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lavelled.bsky.social
once in a lunchtime
@lavelled.bsky.social
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lavelled.bsky.social
So say goodbye a little longer like I ate a piece of Big Red
Grew a mustache the size of Mike Ditka's forehead
Hair combed to the side looking like a piece of foam
Buick speakers, red cooler, '85 Bears Zubaz
Polish sausage, bratwurst, walking like my cock hurts
The Ameripope busting out the first verse of Serengeti’s “Dennehy”
November 23, 2025 at 3:02 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
“Started out”
stupid sexy Flanders
November 17, 2025 at 8:31 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
He’s electable if you vote for him
2013 Adelaide Advertiser front page splash on then-Palmer United candidate Buddy Rojek’s advertising materials that promised he’d help volunteers get laid
November 1, 2025 at 10:42 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
the most useful book I read this year
David F Noble’s ‘The Religion of Technology’
October 28, 2025 at 8:31 PM
lavelled.bsky.social
Charles I Stuart, looking a bit sad at who has taken up his strategies
October 28, 2025 at 8:25 PM
lavelled.bsky.social
Just another painting of a fully intact Charles I Stuart for no particular reason
October 24, 2025 at 8:51 PM
lavelled.bsky.social
Charles I Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, in happier times
October 16, 2025 at 12:48 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
why is he doing this
Greg Jericho, Chief Economist of the Australia Institute telling an American politician to resign
September 28, 2025 at 1:48 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
odd comment cos I assume you haven’t had a big Republika Srpska phase recently
September 7, 2025 at 9:40 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
not to mention…
Donald J. Trump @realDonald Trump Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen! 11/11/17, 5:48 PM from Vietnam 249K Retweets 588K Likes
September 5, 2025 at 4:12 PM
lavelled.bsky.social
It’s clear from interviews at the time that the space Vietcong narrative was giving way to an upbeat, Campbellian romp. And you can’t say his assessment of the mid 70s zeitgeist was wrong - it’s what made Star Wars a hit! But that hit movie isn’t a polarising Vietnam allegory any more.
From Rinzler, on the choice between doing Apocalypse Now as he’d originally intended or going ahead with Star Wars: What must have been a difficult choice was made somewhat easier by the reaction Lucas was still experiencing to American Graffiti. "Part of my decision was based on the fan mail I had gotten from Graffiti," he says. "I seemed to have struck a chord with kids; I had found something they were missing. After the 1960s, it was the end of the protest movement and the whole phenomenon. The drugs were really getting bad, kids were dying, and there was nothing left to protest. But Graffiti just said, Get into your car and go chase some girls. That's all you have to do. A lot of kids didn't even know that, so we kept getting all these letters from all over the country saying, 'Wow, this is great, I really found myself? It seemed to straighten a lot of them out. "I also realized that, whereas THX had a very pessimistic point of view, American Graffiti said essentially that we were all very good. Apocalypse Now was very much like THX, and Star Wars was very much like American Graffiti, so I thought it'd be more beneficial for kids," he adds. "When I started the film, ten- and twelve-year-olds didn't really have the fantasy life that we'd had. I'd been around kids and they talked about Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man, but they didn't have any real vision of all the incredible and crazy and wonderful things that we had when we were young pirate movies and Westerns and all that. When I mentioned to kids, like Francis's sons who are eleven and eight, that I was doing a space film, they went crazy. In a way I was using Francis's kids as models, because I'm around them the most. They're the ones who I talked to about the story. I know what they like."
August 29, 2025 at 2:33 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
It’s true that Star Wars started as a space Vietnam parable, what people trying to claim it as an authentically left wing project are missing is where Lucas took that initial idea:
From Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: George Lucas (Lucas): I'll talk about anything. Charles Lippincott (Chas): Why did you write this story, The Star Wars? Lucas: Well, I read a lot of books, including Flash Gordon. I loved it when it was a movie serial on television; the original Universal serial was on television at 6:15 PM every day, and I was just crazy about it. I've always had a fascination for space adventure, romantic adventures. And after I finished Graffiti, I came to realize that there were very few films being made for young people between the ages of twelve and twenty. When I was that age, practically all the movies were made for that age. I realized that since the Western had died, there hadn't been any mythological fantasy movies available to young people like the ones I grew up on: Westerns and pirate movies, Errol Flynn, all that. They just sort of petered out to the point where they don't do them anymore, and then it petered out on television. Now all you get is cops and hard drama. So instead of making impor-tant, gripping, isn't-it-terrible-what's-happening-to-mankind movies, which is what I started out doing, I decided it would be much more useful for me to make movies that made kids have a fantasy life and feel good, so they could go ahead and have a more productive life. Chas: The Star Wars has been through quite a few conceptual changes, there's been several scripts what was the evolution? Lucas: Well, the problem is what happens in a lot of movies. I started as a concept. So I want to make a movie in outer space,
August 29, 2025 at 1:55 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
While at Oxford, Harari first encountered the work of Jared Diamond, whom he has acknowledged as an influence on his own writing. At a Berggruen Institute salon, Harari said that Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel "was kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realized that I could actually write such books."[2][18]
July 20, 2025 at 1:57 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
This is where I post from
Gene Hackman blasting sax in the final shot of THE CONVERSATION (1973)
