Oh no, Trump’s lost the CRAB

I had to take a screenshot of this just in case it vanished or something:

Yes, Convicted Racist Andrew Bolt is done with Mushroom Cock! Not that he ever actually liked him, allegedly, but at least he hated the people CRAB hated so that made him OK. Until now.

This past week settles it: Donald Trump is a lying blow-hard who’s destroyed the United States’ most glittering boast: that it is the leader of the free world.
We conservatives have been betrayed. And Australia has been left without a sure ally in war. […]
Trump is desperate. His poll numbers have tanked to record lows, not least because his war in Iran has driven up fuel prices just ahead of the November 3 elections, which could now cost Republicans control of Congress and turn Trump into a lame-duck president.
Trump’s response disgraces America and excites its enemies. He hasn’t just floated a barbaric plan to distract voters – livestreaming the execution of jihadist Nidal Hasan, an army major who murdered 13 fellow soldiers.
He’s also blaming Ukraine, not his own war with Iran, for the higher fuel prices, and is punishing it.
Trump last week raged that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel”.
That’s because Ukraine has destroyed Russian oil refineries to choke off the cash they earn to buy the drones and missiles Russia uses to destroy Ukrainian apartment blocks, schools, buses and trains.
It’s worked. Russia has lost up to half of its crude oil refining capacity, turning it from a fuel exporter to importer.
But Trump blasted Zelensky for trying to save his democracy from annihilation. He accused him of not wanting peace and called for his removal as president.
Well, that’s Trump’s lying excuse for the deal he then announced – to send Russian president Vladimir Putin, the war criminal who launched this unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, billions of dollars to murder more Ukrainian civilians.
Of course, Trump didn’t put it that way. He instead said he’d drop oil sanctions against Russia and buy 300,000 tonnes of Putin’s diesel to cut US prices in October. He’d buy even more later.
Western diplomats report Trump officials also warned Europe could be banned from sending Ukraine any more American weapons they’d bought, if Ukraine kept bombing Russian refineries.
What makes this betrayal of a democracy even more shameful is that it’s just a pathetic publicity stunt. Trump is helping Russia to kill Ukrainians for no real American gain.
Those 300,000 tonnes of Russian diesel make up only about half a day of US supply, and will make no noticeable difference to prices.
What’s more, Russia doesn’t have enough fuel for itself, so chances are it might on-sell fuel from Iranian oil, meaning Trump’s dollars could feed the Iranian military that’s fighting America.

The BASTARD. I mean, yeah, this is actually perfidious even by Krasnov’s standards, but I just think it’s hilarious that Bolt’s so worked up about it, and so… surprised somehow. As if this weren’t the exact sort of thing Trump would do. Fucking idiot.

Faustbuch


Interesting Graun article about a new book coming out for the centenary of F.W. Murnau’s Faust:

Murnau was also one of the most mysterious of directors: secretive about his methods, with an intense devotion to his work. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him “a great purist who worked under a sort of hypnosis”. Murnau banned producers from his sets, and executives from watching his rushes. Bar a few exceptions, he did not allow on-set photography to reveal the secrets of his camerawork and special effects. This mystique created room for speculation as to whether Murnau, or his talented crew, were responsible for the success of his films. The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece publishes unseen images from the shoot of one of his best films, and gives a rare insight into the collaborative way it was made. […]
In the film, Faust owns a hefty, leather-bound Bible, which he throws on the fire in a moment of despair. But the prop was to become something more. Art directors Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig pulled the book from the ashes and pasted designs, stills and behind-the-scenes photographs on to its blank pages so they could present the souvenir as a gift to the director at the end of the shoot. Murnau left it behind in his flat in Berlin when he went to Hollywood, not knowing he would never return to retrieve it. After his death, Murnau’s brother stashed his belongings in various city-centre basements, which were susceptible to flooding, and worse, once the bombs began falling on Berlin during the second world war.

The Cinematheque Francaise owns the original “Bible”—the survival of which seems to be miraculous—from which the MUBI Editions reprint has been made. $100 US, which is actually less heinously expensive than I thought it might be, given the sort of thing it is, though the MUBI website only give US, UK and European prices, so I don’t know if that means they only ship to those places (though apparently Thames & Hudson have it, so maybe it will be available here?). It’s awfully tempting, I must admit…

You first, Edolf

This is an actual Elon Musk tweet:

Grok Bot is Oolong’s new “virtual teammate platform” that will do things for you like… enable credit card fraud. Edolf actually thinks his cultists are this stupid, doesn’t he? And he’s probably right, that’s the worst thing. Someone other than him undoubtedly thinks this is a good idea and will be acting on it soon if they haven’t already. And they’re going to deserve everything that happens to them.

