Month: August 2023

Do you get it now, Warren?

Via.

Warren Mundine drifted from the ALP to grift instead with the Coalition about a decade ago, and has been a useful idiot for the latter ever since, to the point that he now runs the local branch of CPAC, increasingly one of the worst manifestations of American conservatism, and now one of the worst in this country too. This is what Warren’s side thinks about him. I mean, I have absolutely no doubt that they always have done; the party that welcomed him in 2012 has, I’m sure, always hated him behind his back and treated him like the fool he is. Now they’re not even hiding it. This Marks individual was talking at Warren’s conference about Warren’s people. Maybe it was as this character, but that doesn’t make it better in any way…

Warren let this happen at his own show. Mind you, he also let Gary Johns happen, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at him letting “Chaim” happen too… Whatever, I don’t have any sympathy for the guy, of course, it’d be wasted on him, and I just hope he got a decent price for his soul. But surely even he can’t deny to himself that his side is actually, you know, on his side any more…

Free speech

Will THIS finally be the straw that breaks the X’s back? …Eh, probably not. Considering the other shitty thing’s he’s said and done that haven’t hitherto deterred people from using Twatter (including me, let’s be honest), I can’t see even this making much difference. Indeed, I’m seeing one source claiming that Oolong actually can’t do this, cos if he did then the Apple Store and Google Play would refuse to stock the app; apparently the ability to block users is a key requirement of theirs for making social media apps available. Whatever, though, it’s just another thing making Shitter unappealing… I mean, I suppose the mute button is still there and for some accounts that really is all you need, but other times blocking is absolutely necessary. Wonder how long the mute option will last…

Talking of things making Twitter unappealing: the end of Tweetdeck came about the other day, as threatened a few weeks ago… I discovered this when trying to go there and it redirected me back to Twitter immediately, whereupon the latter just as immediately tried to convice me to pay $135 a year for the privilege of having a functional way of using the service… and then when I angrily clicked that off I found it then opened on the “for you” colum rather than my actual follow list. So yeah, so much for me and Twitter at last, it would appear… there’s still a handful of accounts there I still want to follow, which is why I’m not deleting the account entirely (can’t follow them without one), although one of those is a friend who’s now saying she’ll be on Bluesky (which I still can’t get onto) and Tiktok (which I am, though I rarely use it) more often from now on. So that’s at least one less Twitter account I’ll need to check regularly, I suppose.

Fortunate scum

Ah, Brian Houston. Fortunate to have inherited the Hillsong church from his pedophile father Frank, and now even more fortunate to have a judge on your side after covering up the old cunt’s activities…

Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston has been found not guilty of concealing the crimes of his paedophile father.
Australian prosecutors had argued Brian Houston tried to cover up his father’s sexual abuse of a child in the 1970s.
The Church founder learned of the abuse only decades later and said he did not report it because the victim, by then an adult, did not want police involved.
Frank Houston, who died in 2004, is believed to have used his position as a pastor to abuse as many as nine boys. […]
Brian Houston found out about the abuse in 1999, and told Church leaders but not police.

Scum of the fucking EARTH. And now Frank and his worthless son have both got away with it. Supposedly the victim did say he didn’t want the police involved, which was enough to convince Brian to ignore his legal obligations to, you know, REPORT HIS DAD TO POLICE FOR BEING A PEDOPHILE:

But on Thursday, Magistrate Gareth Christofi ruled that Mr Houston had a “reasonable excuse” under the law not to tell authorities.
“I do not see any reason why a convenient excuse may not also be a reasonable one,” he said.
“It may be that in this case there is an alignment between the interest of Mr Sengstock and the interest of the Church.”

How VERY bloody convenient to have a judge who sees things your way when it comes to ignoring the law. Frank lived for another five years after Brian found out what he’d done, he could still have faced justice for it. I’ll bet his victims back in New Zealand will be looking at this with as much disgust as the aforementioned Mr Sengstock, the artist hitherto known as “victim AHA” in media reports…

Dampnut strike four

Trump’s been indicted again, but this time I actually am interested. Fourth time around, he’s been indicted specifically in Georgia for his activities there in trying to overturn the 2020 election, and from what I can gather that’s significant for the following reasons:

1. It’s a state charge, not a federal charge, so he can’t get a presidential pardon;
2. He also can’t get the state governor to pardon him, cos in Georgia that has to be decided by an independent board;
3. The latter can’t give him a pardon pre-emptively, so they have to wait until he’s actually been convicted;
4. If he is convicted, he has to serve five years before they can even think about considering his case.

Apparently his only recourse otherwise is the Georgia Supreme Court, and he’s already in their bad books for demanding they fire the DA leading the case against him. So this time round he could actually be quite fucked… assuming, of course, that he is found guilty and that he doesn’t pop his clogs before it all ends. I still feel like he might escape justice through natural causes just because the trial could be so long…

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club… Trio?

