Month: December 2024

Good night Clive

Clive Robertson has left the studio.

From his Talking Heads interview from a long time ago:

PETER THOMPSON: What are you interested in? Did you say want to say something through all of this?
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Um, I’d have to say the order of things especially at Channel 9, the order of news items. And if I said, “Look, this is really important”, I’d look at the camera and say, “This is a really important story” and set it up, and if it was an important story, then the audience think, “Oh this guy’s a good filter.” If you said, “Look, this is a silly item, I don’t know why we’re running it” and you run it and it is a silly item, you’ve got them. And it’s not a con. What that program did is different from most news programs is gave things what they really were worth.
PETER THOMPSON: But you were also by playing this role, undercutting the artifice what it is a lot of television.
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Oh, yeah, and did that go down well with the journalists? Have a guess Peter. “He’s ruling our station” and all that rubbish. I mean, we get a new item in at, say, 10.30 at night and I’d say, “By the way, you’ll see this at 6 o’clock tomorrow night” and they’ll say it’s the latest, “you know better”. “You can’t say things like that.” Well, you know, come on, so journalists are a bit thick as you know, Peter, you’ve worked with a few, they really are thick. I mean, they really should be sterilised.

I used to watch Clive back in the 80s when he was on commercial TV, because I was a slightly strange child drawn to programs that I wasn’t really old enough for. He may have been something of an influence on me. This is awfully sad.

Well that was quick

It appears they got the UHC shooter already.

New York prosecutors have filed murder and other charges against Luigi Nicholas Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, according to an online court docket.
The action brought an end to a tense five-day manhunt for the suspected killer.
Mr Mangione remained jailed in Pennsylvania, where he was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police.
Police arrested him on Monday after he was spotted in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s by a customer who thought he looked like the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The 26-year-old was in possession of a gun, silencer, fake IDs, and a handwritten document suggesting he had “ill will towards corporate America”, police said. […]
On Monday, Mr Mangione was sitting in the rear of the McDonald’s, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop computer, when he was arrested, court documents said.
A customer saw him and an employee called 911, said Kaz Daughtry, an NYPD deputy commissioner.
Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye said he and his partner recognised the suspect immediately when he pulled down his mask.
“We just didn’t think twice about it. We knew that was our guy,” he said.

Wasn’t expecting that at all. I had a distinct feeling it would take a lot more time and effort than this. Also wasn’t expecting brother Luigi to be… well, a Unabomber-esque crank, or at any rate that’s the perception the media seems to be trying to push; this article goes so far as to note that the book study group he founded back in Hawai’i actually studied Kaczynski’s manifesto at one point (albeit as a “joke”?), and there’s a somewhat peculiar purported screenshot of his Twitter circulating at the moment in which he offers interesting solutions to the Japanese birth rate problem. Uncertain how authentic it is, but I’ve seen someone else post another screenshot of him linking to a Jash Dholani piece… so.

The oddest detail in all of this, of course, is that he was evidently carrying his own manifesto or whatever it is with him when he was caught. Which is a bit of a head-scratcher until you consider the speculation I’ve seen that he wanted to get caught, because he wants to go on trial and use that as a massive public platform for his beliefs and opinions. Doesn’t really make much sense otherwise, to be honest.

A tale of two coups

South Korean politics got weird in the last week or so when their president declared martial law. Basically it all went something like this…

President Yoon: I’m declaring martial law because of the North or something.
Military: Woohoo!
South Korean public taking to the streets: Yeah nah, get fucked with that.
South Korean opposition politicians: Yeah, what the people said.
Yoon: OK I’m undeclaring martial law now.
Military: What?
Opposition: We’re gonna impeach your arse.
Yoon: I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t really mean it.
Opposition: Don’t care. Impeaching.
Ruling party: Hmmmmmmm… no. Not happening.
Everyone else: What the fuck?
Ruling party: Look, we’ll block him from leaving the country for some reason. Will that do?
Everyone else: …No?
Military: You really should’ve just let him go ahead with the martial law thing.
Everyone: Oh fuck off.

Meanwhile in Syria, decades of misrule by the Assad family appears to have ended over the weekend after a rebel advance came out of what appears to have been fucking nowhere:

Crowds of people waved the Syrian revolutionary flag and pulled down statues and portraits of the president and his father, Hafez, while celebratory gunfire and car horns echoed around Damascus on Sunday as an astonishing rebel advance reached the capital.
In photos and videos of families reunited with loved ones long lost to the dark of the regime’s notorious prison system, people cried and clung to one another in disbelief at their newfound freedom. Others gleefully ransacked the presidential palace, marvelling at the abundance of luxury goods and designer cars in a country where 90% of the population lives below the poverty line.
Just hours before, it was announced that Assad had fled the capital in a private plane and that his regime had fallen. On Sunday evening, Russian state news agencies reported that the president and his family were in Moscow and had been given asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.
The major road linking the Lebanese city of Beirut to Damascus was lined with discarded army uniforms on Sunday after Syrian army soldiers discarded them upon realising their leader had abandoned them after 54 years of his family’s rule over Syria.

Lots of happy people in Syria right now, obviously, and, equally, a lot of people probably worried about what happens next. No guarantee, after all, that whoever now fills the vacuum will necessarily be an improvement, or that it won’t be a case of meet the new boss same as the old boss. We remember how well this worked in Russia back in 1917, after all…