I don’t ever recall seeing Nepal in the news that much, it doesn’t seem to be the sort of place where things happen, or maybe it’s just that media here doesn’t care about things happening there (much more likely, really). However, even western media are having trouble ignoring the strife there in recent days… with the government talking about banning social media, which turned into a protest against the government, which turned into a massacre with 19 dead, which turned into riots, which turned into the overthrow of said government, all in the space of a couple of days. I saw the above picture on Tumblr earlier today, a protestor who took on one of the riot cops and stole his gear from him, and whatever else may be said about the situation there right now, that is a hell of an image.
Well, Charlie kind of got what he wanted, in that a bunch of students at a college in Utah got to watch the public execution of Charlie Kirk himself at a Turning Point USA event there. Apparently they were actually in the middle of a debate about mass shootings when it happened, too, so the shooter’s timing was undeniably good.
So I’d just got out of bed this afternoon, went to the bathroom for a piss, and Joe (housemate) popped out of his bedroom and said “Hey dude, they assassinated Charlie Kirk”. Piss… stopped. I was too shocked by this news to even let my bladder out. In a slight daze, I then made breakfast and sat down to read the news and see the reactions. The news was kind of awful, really…
…but so was Chuckles himself, of course. For him it was worth other people dying to maintain that bit in the constitution about well-regulated militias and keep the gun industry alive. How would he be feeling now if he’d actually survived this? Was it worth it for him to be a target? Would he be defending the right of whoever shot him to own that weapon?
And who did shoot him, anyway? FBI apparently caught two suspects but let both of them go, so as far as I know the shooter’s still out there. Who would have shot him? Well, radical woke leftists, obviously, like this guy, but Kyle Kulinski was speculating on his YT channel about it being a far right job, cos apparently Kirk had been fighting some Nazis online lately… cos you know what Nick Fuentes and his ilk think of the Republicans, i.e. the latter are insufficiently racist for them. Whoever it was, though, obviously meant to do it, unlike those “attempts” on Trump last year, this guy knew what he was doing…
As for the reactions online, well, thus far California governor Gavin Newsom offered probably the least helpful idea:
That’s a lovely sentiment Gavin expresses, of course, except that Charlie Kirk did not believe in any of those things except for violence. He believed in hate, and the destruction of the people and things he hated. That would’ve included Newsom, whose death in similar circumstances he would’ve welcomed. Oh Gav, you were doing so well recently with your posts mocking Trump’s posting style on Twatter… Otherwise I think the reactions have been predictable, hysterics from the right and tut-tutting from the left about not celebrating his death mixed with a possibly greater load of “yeah, but fuck that guy, he was scum”. And he was. I’m not going to mourn him or actively celebrate his end; equally, I won’t tell anyone else that they can’t or shouldn’t.
One of my own initial reactions was “shit, a fucking martyr is all these people need now”… I don’t WANT him dead, I want the crappy far-right “news” people like him and Ben Shapiro and Tim Ghoul and the rest neutralised and removed from any position where they can influence anyone. Them being dead—especially like this—certainly stops them saying anything further, but it doesn’t really help much otherwise. I think my own initial shock at the news was that it was specifically about him. Someone targeted Charlie Kirk, as opposed I suppose to an actual political figure or even another of the MAGA media mob. I’m still wondering why him.
So yeah, objectively murder is a bad thing. Also objectively, Charles James Kirk was a titanic piece of shit and failure as a human being. And on the same day as he died there was another school shooting, and the Republicans will never give a shot about that cos they never do, and the Democrats won’t be any better, and there will continue to be mass shootings and lots of hand-wringing about “this is not what America is” and more bullshit like that even though it 100% IS, and even now that it’s happened to one of their people the Republicans will still do absolutely nothing to stop this sort of thing from happening. Fuck him. Fuck them. Fuck that country and its national psychosis with guns. But at least people stopped talking Jeffrey Epstein for a while, didn’t they? Maybe THAT was the motive, who knows…
This… intriguingstatue of Mrs God was doing the rounds on Bluesky today, for reasons that I think are obvious. It was Greg’s repost of it, though, that got me thinking… and what it made me think was “Face? But isn’t that oval bit at the top meant to be the face?”… And ONLY THEN did it hit me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a man in my life, if you know what I mean…
THIS was a hell of a thing to see tonight, and it’s left me weirdly uncomfortable for some reason.
