Month: January 2024

Albo giveth, Albo taketh away

Had to go out shopping today—one of those rare occasions when I actually leave the house these days—cos I needed to get my pills for the next month, and while the pharmacist was filling my scripts I went up to the newsagent to browse for a few minutes. Which meant I was brought into close contact with this:

Ugh. It’s always bad enough just seeing these cunts’ stuff online; having to physically share a space with it, though, is even less pleasant. But what are they whining about, anyway? I was dimly aware of it being to do with these tax cuts, but what had Albo actually done? Well, I turned to the Graun when I got home:

Australians earning less than $150,000 are set to benefit from changes to the stage-three tax cuts package from July, after federal cabinet approved plans to change the tax code. This includes those earning less than $45,000, who were set to miss out under the stage-three tax cuts legislated under the previous Coalition government.
Those earning between $50,000 and $130,000 will see the biggest benefit from the reported changes, according to modelling by Assoc Prof Ben Phillips at the Australian National University. Those earning above $150,000 will see a smaller tax cut than they otherwise would have. Australians earning less than $45,000 were not set to get a tax cut in July but now will. […]
All Australians will get a tax cut, but for many on higher incomes it will be a smaller tax cut than they were expecting.
The Morrison government’s stage-three tax cuts passed parliament in 2019, and Labor committed to keep them in the last election. This removed the 37% tax bracket for those earning between $120,000 and 180,000, increased the top tax bracket from $180,000 to $200,000, and lowered the 32.5% marginal tax rate to 30%.
The stage-three tax cuts predominantly benefited those on higher incomes. But the changes passed by the federal cabinet will see the distribution change, with households on middle incomes the biggest beneficiaries according to ANU modelling.

So, as I see it, the issue is that Albo is going ahead with the tax cuts as he said he would, but he altered the deal, as they say in the classics, so people making above $150k won’t get as big of a cut as the Liberals were going to give them, but people making under $45k will now get a cut the Libs weren’t going to give them at all… Oh. OH. I think I see the problem now. It’s THE POORS being given something at the expense of people who can afford to live without that thing anyway. No wonder the Daily Xenophobe is worked up. And that cunt from Queensland thinks Albo should go to an election on the matter?

Dutts: “Hey, we’re the Liberals and we promised tax cuts for our rich friends which Albo is fucking with, vote for us!”
THE POORS: “You mean the same Albo who’s giving us tax cuts you weren’t going to give us? Get fucked, you potato-faced turd.”
Dutts: “…Well, shit.”

Yeah, not that Albo’s going to do it anyway, but I can’t see Dutton actually pulling such a stunt off somehow.

RIP “Bobby”

News is coming through of the passing of Frank Farian, aged 82, who gave the world Boney M and, perhaps more memorably but for the wrong reasons, Milli Vanilli. Frank was, of course, the actual male voice on the records, in which capacity I will say he was quite good, but arguably the best move he made was casting Bobby Farrell as the male face of the band. Not only could Bobby move, but he actually had a pretty good voice for this sort of music when he was allowed to actually deploy it in live performance. I don’t know what was fuelling him in this particular performance, but he’s fucking great in it, and to be honest I think I prefer to celebrate him than Farian, who may have given Farrell his career but also screwed him out of the rewards therefrom…

Too late

Scunt is finally leaving politics! Far too late to benefit this country, of course…

The former prime minister Scott Morrison has announced he will quit parliament at the end of February, triggering a byelection in his seat of Cook.
In a statement on social media on Tuesday, Morrison said he had decided “to take on new challenges in the global corporate sector and spend more time with my family”.
“By giving advance notice of my intention to leave parliament at the end of February, this will give my party ample time to select a great new candidate who I know will do what’s best for our community and bring fresh energy and commitment to the job,” he posted on Facebook.
Morrison intends to join a series of global strategic advisory roles and private boards, focused on the US and the Indo-Pacific, in sectors including defence and funding of defence startups.
While these roles are mostly based in Washington, Morrison said on Facebook he intended to remain in Australia. He said he looked forward to “enjoying local life here in the shire and my church community at Horizon with my family and friends”.

