came across someone’s post that quoted “Cassilda’s Song” from The King in Yellow, and for some reason I wondered what might result if I ran it through an AI art generator. Here’s one of the results:

This is the first thing that mage.space threw at me, and I find something weirdly evocative about it. I’ve played about with mage.space a fair bit and I’ve occasionally got… interesting results, but rarely good ones. This might be the best I’ve got so far. I mean, maybe if I weren’t cheap and actually paid a bit for one of these AI things, I might get more “realistic” results (like the famous Pope in a Balenciaga jacket picture)… but, like I say, I’m cheap. There’s some things I’m happy to pay for but this AI nonsense isn’t one of those things.

And even this still looks like AI, doesn’t it? I see a lot of this shit on Instagram, it infests some of the hashtags I follow on that, and even the OK stuff is still… obviously AI (even the Pope picture does once you know that it is). It’s not the same as digital art that’s actually had a human hand in it; even if said human hand was just moving a mouse to drag pixels across a screen rather than drawing on a tablet, it’s still an actual person making the ultimate decisions… whereas pretty much all the AI-created stuff has a kind of sameness to it. It’s kind of characterless and dull. And I think that image I posted above wound up being good in spite of itself (the other images I got from that prompt were much less interesting)…

Well that’s just fucking great

We’re not going to live forever but we’re probably going to live a fair bit longer…

Our ability to extend human lifespans is improving dramatically, but whether there is any natural limit to how far we can push is an outstanding question. New research contradicts claims that we’re approaching a maximum human lifespan.
The question of whether or not there is a limit to how long humans can live has fascinated scientists for decades. While answering this question is likely to require a better understanding of the physiological process of aging, researchers have long tried to divine trends in demographic data that could give clues as to what the upper limit might be.
One study predicted that the human lifespan is unlikely to go past around 150 years no matter what medical innovations we come up with. Another came to the even more conservative conclusion of 115 years. But a new study that uses novel statistical techniques appears to show that people born between 1900 and 1950 could live much longer than previous analyses suggest, opening up the prospect that no natural limit is currently on the horizon.

Ah, just what the world was needing. Assuming, of course, that these Methuselahs actually have a world left in which to grow old, cos the older generation currently running the joint seem disinclined to do much to save it for them…

Physician, heal thyself

Fascinating viewing from the Holy Koolaid channel. I don’t think I’d heard of Jack Coe until now, and certainly didn’t know anything about him and his somewhat short life story, and, well, I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but Coe deserved something bad to happen to him. And what happened was not only bad, it had multiple elements of irony to it; it was the sort of death that, if I were inclined to believe in that sort of thing, I’d have considered it a sign that God was kind of pissed at me for the sort of life I’d lived. And frankly, I’m ten years older than he was when he died, and with all my issues I look a lot better at 48 than he did in his mid/late 30s…