July 19, 2025 at 2:14 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
And connoisseurs of satirical illustrations
Words can’t really do justice to this insane self-fellating billboard Hilton Grugeon put up to celebrate his success in bribing Hunter MPs into approving one of his projects
May 31, 2025 at 11:11 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
Reading this you’d have no idea Australian refugee policy is the model for the Rwanda scheme or that Albanese ran on cutting student visas and his good relations with Donald Trump
A Guardian column from Marc Stears titled “Leftwing values will defeat the right. That's what Keir Starmer can learn from Australia” There was a confidence to Albanese that felt a long way from Labour's recent efforts in Britain. The Australian prime minister is no showman, and his dry style has often been compared to Keir Starmer's. But whereas Albanese has found clarity, in Britain uncertainty seems still to rule the day. Politicians and commentators close to No 10, such as Blue Labour's Maurice Glasman, seem to think that the only way to respond to Reform is by moving to the right on issues such as diversity, human rights and immigration. Others, including some advising the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, worry that global instability makes this the wrong moment to rock the boat with Donald Trump, especially with a trade deal with the US up for grabs. For that reason, far from attacking the US president, leading UK government figures are still regularly sent out to claim - as Reeves herself did - that there is "a lot that really resonates" between the leaders of Britain and the US. They should beware: perceived support for Trump is partly what did for Australia's opposition.
May 7, 2025 at 8:23 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
No really, it’s an incredible book
«The first man-made nuclear explosion would be a historic event and its designation a name that history might remember," one historian of the atomic bomb noted; "Oppenheimer coded the test and the test site Trinity." The religious significance of the term was intended. Two decades later, Oppenheimer explained to General Leslie Groves, who had been the military commander of the Manhattan Project, what he was thinking when he christened it. "Why I chose that name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem by John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: 'As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one-are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrec-tion?" Oppenheimer also pointed out that another of his favorite Donne poems opens with the line "Batter my heart, three person'd God." "Beyond this, I have no clues whatever," he concluded Thus the leader of the effort to build the atomic bomb had on his mind when he named the first bellow of the beast the redemptive reveries of a seventeenth-century cleric, a contemporary of Francis Bacon. The first poem from which he quotes, which he loved and memorized ("Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse"), goes on in an equally familiar vein: We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie Christs Crosse and Adams tree, stood in one place; Looke Lord and find both Adams met in me; As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face, May the last Adams blood my soule embrace."? "Both Adams met in me": the first man, image of God, fallen favorite of creation, and Christ, the last Adam reborn from death to inspire and lead the second creation, of man's redemption. The significance of the poem is clear enough, that dying leads to death but also to the prospect of a more blessed renewal. So the bomb for Op-penheimer, as for many of his colleagues, especially Szilard and Niels Bohr, signaled a beginning as well as an end, "a weapon of death that might also redeem mankind." Oppenheimer "cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two outcomes, one of them transcendent." But the Adamic emphasis in Donne's poem indicates also the deeper meaning of such transcendence: the restoration of Adam's original perfection and divine-likeness. Mesmerized by their spellbinding achievement, the atomic pioneers behaved, like so many earlier self-anointed saints, as if they had themselves already advanced toward this recovery of divine-likeness, as much Redeemers as redeemed. As one of them later reflected, their development of the bomb gave them "the illusion of ultimate and illimitable power, like being God."
April 18, 2025 at 12:20 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
gain revered BlueSky Elder status by posting about how there is a clear through line from medieval apocalyptic theology to modern acolytes of technological abundance
For Comte, who considered his "spiritual fathers" to be Bacon, Franklin, and Condorcet-and who was himself often described as the "Bacon of the nineteenth century" —the engineers constituted the vanguard of a positivist regime, "which has been rising since the time of Bacon." Comte believed that this new system would re-establish social order, in accordance with ineluctable natural laws, in the wake of the "crisis" of the French Revolution. It is quite remarkable, and testimony to the undiminished influence of the medieval ideological tradition, that, despite his vigorous iconociasm and radical systemic critique of both theology and metaphysics, Comte reproduced almost in its entirety the millenarian mentality of the Middle Ages. "We [positivists] are the true successors of the great men of the Middle Ages," Comte proclaimed.
April 10, 2025 at 11:24 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
things of that nature
March 20, 2025 at 7:19 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
grow your follower base by posting about how monks invented technology and techno-optimism
Inspired by Erigena's ideas, Hugh likewise "linked the mechanical as well as the liberal arts directly to salvation and the restoration of fallen man." Although as an Augustinian Hugh identified technology exclusively with the fallen world (and with the first act of fallen man, the making of clothing), he nevertheless maintained, in a marked departure from Augustine, that the useful arts constituted a means of recovering mankind's perfection, his original divine image. Following Erigena, Hugh believed that this prelapsarian perfection was not solely spiritual, as Augustine had argued, but physical as well. Hence, he argued that "the work of restoration included the repair of man's physical life" as well as the spiritual.