Look who’s… back?

Candidate named Hitler Mussolini elected mayor in Peru

A businessman called Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has been elected the mayor of a remote district in the Peruvian Andes, according to local election data.
The 45-year-old, who shares two of his names with the notorious European dictators, won the race for mayor of Queropalca, in Peru’s central Huánuco region, and will take office on 1 January.
The candidate from the leftwing Ahora Nación party won 229 out of a total of 663 votes in elections on 4 October, according to the national office of electoral processes.
His closest rival, the far-right candidate Gaspar Osorio, received 204 votes.

What a world we live in where someone called Hitler Mussolini is the leftist candidate. That could give some unfortunate ammunition to those cranks who insist the Nazis were leftists… The article further notes he’s not the only Hitler in Peruvian politics:

In 2021, the doctor Hitler Saavedra Casternoque was elected to parliament for the centrist party Somos Peru.
In 2018, Hitler Alba Sánchez was voted in as mayor of the Andean district of Yungar, saying during his campaign that he was “the good Hitler”.

Alas, the article fails to answer or even ask why there are so many people (let’s face it, even three Hitlers is a lot, and just one is arguably too many) in Peru called Hitler. That’s the detail I’m most interested in…

My Bloody Valentine

To be honest, I’ve never been into the slasher film as a concept; I think I’d been kind of put off by the idea by Ric Meyers and his book For One Week Only, in which he calls them “murder movies” and did not actually consider them horror films as such. I have possibly been prejudiced against slashers (which I’ve been known to also call “let’s kill teenagers” movies) unfairly ever since, been and indeed I don’t think I’d actually seen any before Scream came out. I was, as I’ve observed before, a relative latecomer to the horror genre, so Scream was an educational experience in that respect; I got all the lore and theory of slashers without any real direct experience of them. I was at least familiar with this title, though, and knew it was considered a particularly noxious example of the form (reportedly even the film’s director threw up at the sight of one of the corpse effects). Finally I’ve actually seen the damn thing, and, well, it did pretty much nothing to dispel those decades-old feelings I’ve had about slashers…

My Bloody Valentine is set in a Nova Scotia mining town, where there was an appalling accident 20 years earlier, and it appears a long-incarcerated survivor of the accident has returned to exact revenge or something. It’s very “slasher film”, if you know what I mean, to the point of formula or stereotype; indeed, the whole scene where the bartender relates the “legend” felt borderline parodic, if anything. I watched the “unrated” version with the long-lost violence cut back in, and, well… I didn’t really get the fuss? I mean, there’s a lot of violence (two and a half more minutes of it than there used to be, in fact), but I’m not sure there hadn’t been far more violent films before MBV came out in February 1981 (particularly from Italy), I’m not sure why this was necessarily worse… Anyway, MBV gets two stars for effective locations, especially the mine, and for some adorable Canadian accents. Otherwise I hadn’t exactly been missing a classic all this time…

New low 5,475,139

Yeah, the guy who did a mass shooting I’d completely forgotten about is finally meeting his maker… on livestream.

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center on the Texas base on 5 November 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.

Now, I’m not surprised they’re getting rid of this fellow; they obviously weren’t going to let him live even if it took him years to exhaust his options. No, it’s the bit about livestreaming him being, you know, judicially murdered. Making a public spectacle of someone’s death. Which, as others have noted, is something only a handful of countries do, including Iran. You know, that country may or may not be at war with at any given time. I’m fairly sure the US has been critical of Iran in the past on this subject. I can only assume it’s another one of those things that are OK When We Do Them. If they could find a way to make every American watch it, not just make it possible to do so, I’ve no doubt they would.

So why are they doing it now, though? I mean, I know why they’re doing it: the whole grotesque spectacle is obviously meant as a show of force and intimidation, but to America’s citizens more than to international terrorists. Being born in the US will not save you, if it ever did. But why now specifically (as opposed to why has it taken them so long?

Oh.

Pete Hegseth is very insistent that his soldiers be godlike beings chock full of testosterone (especially the women, if he allows them to serve) and he will tolerate no slackers in that department. Except himself, apparently. There’s been other videos of him looking like a champion fuckwit trying to compete with the rest of the joint force as his own joints give way, but some particularly damning new footage has emerged in the last day or so looking, you know, far below the level at which he insists the US military perform. Looking weak.

