Month: February 2024

Starship of Bethlehem?

Found on Facebook, Baptism of Christ from 1710 by Aert de Gelder:

I know there’s other pages that have already brought up the “UFOs in classic art” thing before, so I’m hardly bringing anything new to the table here (what, me come up with something original? Perish the thought), but I still find this kind of startling. I’m sure the thing apparently firing lasers at Jesus and John the Baptist is meant to be the spirit of God being pleased with the proceedings, but it’s a very odd depiction of something the book says descended on Jesus like a dove. Wonder what the reason for rendering that God character quite like this was…

Good morning to you too

Former (?) professional racist Richard Hanania had… this to say earlier:

I can only assume Richard is speaking from experience here, in that at some point he said “good morning” to another man of his own age and the latter just fucked him then and there, which is something I’m sure happens all the time cos you just can’t trust those pooves not to fuck you at the slightest provocation, can you… At any rate, this is not one of those thousand different rules I ever learned, and I’m now confused about precisely who I can say “good morning” to. I’m guessing women are OK, but what about men not my age? I’m 49, so does that mean I can say it to a 48 or 50 year old man? Can I say it to another 49 year old man if he wasn’t born on the exact same day as me? What if he was but it was in another country? TELL ME, RICHARD!

Jesus: cool for cats, apparently

This… thing turned up in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm group:

This is clearly the work of someone tooling about with AI, presumably using the prompt “Jesus walking on water surrounded by orange and black kittens” or something of the sort… the question it begs, of course, is why the FUCK they did so, cos it’s not like it’s illustrating a particular Bible scene that I’m aware of; fairly sure the good book has nothing to say about the messiah’s relations with our feline friends. Someone in the PIAT group suggested he was selecting the two kittens that would go on Noah’s Ark, which is… dark but the sort of thing I’d be disappointed if someone in that group didn’t come up with it.

Parenthetically, I tried entering that prompt into mage.space and, well, here’s one of the things I got from it:

…so you can perhaps see why I thought that was all the “creator” of the first image did, cos it almost certainly was.

Nobody tell Alan Moore…

The New York Post has outdone itself:

The thing is, of course, that not only do we not know what JTR actually looked like, WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO HE WAS! Who writes this bullshit? Well, per the article:

The dangerously dreamy drawings come courtesy of Jeff Leahy, a long-time Ripper enthusiast from Carmarthen, Wales, who produced a mini-series on the murderer and has spent decades studying the lore surrounding one of history’s most infamous villains.
Using Midjourney software, along with information and available photographs of the relatives of prime suspect Aaron Kosminski, Leahy was able to produce a rather astonishing portrait of the man.
“It’s astonishing to finally have an image of him. I was surprised by how striking the picture is,” Leahy told SWNS.
Kosminski was a Polish-born barber working in Whitechapel, the area of London’s East End where the murders took place in the late 1800s.
Kosminski has been named by numerous experts as the Ripper, however nobody has ever been able to prove his guilt.
“There’s never been a picture of him and this is the best we’re ever going to get,” Leahy said.

JESUS FUCK. There’s never been a picture of him and THIS ISN’T ONE EITHER, you ignorant cunt. The evidence for Kosminski is thin, in any case; you might as well have taken the drawings of William Gull in From Hell and fed those into AI and called that a picture of Jack the Ripper, cos he’s about as likely to have been Jack as Kosminski was, or indeed any of the many and varied other putative “Jacks“. This is transcendent bullshit even by the NY Post’s minimal standards, and I find the stupidity of the entire thing kind of offensive…

RIP Alexei Navalny

Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead at 47, region’s prison service says

Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region where he has been serving his sentence said on Friday.
Mr Navalny, one of the most vocal critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had been in prison since February 2021.
Late last year, he was moved to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
Russian state news agency TASS reported that Putin had been told of Mr Navalny’s death.
In a statement, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said Mr Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday, and “almost immediately lost consciousness”.
It said that medical staff had been called, but that they were unable to resuscitate Mr Navalny.
It said the reason of death was being established.

I think we can guess what and indeed who the cause of death was. The only thing I wonder is what took Putin so long to do it. And the president of Latvia is coming right out and saying Putin murdered Navalny, so I guess it’s a matter of time before he gets too close to a dangerously open window too…

Calm down, Grandad

Well SOMEONE wasn’t a fan of the Fabs, was he? From what I can gather about Paul Jones, he was 67 when he wrote this (and died in 1974 just a few days before Ed Sullivan did), and I would boldly assume he was not exactly JPG&R’s target demographic. I feel like he wasn’t Sullivan’s target demographic in general either, for that matter… Wonder what Paul made of Elvis on the Sullivan show a mere eight years earlier when he was only 59? What about the black artists Sullivan insisted on supporting? Why do I feel like he’d only just got used to jazz being a thing and rock’n’roll was just too much for him to cope with? As for the vast millions, well, nearly seventy-four million people apparently watched that episode, and I presume at least a few of them enjoyed it more than Paul did…