I don’t know who to feel more sorry for in this situation, his family or the global corporate sector (certainly not his electorate who kept voting for the cunt). Or will the latter have to suffer him at all? Morrison has God on the brain, after all, and I feel there’s a church organisation somewhere that would be delighted to have him on their books.

Meanwhile, even if it is too late to undo the damage he did to this country in his various capacities, I am heartened that “Engadine Maccas” is trending on Twatter in the wake of the news. So good to see Australians maintaining tradition…

So nice they Rogered him twice

And it’s good night at last to Roger Rogerson, who had a brain aneurysm or something last Thursday and who finally passed last night despite being taken off life-support almost as soon as they got him into hospital… cunt was determined to hang on as long as possible, clearly. To be honest, I thought he’d actually shuffled off his mortal coil a few years ago but I was probably thinking of Neddy Smith, who did pop off in ’21. I don’t know what good Roger may have done in his professional capacity, but any good he did was undone by the ways he tended to do it and the fact that he was a murdering prick; whether or not he was actually the country’s worst cop is probably arguable, but I think we can say he was the worst one to get caught (Terry Lewis up in Queensland was pretty awful too, but I don’t think he had any murders to his credit). Whatever the case, the world is not poorer for his departure from it.

So I just wrote this…

Just been watching a Little Joel video on the Tube of You about some poet called Aliza Grace, who appears to be one of those “Instapoetry” types; I took this screenshot of her poem from the video:

And then whatever this fucking thing is just… you know, came to me. It didn’t exactly flow as such from my pen, or more accurately from my fingers over the laptop keyboard, but somehow once I had the idea expressed in the title, this bizarre list of things I wouldn’t do only took me a short time to produce… which I think is rather good, and quite surprising, considering I haven’t written anything for months.

Some Things That I Will Never Do to You

Compile a Florence Foster Jenkins mixtape,
Or feed you vegetables that aren’t quite dead;
Entomb you in a cavern full of milk,
Or stick you in a frozen peppermint;
Replace your flesh with oleander leaves,
Or extradite you to Ulaanbaatar;
Marry you to King Arthur and his knights,
Or leave you at the molten core of Venus;
Apply a Belgian waffle to your feet,
Or call you up outside of office hours;
Pretend that I’m a decent human being,
Or sing black metal to your Persian cat.
These things I would not do; but be afraid
Of all the things that I would do instead.

I have taken the liberty of posting this thing in the above video’s comments section too. Curious to see what if any reaction it gets.

Poe boy

I’m not a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, whose 215th birthday this would’ve been today. I discovered him, pretty much, via H.P. Lovecraft, whose Supernatural Horror in Literature devotes an entire chapter to him, so I thought he had to be something special. So I went in search of a book by him at the library, found one, read it… did not find it to be anything special. I spent years being mystified by Poe, whose historical importance I could appreciate but that was all; I was particularly put off by the fatuous humour of some items. A few years ago I tried a re-read, this time Penguin’s Portable Edgar Allan Poe collection of his stories, verse, and various non-fiction. And I think I understood him at last. Reading the critical work in particular, I think I finally got where Poe was coming from. But I still didn’t like his work as such (and I found much of the poetry actively irritating, particularly that technique he has of repeating lines with slight variations), and I may be doomed to never do so.

But look at him. Look at that picture of him, apparently taken in 1849 not long before he died. He looks EXACTLY like the sort of person who would write his stories. If you were going to be the pioneer of the short macabre tale, you’d want to look like Poe did, the face that illustrates what he said about terror being “not of Germany but of the soul”… perfectly untidy hair, haunted withdrawn eyes, quite rectangular moustache, that necktie and somehow disreputable-looking coat… it adds up to a middle-aged goth icon by itself. Better than his stories as far as I’m concerned.

RIP Pitchfork

I never had much use for Pitchfork, which always struck me as the peak of tedious music hipsterdom, but the news that it’s being shuttered and absorbed into GQ is bad nonethless. As full of shit as it may have been, I still dislike people being forced out of work. Some people are, frankly, not sorry to see it go and maybe they have a point, but even so (plus GQ is an odd magazine to merge it into). And whatever its flaws, it was quite correct about some things: