Month: June 2023

Fly, Donald, fly?

Daily Kos asks a big question:

How long before we consider that Donald Tr*mp is a massive flight risk? Not just a flight risk, but a flight risk who has the absolute means to leave. He has private jets at the ready. He has billions (or millions) of dollars to aid in his flee from justice and establish lifelong comfort elsewhere. He has connections around the world with dictators and autocrats in unsavory places without enforceable extradition — autocrats that would LOVE to help their favorite president for a propaganda win alone. A former president who has seen all of the nation’s most grave national security secrets. A man who clearly doesn’t care about the information within them.

Well, at the risk of sounding like I’m boasting, I actually considered the flight risk thing almost as soon as the latest indictment came out, i.e. a few days before this was posted, but that’s beside the point. I haven’t had much to say about said latest indictment, i.e. the one about all the stolen documents, the best part of which has been this mass of boxes stored in this fuck ugly bathroom:

I mean, my bathroom is long overdue a major remodel, but at least it’s never looked like… that. But I haven’t felt much like talking about it for some reason and I don’t really know why… maybe it’s because the fact he got indicted over the Stormy Daniels payment felt like more of a big deal, in that he actually finally got sprung for something when it often felt like he wouldn’t; the boxes of classified documents is a far larger deal with potential international ramifications, but the indictment itself feels like a comparatively minor detail to me somehow. Like, now we know to expect him to be indicted for his bullshit, it’s not a surprise any more…

Anyway, not everyone in the comments is convinced Trump’s a flight risk, and I suppose they have something; it’s not that he has nowhere to go—Putin or the house of Saud would welcome him—more that he simply doesn’t accept the potential trouble he’s actually facing (and, as someone said in the comments, fleeing the country would be the end of his grift). In any case, I have a feeling this trial is going to take so long to actually put together Lord Dampnut may not live to see it anyway. And we don’t know what damage he may have already done and who’s already been given copies of all that paperwork (cos copies will have been made, I have no doubt), that horse may have already bolted. Trial might be too little, too late…

Bye Ted

And the Unabomber has gone to join Pat Robertson. Suicide, according to some sources, which seems a bit… late in the day for that option, he’d already been in jail for 27 years, but then again Rudolf Hess took even longer to check himself out of Spandau. I’ve never done anything to warrant spending the rest of my life in jail, so I’ll confess to not knowing the psychological effects of doing so and why you might suddenly snap after decades…

Anyway, there goes someone else whose passing I won’t celebrate or mourn; I don’t have much if any time for anti-technology people who don’t seem to see the irony in needing technology to promulgate their beliefs, and even less time for people who kill other people in the name of those beliefs… Equally, though, I don’t think he was entirely wrong about technology being a catastrophe; after all, technology made it possible for Charlie Kirk to do this:

Fucking ghoul. As I was saying just the other day about the mental illness of the American right…

Getting Perry pegged

The industrial-grade mental illness of the American right has found a new target, Cracker Barrel. And this has been the classic Twitter outburst on the subject:

It’s BEAUTIFUL. The reference to “pegging” actually indicates this:

…Which I gather is a game you find at Cracker Barrel cos that’s just one of the things they offer their customers for some reason. But obviously that’s not what you immediately think of… It’s an interesting choice of word, and I suspect kind of deliberate, especially after doing a bit of reading on Pericles:

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles “Perry” Abbasi — a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago’s 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police — had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that “the horrible black diet” was the reason for “13/50”, referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans’ percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).
Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn’t remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he’d immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant “making up insane things to stir shit up”, then it meant just that.

So yeah, I have a feeling Perry may have been aware of what he was saying about “pegging” here. Still trying to work out what’s funny about “the horrible black diet”, though it may be something to do with Perry evidently also being a champion dickhead…

But the odd thing about the right losing its shit over Cracker Barrel is that, well, they’re doing it now. CB actually has a kind of mixed track record when it comes to, you know, treating Teh Queerz as human beings as you can see on their Wikipedia entry, but they’ve been trying harder to be better over the last decade or so. Why the meltdown now? Well, because the dickheads are even more dickheaded now than they were when CB started going actively queer-friendly, and the ramping up of the anti-“woke” culture war involves making sure the chuds always have something to get performatively angry about on social media. Whether or not it makes sense for them to blow up at Cracker Barrel now doesn’t really matter, I suppose, as long as they are blowing up at it.

Strokeversary

Fourteen years (almost to the hour as I post this) since The Cerebro-Vascular Accident.

