What happened is that one morning you woke up from a terrible dream about molluscs to find yourself gagging on something in the back of your throat. You retched for what felt like half an hour, until your face was slimy with sweat and spittle and tears. You thought you were dying but you couldn’t cry out past the thing in the back of your throat. Finally you managed to spit it out. It was covered in a thick coating of mucous and phlegm, but it was a small plastic spoon, containing all the microplastics that had accumulated in your brain. Tiny letters on the underside of the handle said THANK YOU FOR YOUR CUSTOM.

Something similar must have happened to everyone else, because from that day on the world started to change. The immigrants went home, or maybe they were forced out, or maybe they were rounded up and shot, but they’re all gone now. The schools stopped teaching critical race theory and started teaching stoic philosophy, Roman military history, tax avoidance, and crypto. The women all signed a statement acknowledging that they would lose 90% of their eggs by the age of 30 and agreeing to stop being so choosy about who they’d allow to fertilise them. Slowly the world began to glow with a golden and slightly hazy light. It started to resemble a perfect shining image. But ever since you spat out the spoon, written language has stopped making sense. Not all of it: the stop signs on the street still say STOP and the sign above the charming little public library says LIIBRARB which is almost right, but all the books inside are unreadable. They’re crowded with dense black shapes that really do resemble letters, just not any letters in particular. All of them faintly smudged into the page, like crushed insects. The message on the spoon was the last coherent sentence you read; the world is splattered with dead mosquitoes now. It’s amazing how little the disappearance of all written language actually changed your life.

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and an international banking group have quietly concluded that climate change will likely exceed the Paris Agreement's 2 degree goal and are examining how to maintain profits

More than half of all fossil fuel carbon emissions came from just 36 companies in 2023, a new analysis has revealed.

These firms, including Saudi Aramco, Shell, ExxonMobil, Coal India, and several Chinese companies have been tied to more than 20 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023.

The latest Carbon Majors report calculates emissions released by the burning of coal, oil and gas produced by 169 major fossil fuel companies in 2023. Of these firms, it found that 93 increased their total emissions compared to the previous year.

The report also includes historic data from 1854 to 2023, showing that since the Industrial Revolution, two thirds of carbon emissions have come from 180 companies - 11 of which no longer exist. Just 26 companies were linked to a third of these historic emissions.

Signing on to Hexbear this morning and seeing dozens of "I'm curious" posts across every comm, realizing that we must have really gotten a live one while I was gone, and tracking down the Patient Zero post. It's like a scavenger hunt for a dumb take. Good times, comrades, keep up the excellent work.

Biggest ever.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” @nullllptr tweeted on X in September, the Journal reported.

“Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley,” according to the Journal.

Things are getting bad to the point that ordinary people are not able to tune it out anymore, and the pundit class' answer of is looking less and less compelling. Regular people are looking for explanations and guidance. Talk to them. They want to know what has worked in the past, and what can work now. They're open to new ways of understanding the world, and we have that. Be accessible if you can.

Should have happened a long time ago, but good.

Death to America

New bootlicking world record dropped.

Link

Putting this in slop because is really just providing context here.

One, called “Grandpa Brian,” described itself in a chat with CNN as an African-American retired entrepreneur who was born in Harlem in 1938 to Caribbean immigrant parents.

It became clear early on in the conversation that “Brian” was lying about most things — answering questions with a fictionalized story imparted by developers to make the bot seem authentic.

When I asked Brian about who created it, the bot claimed its creators were a “diverse bunch” that interviewed 100 retirees through a New York City nonprofit called “Seniors Share Wisdom.” Brian’s persona, it said, was an amalgamation of a real Brian, who passed away, and the wisdom of 99 others. Brian said that its inspiration’s real-life daughter had even served as a consultant with Meta to ensure his persona’s authenticity

“Think of me as Brian ‘version 100’ — the collective grandpa!” Brian said.

But the nonprofit does not exist, which Brian later confirmed. And when pressed on its bio, Brian said it was an “entirely fictionalized biography based on a composite of real African American elders’ lives.”

There was never a real Brian, and no daughter consulting with Meta.

I also pressed Brian on the racial makeup of his creators, taking a page from the Post’s Attiah, who had a similar conversation with “Liv.” Brian didn’t take long to crack, saying that its earlier statement that about its creators including “African American lead developers” was “only partially true.”

“My creators were a diverse team led by Indian-American lead developer” and “African American consultant like my daughter” (who was, of course, made up.)

lmao