In my palaeontological peregrinations, I occasionally refer to papers that may be everything from months to nearly two centuries old. For instance, one of the seminal papers in the early study of trilobites was a paper by Ignaz Hawle & August Corda entitled ‘Prodrom einer Monographie der böhmischen Trilobiten’ (Prodrome of a monograph on Bohemian trilobites)1. Searching the web for the two authors’ names shows how common references are to this paper in much more recent publications on trilobites, not just from Bohemia but from all around the world.
Another example is one I wrote about recently in regard the discovery in central Australia of a fossil species which had been recorded previously only from northern Siberia. The paper on the Siberian fossil was published in 1940 by Ekaterina Lermontova2. Like the work of Hawle & Corda, her work is still regularly referred to by palaeontologists in my field from all around the world.
Even though the study of trilobites is not much older than the publication of Hawle & Corda, their work, and that of many others, has achieved something approaching immortality. They spent much of their lives trying to understand the myriad unfamiliar animals preserved in the fossil record, and due to the efforts of them and many, many others subsequently, we have a far better understanding of those animals and their evolution than anyone could have predicted.
While there are other human endeavours which have left a mark on humanity, many, but not all of them could be said to belong to the fields of art or science. That form of immortality is the only one available to humans, despite what the religious would have you believe.
This gets me to people like Charlie Kirk, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones in the US, and Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, Neil Mitchell, Andrew Bolt and others in Australia. All these arseholes do is trade in fomenting outrage, mostly with the aim of getting the gullible to vote for the Republican Party in the US, and the Liberal Party in Australia. Kirk and Limbaugh are now dead, and Alex Jones has had his appeal against the judgement in the Sandy Hook damages claim rejected by the US Supreme Court such that it left in place the $1.4 billion judgment against him over his description of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as a hoax staged by crisis actors (yes, he actually said that). He was found liable for defamation and infliction of emotional distress on the relatives of victims of the shooting, which killed 20 first grade children and six school staff members in Newtown, Connecticut3. He is a disgrace to the species.
Among the Australians, Alan Jones’ only claim to fame apart from being a past Wallabies’ (National men’s Rugby Union team) coach, sending love letters to his male students while a teacher, and being charged with indecent assault4, is stating that then Prime Minister Julia Gillard should be dumped out at sea.
Ray Hadley’s only claim to fame, like so many others of his conservative ilk, is being a climate change denier5. Such people don’t actually know enough about science to pass a cogent opinion, they just follow the conservative herd.
Neil Mitchell’s only claim to fame was his inability to understand how lockdowns work in decreasing the spread of COVID-19, to the extent that he made a complete fool of himself. The retorts to his idiocy were hilarious6.
Andrew Bolt’s only claim to fame was that he was convicted of racial vilification7.
When they are all dead, nobody will ever quote them because they did nothing of value. All they did was divide their respective countries by fomenting outrage about gay people, women, Muslims, immigrants, the unemployed or the poor, with the aim of convincing the gullible that these people were the source of all their ills, rather than the billionaires, their corporations, their media and the politicians they have purchased who are the real source of those ills.
Sources
- https://books.google.com.au/books?id=V-a1QBskdT0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
- https://blotreport.com/2025/09/24/fossil-serendipity/
- https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/alex-jones-sandy-hook-settlement-supreme-court-appeal-00607361?utm_source=chatgpt.com
- https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/19/alan-jones-arrest-indecent-assault-sexual-touching-allegations-ntwnfb
- https://blotreport.com/2018/09/15/the-reckoning-is-coming/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/08/01/3aw-radio-for-the-stupid/
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-28/bolt-found-guilty-of-breaching-discrimination-act/3025918
