Month: December 2024

RIP Jimmy

Goodbye Mr Carter. I think that, in fairness, we can only describe his presidency as a mixed bag of some really good things but more kind of awful things, and a job he ultimately wasn’t really cut out for. Also in fairness, he did the best he could in the years that followed to make up for that. Hilariously, he also managed to outlive the writer of the above obit, with a note at the end advising the latter died in 2021, and from what I’ve seen on Bluesky this afternoon there’s at least two others in the same boat… I’ve known for years that news organisations have these prepared years in advance for particularly notable people, ever since this outstanding incident of 20+ years ago, so they can just roll them out when the subject pops their clogs; for the subject to live longer than their obituarist, though, is something I imagine is kind of rare. Anyway, RIP James Earl the younger; for all the things you got wrong, you’ll be remembered far better than any of your successors so far, especially Mushroom Cock.

Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Oh, SPLENDID. It’s been a long time between bites of toast for the dynamic duo, but it’s been well worth the wait; apparently Nick Park found the experience of making Curse of the Were-Rabbit with Dreamworks so enervating he was in no rush to repeat the experience (Netflix seem to have been more accommodating, which I find hard to believe for some reason). So here we are, sixteen years since the last W&G short; Wallace is still inventing things—this time round it’s a robot garden gnome, Norbot, who frankly has a kind of weirdly alarming vibe to him even before he gets reprogrammed for evil—and Gromit is still kind of despairing of him, while the local police chief is more interested in his impending retirement than the impending return of a former foe from long ago. It’s just beautiful. I applauded so many bits of this film. Most notably, I don’t think I noticed that Wallace is no longer voiced by Peter Sallis, who retired after the previous short and then also died; Ben Whitehead, who’s previously been Wallace’s voice in video games, steps up for his first screen performance, and apart from an initial shock at realising just how much he sounds like Sallis, I actually quickly forgot it wasn’t the latter. It was Wallace’s voice. I think the only thing I seriously have against the film is that, though it’s obviously made in Aardman’s classic claymation method, it’s been shot digitally, and it didn’t feel like it had the same sort of “handmade” vibe of the older films. Maybe it was just me, I don’t know. But whatever, it was great; somehow this claymation thing felt more actually thrilling than a lot of live action films I’ve seen, especially ones with preposterous CGI effects… of which there obviously are some in this one, but the heart of it is the physicality of the clay modelling and the fact that they’re real objects, even if I couldn’t quite see the fingerprints in the way I could before. Terrific.

I pity the poor immigrant

I gather that Anna Gorisch works in immigration law and goes so far as to call herself a “protector of immigrants” in her Twitter bio…

…despite which she evidently voted for Mushroom Cock, a substantial part of whose platform involves deporting all the illegal immigrants he can find. I presume Anna’s services are limited to the “right” immigrants, and I also presume she missed the bit during the election campaign where Haitian immigrants were in fact attacked by MAGAcorp. Hope her clients are satisfied with her efforts…

Anyway, the whole thing has just been further complicated by Trump:

Donald Trump on Saturday sided with Elon Musk, a key supporter and billionaire tech CEO, in a public dispute over the use of the H-1B visa, saying he fully backs the program for foreign tech workers opposed by some of his supporters.
Trump’s remarks followed a series of social media posts from Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who vowed late Friday to go to “war” to defend the visa program for foreign tech workers.
Trump, who moved to limit the visa’s use during his first presidency, told the New York Post on Saturday he was likewise in favor of the visa program.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he was quoted as saying.

This was not quite the development I was expecting in this situation, cos you may recall I predicted Drumpf would get sick of Oolong taking attention away from him, but for now it looks like he’s trying to keep Apartheid Clyde on-side. I don’t know. I still reckon he’ll get the shits with him sooner or later. Curious to see how the rest of MAGA will respond now that Glorious Leader has made his position clear, too.

Meanwhile…

Groypers are Nick Fuentes’ particular mob of cultists, i.e. they’re shit even for MAGA, and indeed they seem to have particular beef with MAGA for not being racist and antisemitic enough for them. I mean, when that shrinkfaced cunt Charlie Kirk isn’t racist enough for you… oy. And apparently Oolong’s been OK with them up to now until they got too racist… er, uppity for him. How dare they oppose his glorious economic plan just because they hate furriners!

And Steve Bannon (remember him?) has waded into the morass:

As someone else noted in the comments to that thread, Bannon himself has had Chinese connections of his own, so possibly he shouldn’t be invoking them here. Also, although he’s been sniffy about the alt-right in the past, if Hitler offered Bannon a cheque I don’t doubt he’d take it without a second thought. It’d be a “western civilisation” thing, after all.

Finally…

I don’t know about the last detail, but… yeah. Oolong has been sprung using burner accounts before, but this time was particularly egregious; I heard some of it on Kevin Logan’s livestream earlier this evening but I had so much second-hand embarrassment for the stupid cunt (Musk, not Kev, obviously) I had to stop. I mean… the voice changer not only didn’t disguise him at all, he started referring to himself in the first person, i.e. as Elon, not this “Adrian Dittmann” persona. It was just too horrendous to sit through.

