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The Most Merciful Savior has had enough of your shit.

Entity

11 August 2025: ECAJ statement on Australian announcement on recognition of a Palestinian State.

...

Australia is now committed to recognising as a State an entity with no agreed borders, no single government in effective control of its territory, and no demonstrated capacity to live in peace with its neighbours.

They just described Israel.

Complicity

If you haven’t heard, the F-35 is an expensive death plane used, most recently, to erase Gaza from existence...

Australia sells parts used in its construction, including the release mechanism that allows the bomb bay doors to open and rain death on playgrounds, schools, mosques, etc., whatever depravity this Nazified racist shithole is up to on any given day...

F-35s don’t have other purposes... F-35s – inoperable without Australia’s contribution – have been used to blow up anything resembling life in Palestine. This means that if F-35s had cup holders they’d be lethal cup holders because keeping a genocidal dickweed hydrated is all part of it.

...

Wong is applying the same specious neoliberal reasoning that “means” the coal Australia digs from the ground, sells, and burns elsewhere doesn’t count towards our global emissions. It might be “true” in the benignly villainous world of corporate bookkeeping, but in reality it is just homicidal hoodwinking...

Through a convoluted global network that allows for a veneer of deniability (while also ensuring much of the West is grossly complicit), these F-35 parts sometimes go to other countries for assembly before arriving in Israel and mass slaughtering trapped Palestinians.

...

In Wong’s shirking of any responsibility, we hear her speaking aloud the type of internal logic that people complicit in atrocity use to detach so they can sleep at night. I was just following orders. There was nothing I could do. I only sold the peaceful parts of the big death plane. To normalise and be comfortable speaking such unrestrained garbage publicly, Wong must be surrounded by psychopaths and sycophants. To mistake this position for reasonableness is an indictment on everyone in Wong’s orbit.

Dave Milner at The Shot.

As Francesca Albanese pointed out, the widespread supply chain is the point: it creates a powerful incentive for participating nations to deny atrocities and genocide are being committed by the recipients of the planes, lest the numerous supplying countries be found complicit in those crimes. Our Foreign Minister's idiot claim that the parts we supply are non-lethal reveals a desperation that stems from the realisation that the crimes can no longer be denied, so we must resort to only denying our complicity.

Tom Lehrer 1928 - 2025

We've been waiting for this shoe to drop for a while, but it still hits hard.

Just last week I was thinking about Mr Lehrer's friend Hen3ry:

The 3 was silent, you see. Henry was financially independent having inherited his father's tar-and-feather business and was therefore able to devote his full time to such intellectual pursuits as writing. I particularly remember a heart-warming novel of his about a young necrophiliac who finally achieved his boy-hood ambition by becoming coroner. (The rest of you can look it up when you get home.) In addition to writing, he indulged in a good deal of philosophizing. Like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. One particular bit of advice which I recall, which is the reason I bring up this whole, dreary story, is something he said once before they took him away to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered. He said: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

As I have not recently had the opportunity to visit the comedy albums I listened to obsessively in my youth, and human memory being what it is, I erroneously recalled that Hen3ry's story formed the introduction to Mr Lehrer's song about Mexico, rather than for the finale of that show, the revivalist anthem celebrating the silver lining of a nuclear war: it would leave no-one behind to mourn. (I once saw "We Will All Go Together When We Go" performed at a mid-80s peace/disarmament rally by a prominent Australian folk singer, which would have amused/appalled Mr Lehrer no end.) This memory lapse meant I erased the introduction to "In Old Mexico", the biography of Samuel Gall, inventor of the gall bladder, who had started university majoring "in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day", before switching to medicine and inventing gargling, then going on to specialize in "diseases of the rich".

I've linked to it before, I'm sure, but here is Mr Lehrer's concert in Copenhagen.

Wertheim v. Haddad

"The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other."

Obvious

Spell it out. It’s absurd. There’s this freaky little Nazified genocidal colony swallowing Palestine, 82% of Israeli residents are in favour of ethnically cleansing Gaza, 47% of them want to murder every man, woman and child still cursed with being alive inside the concentration camp, and if you speak out about it anywhere, even in fucking Australia, you might lose your job...

It all makes it rather obvious you live inside a subservient (and embarrassingly eager) military vassal state to a rotting fascist empire eternally fueled by white supremacy and the blood of the Global South, doesn’t it?

Tentacles

That's weird. I thought octopuses were an anti-Semitic trope.

Joe Don Baker 1936-2025

One of the greats. RIP. (This video is a partial spoiler if you haven't already watched the original BBC "Edge of Darkness", which you should.)

Wave

Obviously I approve of the result, but was there any reason to crush seals?

Typical

This triangle is going to help us explain how Australian politics has fundamentally changed.

Like typical triangles, it has three sides, and three corners.

,,, whoa, whoa, slow down, poindexter.

Great Television

Apropos the previous post, if you're a fan of those performances where a musical artist appears live on television to mime to a recording of their signature hit, you will be hard-pressed to find a finer specimen than this utterly demented example of the genre.

Now I Can't Unsee It

I don't know who, if anyone, needs to know this, but if you play the Parallax Corporation recruitment montage at 1.5 times its original speed, it's the same length as Mason Williams' "Classical Gas".

Close

In this case, Evatt’s gaffe mattered...

Following a closely fought election in 1954, it provided an opening for Robert Menzies to call an early election in 1955, which he won in a landslide. It paved the way for another 17 years of Coalition rule.

"Closely fought election" is an amusingly undetailed way to describe an election where the Evatt led Labor Party won not only the plurality and two-party preferred vote, but in fact won more than 50% of the first preference votes, clearly demonstrating who the majority of Australians wanted in power. The Senate election the previous year had produced the same result. In 1954 our idiotic region-based electoral system handed the Tories an illegitimate five seat majority and gave Menzies' infant Liberal party their second term in government, because democracy. Just to be clear.

