Category: News and Events

Why Peter Dutton is Just Crazy About Nuclear!

Peter Dutton and His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. Yes, it’s an old joke, but it works damnit!

It’s election season here in Australia with voters shortly to choose between the currently incumbent Labor Party under Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition under Peter Dutton (there are plenty of other parties but the odds of any of them winning enough seats to form government are so tiny as to be laughable). Good old Pete has been campaigning for quite some time on dealing with climate change by building nuclear power stations, which is something so out of left field for Australian politics that it has a lot of people wondering what’s in the water in the Liberal party room. Well, read on and all shall be revealed!

(Note for Americans and other aliens: The Australian Liberal Party is Australia’s major conservative party, with the Nationals their hillbilly cousins. This causes all kinds of problems, most notably when the sarcastic hashtag #imvotingliberalbecause escaped Aussie Twitter some years back and utterly baffled the poor Americans)

Reason 1: The Liberals have spent the better part of the last 30 years arguing that climate change is a hoax, and renewable energy is a scam. The majority of Australians now know that neither of these things are true and are demanding action on climate, but years of denial have painted the Libs into a corner where they can’t embrace renewables without handing the Left a massive propaganda coup. So they’ve grabbed on to nuclear as an alternate ‘clean’ energy source that won’t make them look like they’re caving to the progressives.

Reason 2: Renewable energy – rooftop solar in particular – has massive potential to take energy generation out of the hands of big corporations and put it into the hands of individuals. This is a nightmare for said big corporations, who will see their profits plunge as people switch to making and using their own power. Nuclear keeps power generation in the hands of big business, which is where the Liberals’ corporate donors/masters want it!

Reason 3: Every non-partisan expert says that it will take at least 30 years to get nuclear power up and running in this country. Dutton denies this with vague hand-waving about ‘breakthroughs’, but from the Liberal viewpoint a big delay is a feature, not a bug. The longer it takes for nuclear to come online the longer the Liberal Party’s big business mates can keep on turning a profit from coal, oil and gas. Dutton’s dream reactor is the one that starts operating in the infinite tomorrow – the tomorrow that ticks over a day every day at midnight.

So there you have it, the three reasons Peter Dutton and the Liberal-National Coalition are suddenly crazy for a nuclear future. What a shower of dicks.

I hope his pants get caught and a bloodbath ensues

Man there’s not a week goes by, not a week, that I don’t hear about a dingo attack on K’gari involving some bastard tourist that could have been easily avoided had some parent – I don’t care which one – but some parent conditioned them to fear and respect those dingoes!

Correcting the Record

Willie, Willie, Harry, Mattie,
Stephen, Harry, Harry Bratty,
Dick, John, Louis, Harry three,
One two three Neds, Now let’s see,
Richard two, Harrys four five six,
Edwards four five, Nasty Dick,
Harry VII, Harry VIII,
Ned the sixth who turned up late,
Lady Jane Grey, Philip and Mary,
Bessie, James and Charles contrary,
Ollie, Ricky, Charles restored,
James the second (most abhorred),
Will and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Georges (Four), Will Four, Victoria
Edward, George, then Nazi Ted,
So George the sixth stepped in instead,
Elizabeth, her reign unanswered,
Now Charlie III who has the cancers,

Me in Golden Shoes

I happened to catch Planet America last night and was extremely pleased that Cheeto Mussolini’s stupid shoes provided the perfect excuse to repeatedly play clips from Herreys’ 1984 Eurovision winning Diggy-Loo Diggy-Ley – a song that I am inexplicably and entirely unironically fond of.

Behold the official English version, which includes some classic 1980’s CGI – the creation of which probably took several weeks in Quantel Paintbox.

And if that’s not charming enough for you, here’s Herreys’ performance 31 years later at the Eurovision 60th anniversary concert. They’ve still got it! (Or at least still had it back in 2015).

The Voice and Other Matters

Well, the Voice referendum was – as predicted – a total shit show. I’m a big fan of democracy and so should support the will of the people and all, but I can’t help but feel that the vote was affected by huge amounts of people simply not understanding what we were voting about.

I disagree with the opinion of No voters who understood the proposal and rejected it, but I respect their right to have their say. And if their view was that of the majority of Australians then it’s democratically correct for the referendum to have failed. But how many voters said No because they thought the Voice would result in them having to pay rent to local indigenous bodies? Or that they’d have to hand over their house to the first indigenous person who called dibs? Or even that the entire thing was a nefarious scheme by the United Nations to destroy the white race? All of that bullshit was circulating (and being actively spread by bad actors) and all of it would have distorted the vote to some extent.

The Yes campaign seemed to have been blinded by their own comprehension of the proposal and concentrated on aspiration rather than the much more needed education. A goddam one minute explainer video on what the Voice is and what it could and couldn’t do would have been worth a thousand ads with an indigenous kid dreaming about a brighter future.