I gather that this was the almost entirety of the cast and crew of the production of The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, the first play shown on British television back in July 1930. Forty years later. almost everyone in that photo (including all three of the cast) was still alive and accordingly appeared on some BBC show called Review to show how it was done using the original Baird 30-line gear, a period microphone, etc.
And it just felt… strange. Not least because, obviously, the 1930 technology was so limited compared to what the BBC had by 1970 (never mind how much further it’s progressed since then); this performance certainly did give what I imagine was a pretty accurate reconstruction of how the 1930 production looked and sounded, and it’s quite fun to imagine TV as we know it blossoming from… this thing. But it was more than that somehow. There was something a bit “unco” (to use a good Scottish word Baird himself might have used) going on. Like ghosts being summoned.
I mean, even if you don’t consciously register it, there’s always ghosts being called up whenever you engage in some old media where the people involved have left this world behind, but this had some very particular ones. One of those ghosts, obviously, was that of the original production, which vanished into the ether as soon as it was finished in those days before recording. Though the actors were 40 years older by then, it was still the same actors as in the 1930 broadcast, and indeed the same crew. I suppose, too, there’s also the ghost of the long-dead production method as well, finally defeated in 1936 by Marconi’s electronic camera system.
But, like I said, there was more it than just watching an old TV show… I don’t know anything about Review; with a name like that I can’t exactly find much information. What sort of show even was it? How much of it did the BBC keep? (I mean this is the BBC we’re talking about here; as I’ve been saying for a long time, if the BBC made something before about 1978 and it still exists, it almost certainly does so by accident rather than design.) Is anyone involved with it still with us, like the original Man With the Flower team were for them? I suspect Review is as lost to history as most of the BBC’s programming from that period, and watching it tonight in 2025 on the BBC’s Youtube archive channel was kind of summoning its ghost just as the show itself was trying to summon that of the 1930 play. Ghost within a ghost?
I don’t know how to really express it, nor indeed why I’m trying to do so; yet again, I’m sure this is something that only I even notice or care about. For whatever reason, though, there was something kind of uncanny about watching this TV show that’s even further in time from us now than the TV show it was about was from them when they made it, those people who were still alive then wouldn’t be for much longer…
And THIS is the latest development in the Epstein bullshit: yes, Mushroom Cock hung around Epstein like the smell of piss, but only because he was informing on him to the FBI.
No, really.
On Friday, Johnson made the confusing remarks about the president when a reporter asked him about Trump repeatedly referring to the Epstein scandal as “the Democrat Epstein Hoax.”
“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said, claiming the president’s feelings on the topic had been “misrepresented.” “He is not saying what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil, and he believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago.”
Johnson then added the head-scratching claim that Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
The comment sent the internet ablaze, and could surely make good South Park fodder. […]
For some in the administration, the confusion spilled over into Saturday, with some officials still unsure about whether Johnson was citing some explosive, unheard-of insider information, or if he misspoke or was freelancing extemporaneously.
“What the hell is he doing?” one senior Trump administration appointee told Rolling Stone, after being asked about the Johnson “informant” comment.
Other Trump advisers say it’s their understanding that Johnson was referencing past claims made in the media about Trump; however, these claims did not amount to the idea he was a federal “informant.”
“What the hell” indeed. As others online have noted, Trump himself is the greatest argument against this claim:
Trump claimed to have been friends with Epstein for 15 years in 2002, with the pair cutting ties in 2004. If Trump cut ties with Epstein ‘when he first heard the rumour’, how could he have been an informant before that? Are we supposed to believe the FBI asked him to snitch on Epstein with no idea as to what he should be snitching on?
Untangling this further, the idea that Trump was an uninformed informant falls down immediately, because Johnson said Trump was trying “to take this stuff down”. Take what stuff down? The stuff you just told us he had no idea about?
Yeah, this whole thing is weird and I’m stumped as to what Mike Johnson thought he was trying to achieve. Whatever it was, though, I don’t think he got it…
You may understand why I didn’t think this fucking thing could be real when I saw it posted on Bluesky, so I had a squiz at Truth Social and yeah, of COURSE this fucking thing is real, I shouldn’t have doubted. This is Mushroom Cock’s latest thing, rebranding the Department of Defence (I will not use the American spelling, fuck you) as the Department of War, amd deploying the National Guard to Washington DC in the name of “reducing crime” or something; now he’s apparently making good on his threat to do the same to Chicago and other Democrat-controlled cities…
And that’s the just-posted response from Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who’s been talking an awfully good talk against Krasnov’s behaviour until now. Just hope walking the walk isn’t beyond him now. I must say, I’ve been expecting civil war in the Unhinged States for a long time now and been surprised that it hasn’t happened. Never expected it to be declared by the president, though.