March 9, 2025 at 4:36 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
Monks invented technology
In the first half of [the 12th] century, the monastic technical tradition found its greatest written expression in a technical treatise by the German Benedictine Theophilus. A skilled metallurgist and general craftsman as well as a monk, Theophilus was "the first man in all history to record in words anything approaching circumstantial detail of a technique based on his own experience," according to metallurgist and historian of technology Cyril Stanley Smith. Theophilus's book, De Diversis Artibus, was "a religiously motivated codification of all the skills available for the embellishment of a church," including machine design, metal-casting, enameling, painting, glass-making, wire-drawing, and tinning. His reverence for such crafts was notable, especially in a world in which most craftsmen were either slaves or domanial serfs. Goldsmiths and ironsmiths had sometimes enjoyed a relatively privileged status because of the honorific rather than productive value of their work, such as the making of coins, jewels, and weapons. Here the arts were exalted because of their association with spiritual devotion. For Theophilus too, George Ovitt noted, "spiritual goals were primary.... Practical matters were pursued for the glory of God and the perfection of self. " In the manner of Theophilus, the abbot Arnold of Bonneval marveled at the technical innovations introduced with the rebuilding of Clairvaux, the great mother abbey of the Cistercians, devoting detailed attention especially to the water-powered machinery for milling, fulling, tanning, and blacksmithing, which constituted what has been described as a veritable medieval industrial revolution. An-other monastic observer of Clairvaux described an automatic flour-sifter and fulling mill, and, awed by the "abstract power of water flowing through the abbey seeking every task," thanked God for such labor-saving technology. The monastic mechanization of the crafts, as well as major construction projects such as the building of churches and aqueducts, had indeed become, and was clearly recog- nized as, "holy labor."
March 9, 2025 at 4:27 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
Getting mordant enjoyment from this book, it’s like the last gasp of a certain kind of 90s left liberal tech optimism
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s _Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy_ Averting breakdown [of the US global financial and technological architecture] will require the United States to work toward a different vision of security. It will have to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with power, allowing others to secure themselves from America's network imperialism. At the same time, it must lead the way in working out rules of the road, for a world where adversaries are inextricably tied together by global networks. In the Cold War, the United States was willing to talk to the USSR to figure out what each side was able to accept and to avoid destabilizing misadventures with nuclear weapons. Historical precedent shows it can do this, and must do this—it is American fingers that are closest to the power switches. Building resilience and mitigating vulnerabilities will lead to a better future than crude nationalism and reshoring. No one likes or trusts a bully, but people are willing to accept power if it's used benevolently. International superpower that it is, the United States might even support a vision of commonwealth rather than empire, in which it and other actors secure collective benefits rather than contending over narrow interests. It is easy to see how the United States could use its sanctions against carbon producers or countries like Brazil that keep allowing rain forests to be cut down. The United States has already used its powers in the past to go after other issues, such as tax havens in Switzerland. Why not egregious polluters?
February 20, 2025 at 6:46 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
Perhaps nowhere is the intimate connection between religion and technology more manifest than in the United States, where an unrivaled popular enchantment with technological advance is matched by an equally earnest popular expectation of Jesus Christ's return. What has typically been ignored by most observers of these phenomena is that the two obsessions are often held by the same people, many among these being technologists themselves. If we look closely at some of the hallmark technological enterprises of our day, we see the devout not only in the ranks but at the helm. Religious preoccupations pervade the space program at every level, and constitute a major motivation behind extraterrestrial travel and exploration. Artificial Intelligence advocates wax eloquent about the possibilities of machine-based immortality and resurrection, and their disciples, the architects of virtual reality and cyberspace, exult in their expectation of God-like omnipresence and disembodied perfection. Genetic engineers imagine themselves divinely inspired participants in a new cre-ation. All of these technological pioneers harbor deep-seated beliefs which are variations upon familiar religious themes. The front cover of David F Noble’s The Religion of Technology: the Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
February 6, 2025 at 7:09 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
checking in with the business press
Musk is right - US government badly needs a digital makeover If he can drive the change that's required, future generations will thank him GILLIAN TETT Unions will undoubtedly howl. So will progressives. And Musk's plans will probably face legal challenges. But even as many observers recoil, quite understandably, from Musk's brutal style, there is one point that no one should ignore: if Doge can actually unleash digital reform in the US government, and in a non-corrupt manner, that would be an unambiguously good thing. Indeed, if I had a Musk-focused magic wand, I would wish him to make digital reform, not trolling his critics, Doge's main priority. Digitising government is not just the key to creating greater efficiency and effectiveness; it could also restore some of the public's shattered trust in the state.
February 2, 2025 at 7:20 AM
lavelled.bsky.social
No
February 1, 2025 at 1:25 AM