Sharks Patrol These Waters

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

September 21st, 2023

Where are the sharks? 

In South Africa, they’re either at the bottom of the ocean, sans liver,1 or fleeing from a pack of liver-crazed killer whales. In New Smyrna, FL, they’re clamped onto surfer Mark “JoJo” Sumersett’s face:

“This huge pressure just hit my face. It felt like a bear trap was closing in on my face,” he told The Washington Post. “ … I heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.”

Rahm Emanuel, though not biologically a shark, does have lifeless eyes; black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, he doesn't seem be living, until he bites ya and the black eyes roll over white. Somehow he’s the U.S. Ambassador to Japan now, and the Biden administration would like him to please stop trolling Xi Jinping on social media. Emanuel was previously known for being a terrible White House Chief of Staff and a terrible Chicago mayor, even given the fierce competition for “terrible” among Chicago mayors.

Being eaten by sharks would have been a more humane fate for Elon Musk’s brain-implant monkeys. Wired’s Dhruv Mehrota and Dell Cameron report that the monkeys were not “close to death already,” but in fact relatively young because “up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.” Instead the monkeys suffered terribly and were euthanized due to:

…a battery of complications that developed following procedures involving electrodes being surgically implanted into monkeys’ brains. The complications include bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema, a condition colloquially known as “brain swelling.”

And while killing monkeys for science is probably not securities fraud, in accordance with Levine’s Law the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine suspects that lying about killing monkeys for science might be.

Today in Media: 

Pernicious Australian ghoul Rupert Murdoch “is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards,” but even at age 92, his malignant influence will continue to make life worse for all of humanity well into the future. He will turn over full control of his media empire to his oldest son, Kendall, and in a parting note to staff, Murdoch admitted with refreshing honesty that:

Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.

He didn’t name himself here, but with a seventeen billion dollar fortune and ownership of both the fifth and sixth largest media companies in the world, it seems clear who he means. At press time Murdoch was said to be carefully assessing which of his toilets would be the most convenient to die on.

At a relatively youthful 81, the original B-unit Michael Bloomberg is also making succession plans, reports Remy Tumin. The plan is: on his death, Bloomberg L.P. will go to his charity which will be forced by tax laws to sell it to Elon Musk, who will fire everyone and replace all the numbers in the terminal data with either 69 or 420, turning history’s only truly profitable media company into a cash bonfire within 6 months.

David Brooks managed a tweet so stupid it got him roasted on Twitter by Joyce Carol Oates, on Facebook by an airport restaurant, and in Defector by Albert Burneko. And I thought Brooks’s strongest work was behind him.

Truth or Jannsequences: 

It’s tough to say which is more embarrassing for Jann Wenner, this incoherent and transphobic defense from fellow music-press goblin Bob Guccione Jr. or Rock & Roll Hall of Fame board member Troy Carter’s response to Wenner’s attempted apology: “Your racist and sexist views on ‘mastery’ are cancerous seeds that this organization cannot support… It’s always difficult when a board removes a founder, but in this case, it’s easy. Kick rocks, buddy.” Lol.

Today in Tech:

I recently spent a morning chatting with Trainsley, an anthropomorphic train with giant breasts. In this roleplay, I boarded Trainsley and rode inside(?) of her while she cheerily chatted.

What are we doing? I don’t know, man. Here’s Samantha Cole in 404 on whatever’s going on in the horny A.I. space. Incidentally it’s wild that Vice fired a team2 so strong they could just launch their own blog from scratch and instantly become one of the two or three best tech news sites online. Media seems to thrive in the absence of media management. Really makes u think.

In non-horny A.I., Google’s Bard Extensions is so bad that not even Kevin Roose could pretend it doesn’t suck. The best recurring bit in this piece is Roose telling Google’s Bard director Jack Krawczyk how bad his product is and Krawczyk having to find new ways to say “yes it is very bad. We shouldn’t have launched this! 😊” A screaming comes across the sky: It’s Bird Lord Jonathan Franzen, along with several terrestrial authors, suing OpenAI for dumping their work into its training data without any kind of license. Miles Klee reports that the NFTs are finally all worthless. And are you telling me a chat fried this rice?

Happy Gentlemen’s Friday! In a Today in Tabs first, there are no embedded tweets today. Unfortunately, David Brooks’s tweet broke containment and made all the other posts for the last twenty-four hours bad as well. We regret David Brooks.

Today’s Song: Morphine, “Sharks”

Be careful with the song today:

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