Month: November 2025

History lesson

There’s been quite some fuss lately over this Mushroom Cock proclamation from a few days ago:

This was in response to this:

A video released last week by six Democratic lawmakers has set off an acrimonious partisan debate over what constitutes treason and reflects a larger political debate about what constitutes patriotism in today’s polarised political environment.
In the 90-second video, the six Democrats, all with military or national security backgrounds, criticised Trump and reminded military personnel they had the right – the obligation, even – to disobey “unlawful orders”.
Although they did not detail what orders they had in mind, they are thought to have been referring to the deployment of National Guard troops to US cities and the US Navy raids on alleged drugs traffickers in the Caribbean.
“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” they said.
You have taken an oath to defend the US constitution, they reminded their military listeners, and “the threats to our constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home”.

Which in turn inspired this discussion I saw posted online:

The American education system at work, I see. Someone want to teach Rick a bit of European history? Cos evidently someone needs to…

Hey, remember Jordan B.?

Someone posted on the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm group about watching a Jordan B. Peterson video and wondering what happened to him and what a shame he chose to become such an arsehole. I replied that he’d always been one—let’s face it, 12 Rules doesn’t paint him as a particularly stellar person—and I knew he’d done Prager U videos before the Bill C-16 bullshit made him famous. Indeed, I went to find when he did his first one for them, and didn’t find that but did get this suggestion from Google:

Oh my, Murdoch media’s turned on him too! I have to say that’s pretty scathing; evidently even right-wing propaganda rags like the Oz can only take so much of this bullshit…

I suppose someone has to…

Elon Boasts That His AI Can Generate a Beautiful Woman Saying “I Will Always Love You”

Elon Musk appears to be going through it.
On Saturday, the billionaire became the subject of widespread mockery after boasting about how the video generating model from his AI company xAI, Grok Imagine, can fabricate a photorealistic clip of a woman looking into the camera and declaring her undying love for you — which is either an indication that Musk thinks his fans are a bunch of lonely sad sacks, or that he himself is one, or both.
“Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you,’” Musk wrote in a post with the video on his website X, formerly Twitter, published at the very well-adjusted hour of 4:20 AM (Musk is a late riser, so this was likely posted at the end of a long day, not the beginning of it.)
The resulting video, true to Musk’s prompt, does show a clearly AI-generated woman saying “I will always love you” in a voice that’s obviously of AI origin — which, all subtext aside, is an unconvincing demonstration of Grok’s supposedly incredible capabilities.
It gets even sadder. Replying to his own post, Musk also revealed that the AI-generated woman was actually one that he saw in another Grok-created image by a fan. In other words, Musk didn’t just ask for a generic video of a fake woman saying he loves him — he wanted someone else’s specific fake AI woman to do it.

This piece is a couple of weeks old but I’m only just discovering it now, and, well, idiocy has no expiration date. Talking of idiocy, this also came just a few days after Tesla shareholders voted to potentially make him a trillionaire:

Tesla announced that more than 75% of shares voted in favor of the pay package during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The vote didn’t include the 15% of the company that Musk already owns.
The crowd at the meeting broke into cheers and chants when the results were announced. Musk thanked the shareholders and the Tesla board soon after. “I super appreciate it,” he said.
Musk doesn’t take any salary, but the approved pay package comes in the form of a stock grant that would give him as much as 423.7 million additional Tesla shares over the next 10 years.
Those shares could be worth about $1 trillion, assuming the company reaches the $8.5 trillion market cap needed to have Musk qualify for the full potential payout. In addition, Tesla needs to achieve a series of either operational or financial targets for him to get the full number of shares, which would be distributed in 12 equal blocks.
Getting all the shares available under this package over the next 10 years would be the equivalent of earning $275 million a day, dwarfing any other executive pay package in history.

Given how relatively poorly Tesla has been doing in some markets lately, I feel that we can probably call the shareholders even bigger idiots than Edolf himself over this silly shit.

And I’ll be honest, I’ve been playing with AI a bit lately, which I know makes me a bad person and all of that, but it’s been purely for my own amusement and I have no interest in sharing the results (and no illusions about being an “artist” either, cos I’m just using it as a quicker way of doing some things I used to do with Photoshop), but I’m not so desperate that I feel the need to do… this. I am, obviously, painfully single and a lonely man in his early 50s and all that, but I don’t think I’d ever resort to this to reassure myself that I wasn’t a loser. Cos I absolutely WOULD be if I did. And, frankly, the world’s probable first trillionaire also being the world’s biggest loser? THAT reassures me that I’ll never be as much of one as him…

I was wrong

Unlike some people, I actually generally enjoy Facebook’s Memories feature, cos I don’t have a lot of bad memories to be reminded of… but I have this one, and whenever it comes around, I always get a reminder of just how bad my political prognostication skills can be. I mean, I wasn’t actually wrong in this case, cos the Libs did remain in opposition until 2013, but I was expecting the ascent of Tone Abet to be a catastrophe for them that would give the ALP a boost and a secure footing for those four years. I wasn’t expecting Labor to shit the bed with the fighting between Rudd and Gillard leading to the latter barely retaining power, and then the further in-fighting leading to Rudd losing to Abbott. A shower of bastards, the lot of them…