Anyway, it’s done, and now we have to live with the consequences. I can at least take some small comfort that my electorate voted Yes, and that Western Australia did not turn out to have the lowest Yes vote – the ever reliable Queensland hitting the bottom of that particular barrel.

But on to other matters.

The Saturday of the referendum also turned out to be the day of my 30th Anniversary High School Reunion at the Breakwater at Hillarys. I was not intending to go, but got badgered into it by a couple of friends. Overall… it was alright. I didn’t recognise half the people there but had a few decent catch ups. I also got a hug from the second-prettiest girl in our entire year, and the prettiest refused to let me leave before we’d had a quick chat – both very gratifying to the shy, damaged nerd that still lurks in the back of my brain. I did bail a bit early though as I felt myself starting to get a bit maudlin – which is the reason I wasn’t inclined to go in the first place. I am far too prone to maudlin nostalgia and if not controlled it can wipe me out for days. I got out before it got too bad and merely lost Sunday brooding on lost opportunities and the merciless passage of time.

(On the subject of the merciless passage of time, one of my classmates could have passed for 60. I don’t know what he’s spent the last 30 years doing, but it definitely hasn’t been kind to him…)

On Sunday, just to make my crappy weekend complete, I ran out of money. Which is not to say I had no money, I just found myself completely unable to access any of it. I misplaced the debit card for my standard bank account a few weeks back and was holding out on reporting it lost in the hopes it would turn up, living in the meantime on the hardly-ever-touched card for my savings account. As I was already feeling crap on Sunday morning I decided to bite the bullet and report it lost. With that done I decided to ease my troubled mind by downloading some truly embarrassing music from iTunes, for which I had to set up and use the savings account card.

It was in the midst of purchasing music that I got an SMS from the bank telling me that said card had been blocked because of “suspicious online transactions” and that I needed to call them right away (in hindsight I suspect that Erasure’s Blue Savanah was too much for the bank computer to handle). I did call them right away (after checking that the number in the SMS was in fact their real number and not that of a Belarusian scam artist) and was immediately connected to a recorded voice that told me I’d called them outside of business hours, then hung up on me.

(Why didn’t I log on to my account online? Because I’ve deliberately avoided setting up online access to my savings account to make it harder for me to spend it all.)

So until I was able to get them on the phone this morning and explain that no scammer would pay $2.99 for a digital copy of the 12 Inch ‘Summer’ remix of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy I was entirely unable to pay for anything – including any more atrocious music.

Anyway, it’s all sorted now and I should soon be back on an even keel, financially if not psychologically.

So, how was your weekend?

Vale Ducky

David McCallum – famous as Illya Kuryakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. but better known to my generation as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard in the NCIS franchise – has passed away at the age of 90.

NCIS has always been fundamentally silly, but still quite enjoyable in a unthinking ‘hunt down the bad guys and shoot them pew-pew-pew’ sort of way, and Ducky’s appearances were one of the most enjoyable aspects. I don’t think he’s been in it much of late (I haven’t been going out of my way to watch since the classic cast were replaced), but he will still be much missed.

(I think McGee’s still there, but he has a beard, and McGee with a beard isn’t real McGee)

As it happens, one my earliest encounters with the works of H. P. Lovecraft was a set of books on tape of The Dunwich Horror and The Rats in the Walls that I borrowed from the local library. Years later I actually managed to buy them when the library decided they were past use. Examining them a few years back I was astonished to discover they were read by Mr McCallum. His reading of the description of Dunwich will always be the definitive version for me.

I’ve managed to find a copy of it on YouTube, although it’s a little faster and higher pitched that the version that I first heard creeping out of my tape player a good 30 years ago. But I’ll include it nonethless.

I’ve also found a copy of The Rats in the Walls, but be aware that the name of the cat (unfortunately common at the time of the work’s writing but appallingly racist) is not edited.

Vale Mr McCallum, and thanks for all the fun!

Not the Games!!

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has cancelled the upcoming Commonwealth Games!! Say it ain’t so!!

Personally I think it’s approaching obscene to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on a glorified sports carnival when the country’s in the grips of both a housing and cost of living crisis, but many people have a weird and unhealthy obsession with sports and are likely now losing their minds. They’re probably already tweeting (and/or threading) up a storm about how people need sports to make their miserable lives bearable, an argument with a real panem et circenses feel to it. Gotta keep those proles entertained!

The only reason people like the Commonwealth Games anyway is because Australians are the only people in the Commonwealth who can actually swim. Our swimmers reliably bring home a massive pile of medals and everyone cheers about how we slaughtered Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Then at the Olympics everyone is baffled when our world-beating team picks up maybe two golds and three or four silvers. Questions are asked about how our performance could have collapsed so far in only two years, completely ignoring the fact that the Americans preemptively quit the Commonwealth back in 1776.

Screw the games. Well done Dan!

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