“What is the point?” our shitty “hero” shouts at one point during a fight with his wife, a question I found myself asking throughout this film. I likely would never have watched this had it not been in the 1001 Films book—I vaguely recall reading director Jon Jost’s name somewhere but otherwise knew bugger all about his work—and would have missed nothing… I was, as you probably don’t recall, pondering a while ago the lack of “respectable” cinema on my list for the Century of Cinema project, so I decided to go for “serious and arthouse” again tonight, and strike another title of the 1001 Films watchlist while I was at it. It’s one of the harder films to obtain on the list and it was not worth the effort. Our aforementioned shitty “hero” is Tom, a truck driver who’s out of work and not trying too hard to find new work, which is pissing his wife off cos he leaves her behind for weeks at a time on his nominal trips to get a job, and the film ends with him murdering another man for his money, and I suppose we’re meant to assume this is how he’s been surviving without a job. I gather the whole thing is meant to be a critique of how capitalism ruins the lives of people like Tom, and JESUS FUCK WHO CARES, cos Tom is so unlikeable and uninteresting that I don’t give a fuck for his plight and how capitalism has driven him to to point he’s at. He is such an absolute bore that the film, telling a story (barely) about emptiness, just becomes vacuous itself. Last Chants was a famously cheap production, clocking in somewhere between two and three thousand dollars; I admire to a certain extent how Jost worked around those limitations but not the end result. I will say that Jost, who also wrote and sang the songs scattered through the film, is a reasonably good singer. Beyond that, I don’t think I have any further use for his other work; happy to leave Jost as a one-time thing.
This comes interestingly timed after that bullshit the other day where Aaron Lewis was whining about being later than everyone else to realise “Born in the USA” actually wasn’t the ra-ra anthem he thought it was… this is the so-called “Electric Nebraska” version; having done the home recordings that turned into the Nebraska album, Bruce then tried to work up full band versions of those songs but wasn’t happy with the results and scrapped them (until now, with an expanded Nebraska featuring those E Street Band recordings coming out soon). However, the sessions had produced a number of other songs that would be reworked for Born in the USA, including the title track… whether or not the 1982 version above is better as such than the 1984 one is obviously a matter of taste, though I think it might actually be. And, either way, it’s different enough in its approach that even Aaron Lewis might realise the bitterness underpinning it.
Staind frontman and outspoken conservative Aaron Lewis recently made an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, during which he was asked about his thoughts on Bruce Springsteen, whose political beliefs are in strong opposition to those of the post-grunge rocker.
Not surprisingly, Lewis proceeded to go on a tirade, accusing The Boss of being unpatriotic and fooling everyone with one of the most “anti-American songs ever.”
“I think that he is a disgusting display of not appreciating what was handed to him, in this country as being an American, the success that he has had,” Lewis told Carlson (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “The fact that he duped us all with one of the most anti-American songs ever and called it ‘Born in the USA’ as some sort of celebration of how great it is to be born in the USA. I’m angry at myself for not seeing it for so long and actually giving him, in my mind, the credit of being a representation of blue-collar America.”
Springsteen wrote “Born in the USA” from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran who was disillusioned with the way the country treated him upon his return home, but the song has often been misinterpreted as a patriotic anthem.
Aaron Lewis has apparently only just discovered the concept of irony. Meanwhile, I suspect most music fans who care about this sort of thing have been aware for decades that “Born in the USA” was celebrating piss all and was far more about standing up for the blue-collar Americans drafted into that shitty war who then got ignored when they returned home having lost it. I suspect, mind you, that brother Aaron should be less angry that he was too stupid to realise what a certain song was well known to actually be about and more that Springsteen looks better at 76 than he does at 53…
“What is the point?” our shitty “hero” shouts at one point during a fight with his wife, a question I found myself asking throughout this film. I likely would never have watched this had it not been in the 1001 Films book—I vaguely recall reading director Jon Jost’s name somewhere but otherwise knew bugger all about his work—and would have missed nothing… I was, as you probably don’t recall, 
You must be logged in to post a comment.