This is possibly the strangest Beatles-related story I’ve ever read, cos it contains a theory I’ve somehow never heard of until now… namely that Paul McCartney wasn’t present for the Sgt Pepper album cover photoshoot and was added in later, and that someone stood in for him on the back cover in which he is noticeably not facing the camera.

What?

The really odd thing is that the Graun is telling this story—which is actually about an interesting bit of memorabilia, a press pack for the never released Sessions collection, going to auction—as if the mystery were only being solved now rather than… decades ago. Behold, if you will, the inner gatefold picture from Sgt Pepper as it appeared in 1967 (picture ganked from Discogs):

So, if Macca wasn’t there for the album photoshoot… who’s this in between John and George? Did they secretly arrange another photoshoot that he did turn up to for some reason (given that pretty much every day of the Fabs’ activity is on record somewhere, it’d have to have been secret or we’d have known long ago)? Did they make unusually sure that his apparent stand-in for the back looked exactly like him from the front too? If he wasn’t at the photoshoot but they had a perfect indistinguishable stand-in for the gatefold photo, why not just use him on the cover photo rather than paste the real one in later?

And if it’s been a mystery since then about whether or not Paul was present, why does Mark Lewisohn’s book about the Fabs’ recording sessions (published in 1987 and which I’ve had since about 1991 or 92)  have so many outtakes from the photoshoot in which Paul is, frankly, right there? And why does the Graun article acknowledge there’s other photos of him proving Paul was there when they’re trying to sell this story as finally solving the mystery? None of this makes sense…

Mark Latham seems surprised for some reason

The children are squabbling again:

One Nation MP Mark Latham says he has been ousted as leader of the party in New South Wales.
Mr Latham said in a Facebook post federal leader Pauline Hanson removed him from the job “without consultation or due process”.
“Senator Hanson has installed a new state executive with no leader,” he said.
Mr Latham remains a member of the One Nation party.

Wherein lies the only real surprise in this story; I find it odd that she didn’t dump him entirely, and even more so that he hasn’t stomped off with his ball and gone home himself. (Not yet, anyway; I do expect him to tender his resignation in the huffiest possible way within the next few days.) It continues:

In a statement, Senator Hanson said the party chose to appoint a new leader in NSW “following the recent state election which saw [the party’s] vote drop by 14 per cent”.
“The national executive of the party has also declared vacant the position of NSW parliamentary leader while the review takes place,” the statement read.
Mr Latham, however, said he remained the leader of the “parliamentary team”.
“This is a matter, quite rightly, for me, Rod Roberts and Tania Mihailuk. I remain as the leader of our parliamentary team,” he said.
“Over the past 5 years we have built up into the largest One Nation parliamentary party in the country— so where’s the problem?”

Well, Mark, the problem is kind of twofold.

One, the party is called Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Her name is in the name of the organisation. The Libs don’t call themselves Robert Menzies’ Liberal Party. The party is about her and her ego. You presided over a drop in her party’s popularity in NSW. That’s not a good look.

Two, frankly, you exist. You’re Mark Latham. You’re a liability to whoever you’re working with. Even the Liberal Democrats had enough sense to tell you to go fuck yourself when you offered to run for them. Have you forgotten about being sued by Alex Greenwich for vilifying him with comments that even Pauline criticised you for? (I’d be worried if you had, given that you’re currently engaged in defending yourself in that case…) Legal action is never a good look either.

Look, the fact that Mark Latham ultimately shacked up politically with One Nation was not really surprising (except in that he joined someone else’s party rather than starting his own); he’d clearly moved so far to the right that PHON was the logical last stop for him without leaving the political mainstream entirely. And the fact that it seems to have ended badly… also not surprising in the least; those two planet-sized egos were bound to clash eventually and Latham was, frankly, always going to be Latham because he’s incapable of doing anything else. Only surprising that it’s taken so long for the shit and the fan to collide.

The Unexpectedly Animated Menace

Well, I’ll be damned. “The Underwater Menace” is finally getting an animated reconstruction of its two missing episodes and is due out before the end of the year (which means we’ll probably get it three to six months later here in Australia; we’re only getting the blu-ray of season 9 here this month after it came out in the UK in March).

The original DVD release always struck me as quite unsatisfactory, although I now see that wasn’t entirely the BBC’s fault; the missing episodes were going to be animated in 2014 but the animation company went under before doing the job. That said, rather than hiring someone else to animate it and instead just slapping together a telesnap reconstruction without even the title sequence or proper credits or some sort of text commentary to illustrate the bits of action that you couldn’t discern just from the audio was lazy as hell, so nice to see it’s finally getting done properly, even if it is. Maybe I’ll even like it a bit better if I fully understand what’s actually happening on screen in episodes one and four…