Jimmy finds his way over

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

A message from his wife Latifa Chambers on Instagram reads: “It’s with profound sadness that I share that my husband, Jimmy Cliff, has crossed over due to a seizure followed by pneumonia. I am thankful for his family, friends, fellow artists and coworkers who have shared his journey with him. To all his fans around the world, please know that your support was his strength throughout his whole career … Jimmy, my darling, may you rest in peace. I will follow your wishes.” Her message was also signed by their children, Lilty and Aken.
With hits including You Can Get It If You Really Want, I Can See Clearly Now and Wonderful World, Beautiful People, Cliff’s upbeat musical temperament brought him a large and longstanding fanbase. His lead acting role in 1972 crime drama The Harder They Come was also acclaimed, with the film seen as a cornerstone of Jamaican cinema.
He is one of just a handful of musicians, alongside Bob Marley and others, to be awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit.
Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness was among those paying tribute to Cliff, calling him “a true cultural giant whose music carried the heart of our nation to the world … Jimmy Cliff told our story with honesty and soul. His music lifted people through hard times, inspired generations, and helped to shape the global respect that Jamaican culture enjoys today.”

Intense Hammer rage

(With thanks to the Sound is a Factor YT channel who reminded me the other day about the band of that name…)

You know what I hate? When I don’t do enough research… So I spent a good chunk of tonight watching a fantastic video by a chap calling himself the Academic Agent on Hammer Films and its history (one thing I don’t think I ever knew before: Will Hinds, who founded the company in 1935, didn’t actually even like films that much), going into the key people at the company and even the business transactions and stuff like that, all of which is great and fascinating… and then in the last bit where he cites his sources, he mentioned another Youtuber and observed the latter individual had a tendency to go off against THE WOOOOOOOOOOKE. Which he approved of.

Hang on… had I just spent two hours greatly enjoying a fascinating video about something I love by a right-wing goon?

And yeah, it appears I had in face done precisely this. My fault for not checking, too, cos if I had just looked at our host’s list of videos, I would’ve seen this:

Um. A quick squiz at his community posts further revealed he has a Substack which had been made into an audiobook by yet another Youtuber with the… promising name of Daughter of Albion, who hasn’t posted much in ages but the tagline on her YT channel is “it’s OK to be English”. Didn’t realise anyone was saying it’s not, but sure…

Who, then, is Neema Parvini, the Academic Agent, proprietor of the Academic Agency and non fan of THE WOOOOOOOOOOKE? Well, he’s a trained Shakespearean with several books to his credit and an enthusiast for classical economics and political theory, to which end he’s written books on those subjects too. (Folio Society collector, judging by his website photo.) And, per Hope Not Hate, an “extremist” who associates with far-right mobs like the Traditional British Group and Scyldings and Imperium Press (an Australian white nationalist publisher who have two of his books in their catalogue) and people like Carl Benjamin (though funnily enough, I did spot a video by the latter whining about Parvini refusing to debate him on something). And that Substack offers this interesting piece on whether or not he’s “white”, given that he’s mixed Welsh and Iranian:

I can no more claim the victories of Cyrus the Great for myself as I can the victories of Henry Tudor. I find it absurd to think in this way. This is a kind of cartoon nationalism. In my experience only Tory Boys imagine this is what nationalism is. None of my truly nationalist friends ever speak in this way. Our ancestors live in us but it’s not a low-rent game of glorified spectator sports whereby the Liverpool fan lords it over the Manchester United fan because some man wearing the right shirt scored a goal. To feel the call of a hundred generations in your bones is not some two-bit game of oneupmanship, it should be a profound and humbling realisation that you are part of something far bigger than yourself and far more significant than the trifles of the past few decades.

Charming. Fortunately (?) Neema is far too much of a rugged individualist to fully embrace either identity, though he definitely seems to lean one way:

To be spiritually ‘white’ in 2022 is to be deracinated and atomised and dislocated from any sense of belonging. This is why we fight: because we have been denied even the possibility of being rooted in a world that is fake and gay. I see my fight as the same fight as Fróði Midjord’s ultimately: the return of the real. Even if Fróði’s ancestors were Vikings and mine were nomads the from the Zagros mountains or Welsh druids, I feel like our struggle is the same.

This Midjord character is apparently a Faroese white supremacist, so… that’s the struggle he identifies with, apparently.

I’m really kind of ticked by this, cos I could’ve just looked at Parvini’s channel and seen the anti-woke kids’ books video (no, I didn’t actually watch it) instead of, you know, giving him the view. And yeah, I deleted it from my viewing history so I don’t think the view counts, but still, I gave him the time. About two hours of worth. I was enjoying it so much I was going to link it here and make a post about how good it was… which is the most galling thing, it was a great video. But Neema is a right-wing goon with kind of clear white nationalist sympathies (even if, to be sure, they didn’t affect this particular video apart from that one bit), and I regret having given him my time and attention like that… To be honest I’m a bit surprised by my own reaction to this whole thing, am I overreacting or what, and once again probably only I care, but I think this is just what happens to me when I encounter someone godawful like this who loves something like this which I also love (cf. Davis “Fucking N****rs” Aurini‘s fondness of Motorhead)… Whatever. It is what it is, as always… and if all else fails I suppose I can take some bitter amusement at the idea of this half-Welsh half-Iranian dude being in bed with white nationalists; Hitler might’ve excluded Persians from the race laws for their “Aryan” ancestry, but I don’t think his more recent followers would find Neema sufficiently Aryan despite his own…