Very much in the news with the genocide in Gaza is the philosophy or ideology of Zionism and attempts by pro-Israel lobby groups to conflate antisemitism with antizionism, with the bogus ‘report’ to the Australian government by Jillian Segal being a case in point1.
I have been banned from Facebook for a second time. The first time was some years ago, when I posted a simple statement along the lines of ‘with Brexit, the UK has shot itself in the foot’. The morons who ran the community standards system at Facebook told me that I was advocating violence, rather than just pointing out the stupidity of the UK leaving the European Union. I seem to remember that ban lasted for a week.
I was wading through some of the facebook posts I received after a day or so of doing other stuff, and I came across a meme that stated that the idiotic antivaxxer who is Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Service, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has now turned his attention to ‘chemtrails’1.
I specialise in a particular group of fossils which are extremely useful in determining the relative age of rock units in the upper half of the Cambrian System. There are not many of us around, with perhaps about dozen of us globally, with only two of us in Australia, the other one being in Adelaide. I write papers on this topic fairly regularly and submit them to a couple of journals.
Having to deal with recent monumentally stupid management decisions in the organisation where I used to work and, until a few months ago, at which I used to volunteer, made me think about some of the stupidity I encountered from management in the past. One of these happened nearly three decades ago. Because of my particular palaeontological expertise, I was asked to be involved in a project with the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS).
Most people have been appalled or sickened by the images coming from Gaza, of flattened cities, rows of shrouded corpses, dead or dismembered children, mangled babies, emaciated children, lists of journalists and health-workers targeted. In the western world, people have been demonstrating in their many thousands against this genocide in Gaza. So what do governments do?
Quite often online when someone is amazed or annoyed by something (quite often an incidence of MAGA stupidity or bastardry), they will use the exclamation ‘JFC!’, short for ‘Jesus F*****g Christ’. I have been known to use a similar one; ‘JHC!’ or with increased exasperation requiring more emphasis, ‘Jesus H. Christ’, or with a tinge of disgust at my inability, for example, to pot a sitter at our weekly snooker game, ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bike’.