Trump breaking the law? Surely not

So Drumpf made a typically helpful statement the other day about NATO and how the US would let Russia run rampant on Europe if his good mate Putin, and the Daily Kos has offered this bit of hand-wringing about just what that means:

It took some time before Donald Trump’s Saturday night statement that he would not come to the aid of European NATO allies and would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to get the attention it deserved in the media. The initial response was to largely ignore the statement, as the national press seems to ignore most Trump statements.
But after a day in which both President Joe Biden and European leaders pointed out the immeasurable importance of this statement, coverage began to grow. Not so much that it displaced stories about Biden’s supposed memory issues, but it did rate front-page coverage in many outlets by Monday morning.
But even as the story gathered attention, and as Republicans hustled to once again show that they placed their loyalty to Trump over anything else, the reporting on the topic continued to miss major aspects of this story, including what might be the most important factor: What Trump is threatening to do isn’t just to abandon allies, but to abandon the Constitution. […]
Beyond this obvious betrayal of nations that came when the United States called and who lost their young men and women in the dust of Afghanistan, there’s an even bigger reason why Trump’s statement that he would ignore a call from a NATO ally should be shocking.
That’s because Article VI of the Constitution declares, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States … and all Treaties made” are the “supreme Law of the Land.” Trump is not just saying that he will break treaty obligations to U.S. allies and hand them over to Russia, he is flat-out saying that he will break the law. Because treaties are law.
Failure to abide by the obligations of Article 5 would be the gravest possible betrayal of our allies and a direct failure to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It seems like someone should be making a big deal about this. But that doesn’t seem to feature in the coverage.

So you’re saying that for Trump to turn his back on the US’ NATO allies would be a violation of the law… and you say that as if that were a consideration that Trump might be deterred by? The guy who promised to be a dictator if he got back into power? I know this piece is about trying to get us all terrified of Trump but, honestly, anyone who’s paid the slightest attention to the cunt over the years ALREADY FULLY EXPECTS HIM TO VIOLATE THE LAW. It’s the minimum we’d expect from him.

Matt doesn’t get “getting us”

Malsh Walsh wasn’t happy with that Superbowl ad either:

Now, though I said yesterday I’ve read the NT in full, I admittedly couldn’t have told you exactly where in the Bible the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet happened, but I knew that it did, and a very quick search soon pointed me to the gospel of John, chapter 13 thereof:

When he had washed their feet, and taken his garments, and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.

I even took that translation specifically from the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, so a good Catholic like Matt should find it theologically acceptable. Of course, a good Catholic like Matt wouldn’t be calling the foot washing thing “heretical bullshit” cos he would not only know it’s in the Bible, but it’s a particularly Catholic thing:

The point Jesus was trying to make is already spelled out in the Scriptures, and needs little interpretation. We are to serve our neighbors, even if it means we must do things we might not like to do. Even if the work is dirty or hard, or even if we think it beneath us, we must still do our work. After all, Jesus Himself, the Son of God, washed the feet of His disciples. And we are no greater than Jesus, so surely we too should do the same.
In church, the foot washing ceremony is an important call for all people that they too should be willing to serve others. In the Catholic Church, this is called the Holy Thursday Mandatum, and the rite takes place after the homily. Members of the congregation are chosen to sit and have their feet washed by the priest, who plays the role of Christ. One by one, the priest will wash the participant’s feet with a basin and a towel.
Allow us to be explicit in stating the significance of this ceremony. It is a reminder that we are of the Body of Christ and as such, and His followers, we too are called to serve others in a spirit of humility. And we are to do so, even if we do not feel the desire to do so. As Christians, this is our duty.

And, obviously, this is what the self-described (ironically or not) “theocratic fascist” Walsh actually considers heretical bullshit. Fundamentally, Walsh is incapable of living up to that spirit of humility, cos it would require him to accept others, and there’s an awful lot of people out there that Malsh Walsh hates, particularly if you’re gay and even more so if you’re transgender, and he’s had issues with people that are female, non-white, etc. And all the other people who are OK with those people, obviously. I mean… you really don’t have to love or even like everyone on Earth, which I certainly don’t (you may have noticed) and I’m fairly sure no one actually does.

But at its core I think the whole foot-washing story is basically about acknowledging common humanity even with people you don’t necessarily like as such, which I don’t think is a bad thing… insofar as I have a philosophy, it’s that you shouldn’t be an arsehole unnecessarily; you don’t have to like everyone but if they haven’t done anything to warrant you being a prick to them, then don’t do it. Malsh Walsh, obviously, has warranted it several times over, and that makes him fair game, so as long as he insists on doing it, I similarly insist on doing this sort of thing…