Do I actually think Hegseth wants this man’s death livestreamed to make himself feel big again after being made to look foolish? Well… probably not, I suspect it’s ordinary fascist cruelty at work. Would I be surprised if that actually were the reason? Well… probably not, cos these people are just… Like That. I wonder if this will finally make the US the pariah nation it must be…

That’s not how it works, Alvin

I am childfree, largely because frankly no one has ever offered to be the mother of my offspring anyway, but also because I don’t want to pass on my ho-hum genetics and, to be honest, because I’m a selfish prick who doesn’t want to be bothered unnecessarily, which children would do to me. I am not prepared to take the risk that I might not pass on said ho-hum genetics, nor that I would suddenly love my putative kids more than my own life or anything like that; it’d be unfair on me, on their mother, and on them.

That said…

…I think I still wouldn’t be THIS bad. I mean, I’m sure this was probably meant as a joke, but with AI techbros (of which Alvin is one) you can never quite tell. Lest we forget this banger. Sam Altmas meant that seriously and I wouldn’t be surprised if Alvin wasn’t entirely joking either…

And RIP Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped land Nasa’s astronauts on the Moon, has died aged 90.
Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa’s Apollo missions, which coined the term “software engineering”.
Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding she died on 30 September.
“To say Hamilton was a pioneer – to say she was ahead of her time – would be a dramatic understatement,” MIT said in its statement, before acknowledging that she was a software engineer before it was mainstream.
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division.
It was in this division that she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for Nasa’s Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.
“I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired,” she told the Guardian in 2019.

The photo of her standing next to the printout of the Apollo 11 code is a classic, of course; now there’s probably a mobile phone app that can do the exact same thing. I was saying yesterday about what changes Eva Marie Saint must’ve seen in her industry, but they must’ve been even more so in Margaret’s. Alas that she didn’t live to see the next landing, but at least she got to witness this year’s Artemis mission…

RIP Eva Marie

There’s been quite a few notable passings in the last couple of days, not just Jim Bakker (cunt) but also Jeffrey Archer (cunt), Dennis Hastert (cunt), and Richard Morecroft (not a cunt, he was cool), and now one of old Hollywood’s last big figures, Eva Marie Saint, has shuffled off her own mortal coil at the pretty reasonable age of 102. I was amazed that her first TV role was in NINETEEN FORTY SEVEN—an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that, per IMDB, also starred John Carradine as Scrooge and David Carradine (only about eight years old or so) as the young Scrooge—and her last acting role appears to have been a podcast (a scripted comedy/drama series) just five years ago. What industry changes she must’ve seen over all those decades.

Hands of the Ripper

So we need a bit of Hammer if we’re doing horror films for October, and I’m trying to limit myself to first-time viewings this year to whittle the watchlist down some, which meant going with this (one of the few unwatched Hammer horrors I still have on said watchlist). 70s Hammer, of course, was not what it had been just a couple of years earlier, struggling to keep up with changing times, the ascent of Michael Carreras who hated the studio’s traditional gothics, and the deaths of some key production crew like designer Bernard Robinson, as well as suffering the general British film industry slump of the time. Sinclair McKay’s book on Hammer, A Thing of Unspeakable Horror, is pretty harsh on this period, but even he calls Hands of the Ripper one of the studio’s best films, and that’s probably fair. Hammer were trying a few different things by 1971, and this was one of those, a Jack the Ripper film… sort of.

The daughter of Jack the Ripper, in fact, is the subject here; as a small child she witnesses him killing his wife, her mother, and as she grows to young adulthood it appears she may be, well, carrying on her old man’s trade. A well-meaning psychiatrist takes her into his care, but will this just make things worse in the end? No prizes for guessing. I don’t think any of the cast were Hammer regulars, interestingly, and though other Hammer productions of the time ramped up the sexiness and nudity, this one went heavier on the violence; there’s a kind of nastiness to it most other Hammer films don’t really have. Hands of the Ripper is elevated by its two main leads, Eric Porter as the doctor and Angharad Rees as the Ripperette, they’re quite appealing and well-played characters (as are most of the secondary cast). It struggles to reclaim the old Hammer atmosphere, but it’s a valiant effort, and on the whole definitely one of the better examples of late Hammer.