Sand

Today I discovered that techbros, usually as a rejoinder to scepticism about the unlimited potential of innovation in computing or the notion, say, that humankind will terraform Mars, like to use the phrase "we taught sand to think". Now, I'm not saying they really don't understand that the only function of the silicon* in silicon chips is as an insulator, just: stupid people use stupid slogans. (Mind you, more common on the internet is the T-shirt inscription "Teaching sand to think was a mistake" which only avoids being dumb by virtue of being facetious.)

(* 02/04/2026 Silicon oxide, of course, which is sand, to be sure. The silicon in a silicon chip apparently does conduct electricity, forming part - or most, I guess - of the "thinking" structure of the chip. Chips also contain silicon oxide, and it is there as an insulator, but, embarrassingly, that's not what I meant. Still, I was half right!, or to be more accurate, only mostly wrong.)

Dry

A middle-aged British man who became an unlikely sensation on Chinese social media and added a new item to the Chinese vocabulary for his lunch sandwiches passed away on Wednesday, his family said.

...

Keith rose to fame through videos posted by his wife, a native of northeast China. These videos featured him cutting whole-wheat bread as he made avocado toast or a tomato sandwich and garnered millions of likes across platforms.

These meals became known as "dry lunch" or 干巴 in Chinese and Keith himself as the "dry old uncle." The videos have become a source of both amusement and disbelief for Chinese viewers.

"One bite of this after work, and I'll be scarred for life" was one comment, which was liked 127,000 times.

All the English language news sources reporting this story insist on referring tp this gentleman as "Old Dry Keith" thereby proving that Western media can't get the simplest things right.

Colección

You worry me, duolingo.

Silence

Of those killed, at least 138 139 were journalists...

Consider all that for just a hot fucking minute. The assault on the profession, the massacre of colleagues-in-news by a religious apartheid ethnostate, only for an entire industry – and a mouthy one at that – to shut the fuck up so sincerely about any of it.

[Cricket chirps]

Consider also: the people routinely on these Sunday morning couches get worked up when people on Twitter say nasty things about underwhelming reporters. They find their solidarity and cojones when a presenter is under fire for being a bit shit or the profession is slandered, and onto their high-horse they hop. But when a genocidal nation kills fellow journalists, there’s nothing but cowardly silence and endless justification for the ongoing devastation.

Labels

If you thought the above was the most clueless, or, as the old folks say, cringe election season meme ever produced by a Democratic supporter, you should strap in:


(Click for Twitter video)

I assume the blasted landscape represents Gaza.

As always with these things I had to check for traces of irony, but... apparently there are none.

Ologist

As the arrival of Alien: Romulus in cinemas has sparked a bizarre online tendency for championing the other prequels, here's a necessary reminder that Prometheus is not an intriguing examination of profound questions but, actually, utter shite:

When the Challenger blows up, you don’t waste your time complaining about its paint job. But beyond Sweet et al.‘s observations about the lack of dramatic tension, the lack of mystery, the lack of story, science does play a disproportionate role here. Alien was about a bunch of truckers on a lonely monster-haunted highway; Aliens, about a bunch of jarheads rediscovering, to their shock and awe, the nastier lessons of Viet Nam. Prometheus is about a scientific expedition ... and ... it’s blindingly obvious that Scott couldn’t be bothered to ensure that his “scientists” knew the difference between a gene and a bad joke. Much less anything about science as a profession.

So nobody thinks it remarkable when an archaeologist performs micro-necro-neurosurgery or runs a genetic analysis — anybody with an ologist on their resumé has gotta be a whizz at everything from microbiology to global general relativity, right? We’re shown a biologist who uses the word “Darwinism” as though it were a legitimate scientific term and not a dig invented by creationists: the same biologist who, in the penultimate act of a profoundly undistinguished career, runs with his tail between his legs at the sight of the first actual alien the Human race has ever encountered, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years. Then, a few hours later, watches a live serpentine alien perform what’s pretty obviously a threat display — and tries to pet it.

And yet, idiotic though that biologist may be, the scientist in me can’t really take personal offense because nobody in this shiny train wreck has a clue, from the pilot to the aliens to an on-board medical pod that, honest-to-God, is Not Configured for Females... Nobody bothers with any kind of orbital survey prior to landing (blind luck is always the best way to locate artefacts that could be anywhere on the surface of a whole bloody planet — although that’s downright plausible next to being able to find a multi-mooned gas giant from 34 lightyears away, based on a prehistoric game of tic-tac-toe someone scratched into a cave wall during the last ice age). A survey team goes charging into an unexplored alien structure and takes off their helmets the moment someone says “oxygen”. Their captain leaves the bridge unattended for a quick fuck, right after informing two crew members stranded in the bowels of said structure that some kind of unknown life-form reading is popping in and out of sensor range just down the hall from them.

And so on.

Scott's apparent facility at SF as exemplified by Bladerunner and Alien was precisely his incomprehension of the genre and its themes, which led him to avoid taking charge of the meaning or resonances of the stories, left sensibly in the hands of great scriptwriters, and concentrate instead on the stuff within his skill set, as a director who cut his teeth in advertising: making it all look amazing. Later, having the career gravitas that persuaded people to take his narrative skills seriously, he revisited films that should have been let alone, burdening them with half-baked meditations on supposedly profound issues (What is life? What is humanity? What is free will?) that actual SF has found tiresome for six decades.

Never confuse serendipity for proficiency.

Sorority

So glad I was reminded of the existence of this, as a result of people suggesting potential performers of RFKJnr's epic about the bear corpse:

Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter

(I did try to embed it, but they have it age-restricted on the grounds of how impressively sweary it is.)