I wrote about it on Facebook in 2010 for the first anniversary of the event, and I’ve just cut and pasted that here cos it doesn’t need to be newly rewritten or anything, I’ve just added a couple of links. Also, before you read this, maybe take this on board first:

https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/stroke

* * * * *

Continue reading “Strokeversary”

The new world order finally got him!

Far-right religious nut, author, broadcaster, conspiracy crank and all-round cancer Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson is dead, and frankly it took the old cunt long enough. Though I hold to the belief that you really shouldn’t celebrate people’s deaths, I also hold to the belief that you really shouldn’t mourn some people’s deaths either; and equally I can understand when people do think it’s a good thing.

Painting the town brown

Click on photo for source and much bigger image

OOF. The air in New York is a bit foul at the moment (and that’s only about half as bad as it currently is a bit further south in parts of Pennsylvania) thanks to the amount of filth in the air from the wildfires up in Canada that have been raging there since April… now that it’s actually affecting the US, the world suddenly gives a shit in a way that it didn’t before. Needless to say, I am grimly reminded of the conditions here in Australia over the 2019/20 season…

That right there is a shot I took myself at the top of my street one particularly awful day back then; I’ve done no editing to this except to reduce it to a more manageable size, the colour was actually like that. And I live somewhere that was well removed from the nearest fire, it’s just the air was that fucked from the smoke.

And the air quality index reading for New York at the moment is still nowhere near as bad as we got it on a few days back then; the CNBC article where I got the top picture from observes that New York’s air measured 342 of whatever units they use… I mean, a reading of anything over 200 (at least on the scale the NSW government uses) is considered potentially dangerous, and I remember we got a few days where the air was over two thousand; I had to go to Eastgardens one of those days, and I remember the new apartments that had just been built right next to the shopping centre were literally only about half-visible from the front of the centre. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it here apart from the famous dust storm of 2009…

So, welcome to climate change, it’s finally mildly irritating the east coast of the US. Will anything actually be done to mitigate it now?

Yeah, let’s not be optimistic. We’ll be seeing and breathing a lot more of that orange-brown air in the years ahead…

Lord, abide with Mel

NB: there’s an update at the end

So this is the latest thing getting the American right excited on Twitter just now… Australia’s greatest export is allegedly making a big documentary about pedophilia in high places. This is fairly new news, the source of which appears to be this guy, who I’ll be charitable and call a crypto dickhead and right-wing fantasist, so who the fuck knows if it’s even true. Of course, right-wing Twitter doesn’t care, cos not only is he allegedly calling out Hollywood, he’s calling out (“the”?) Ukraine as well, and that’ll keep Glorious Leader Putin happy. (I remember when the American right hated Russia. That was within my own lifetime. How things change.) Admittedly they might not like “billionaires” also being targeted cos billionaires are just great, but if it’s the right billionaires (e.g. Bill Gates, George Soros) they’ll be fine with it. The net result has been nonsense like this:

Continue reading “Lord, abide with Mel”

Well duck me

‘Ducking hell’ to disappear from Apple autocorrect

Apple has said it will no longer automatically change one of the most common swear words to ‘ducking’.
The autocorrect feature, which has long frustrated users, will soon be able to use AI to detect when you really mean to use that expletive.
“In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” said software boss Craig Federighi.

This just creates a new problem for people who actually mean to write “duck”, though, doesn’t it? They’re the ones who have to be extra careful now…

All the way with RFK (Jr)

I saw a bunch of people on Twitter the other day getting excited about Elon hosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a conversation on Twitter Spaces. I’m sure Elon is hoping this one doesn’t flame out like the Ron DeSantis debacle, and for his sake I hope he’s taken that as a learning experience… I mean, he should’ve known there’d be a lot of interest in Ronito announcing his run for the presidency and Twitter should’ve been ready for that, which it catastrophically wasn’t. You fire thousands of staff, you get that sort of thing…

Anyway, I feel like RFK II Electric Boogaloo probably isn’t as big of a draw for the Elon cultists, anyway, cos he’s actually not an evil person. Not in the way Ronito is. Or at least he wasn’t evil, at least not until Covid happened and he made antivax propaganda and Covid denialism his career, which kind of… tainted whatever good he’d done in his life before that. And seeing the enthusiasm for this interview with him made me have a moment of nostalgia for the days when Jack Dorsey was still running the show at Twitter and trying to promote Bob Jr’s sort of shit there would get you blocked from it.

And then I saw this on Mastodon today:

Yeah, it turns out that Beardo’s a fan of RFK 2 as well, and has basically endorsed him for the next US president. I actually didn’t realise he was more or less just the money man for Bluesky, which he started as a Twitter alternative even while he was still at the latter in 2021, someone else is the actual CEO… and so much for it being an alternative to Twitter now?