So much for the tolerant… right?

Wasn’t expecting the year to end with MAGA melting down, but that’s what it seems to be doing… Mushroom Cock appointed some Indian guy to be the government advisor on AI, professional racist Laura Loomer (who you may recall cosying up to Trump not that long ago) started bitching about furriners terkin’ err jerbs and all that, and Oolong just had to get involved because obviously:

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Christmas Day.
In a later post, he wrote: “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”

I find it awfully hard to believe that this shortage is actually a thing, at least to the extent that he seems to want us to think, and the real shortage is of people who are willing to let Oolong exploit them by, you know, paying them nothing. Which is why there’s also been a lot of sniping about the H1B visa in this discourse, which is a special visa tech companies use to import foreign workers, and which would kind of allow Oolong to exploit said foreign labour in the way he wants. Ann Coulter, of all people, wasn’t having it:

Of course, I don’t believe for a minute that Coulter gives a flying fuck for the welfare of those imported workers; the real problem for her and the rest of the MAGA mob is the imported workers terkin’ err jerbs. Would they care as much about American workers in the same sort of indentured servitude? Why do I feel not? Loomer didn’t even bother hiding it, per the Graun article:

“@VivekGRamaswamy knows that the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate.”

Meanwhile, Oolong is apparently getting fed up with people arguing with him and responded in the funniest way he could:

And Laura is NOT happy:

FREE FUCKING SPEECH! Where was this cunt when Musk was banning left-leaning Twitter accounts for talking back to him? Was it OK then, Laura? Does it only bother you that he’s a censorious shit when he does it to MAGA chuds? Laura, of course, famously got banned from Twitter in its pre-Musk era, leading to that ludicrous incident where she handcuffed herself to the front door of the Twitter building. Maybe she should try that again.

Obviously, though, I find it slightly rich that Oolong is having this hissy fit at his presumable political comrades for being racist to immigrants when, a few days ago, he went full mask off (was the mask still on? Was it ever?) by endorsing Alternative für Deutschland, who don’t exactly love immigrants and who have been so awful even fucking Marine Le Pen wants nothing to do with them. That takes some effort. Oolong is going to be an interesting part of the new regime, though I suspect it may not be for long; Trump’s already had to make some remarks about not “ceding the presidency” to Musk following the recent government shutdown shenanigans which I doubt he was happy at having to do, and if Oolong keeps this sort of shit up I expect that even his lordship will only tolerate so mmuch of it…

Still going south…

South Korea’s recent political turmoil has taken an entertaining twist: having finally agreed about impeaching previous president Yoon Suk Yeol over that martial law thing from a few weeks ago, they’re now impeaching his replacement:

South Korea has voted to impeach its acting president Han Duck-soo, two weeks after parliament voted to impeach its President Yoon Suk Yeol.
A total of 192 lawmakers voted for his impeachment, more than the 151 votes needed for it to succeed.
Prime minister Han took over the role after President Yoon was impeached by parliament following his failed attempt to impose martial law on 3 December.
Han was supposed to lead the country out of its political turmoil, but opposition MPs argued that he was refusing demands to complete Yoon’s impeachment process. […]
The opposition first filed an impeachment motion against Han on Thursday after he blocked the appointment of three judges that parliament had chosen to oversee Yoon’s case.
Korea’s Constitutional Court is typically made up of a nine-member bench. At least six judges must uphold Yoon’s impeachment in order for the decision to be upheld.
There are currently only six judges on the bench, meaning a single rejection would save Yoon from being removed.

Obviously this kind of complicates the whole situation cos the court still has to decide if Yoon’s impeachment counts or not, and now they’ll have to make a similar judgement about this guy… and they’ve got 180 days to rule on each one, so just imagine how many more acting presidents the opposition could impeach in that time. The guy who’s taken over from Han must be wondering how long before the same thing happens to him…

Oh French

Oh, this year’s festive season Doctor Who was a delight. The other day I saw a video on Youtube called something like “The 15th Doctor doesn’t work”, and though the channel didn’t otherwise look like one of those anti-woke chuds, I still decided it was unworthy of any further attention, cos the 15th Doctor is great and the new episode only underlines how good Ncuti is. Needless to say people are still whining about it being “woke”, probably because Moffat had the temerity to reference Partygate, and actually make that a somewhat major part of one of the main characters’ backstory. Kind of glad I’m not on Twitter any more to witness that shit even for a joke, although the Daily Express (which can get fucked, I’m not linking it) rounded up a few of the predictables. Worked for me, I thought it was one of the best Christmas specials the show’s given us. AND we got “mavity” again! All I need now is the new Wallace & Gromit to finish downloading and my festive season viewing should be well sorted…