The Weekly Whatever: Bad COP26
Quote of the week
“Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade.”
— Jenna Ryan, January 6th rioter from Texas who’s now in jail.
Environment
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COP26 environmental conference takes place. Billionaires fly in on 400 private jets to discuss what other people should do to reduce their carbon footprint.
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Good news! The Great Barrier Reef can be saved if we limit global warming to 1.5°C. We’ve already blown past that target, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
Worst site on the Internet
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Facebook says it will shut down its facial recognition systems. However, Meta won’t.
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Facebook now fact-checking 3.6% of identified climate denial posts.
Rich people
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Two rich men offer to help fund the city of Kalamazoo with money from anonymous donors, as long as they get to decide how the money is spent. Strangely, half of the money goes to tax cuts for property owners, most of them white, and a planned income tax is eliminated at the donors’ insistence.
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Lawyer who sued his parents to try to force them to keep paying him $500 a week allowance loses his appeal.
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Henry Kissinger and his lawyer persuaded rich people to pour $400m into Theranos, once again showing his exquisite judgement.
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Speaking of Henry Kissinger, he’s now worried that AI might send humanity down a dangerous and destructive geopolitical path and put him out of a job.
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Richard Desmond, who published “Asian Babes”, “Barely Legal” and “Big Ones” magazines and owned TV channels “Red Hot” and “TV XXX”, is very upset that Wikipedia describes him as a pornographer, because all his magazines and TV shows were legal (albeit barely?)
Late-stage capitalism
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New “Squid Game” cryptocurrency turns out to be a scam. “Monkey Jizz” cryptocurrency also turns out to be a scam.
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In a small town in Texas, two rival companies are competing to see who can waste the most electricity and produce the most e-waste.
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Zillow set up an algorithm to buy houses so it could flip them for a profit. In Q3 it bought 9,680 houses, and sold 3,032, at an average loss of $80,000 each, so now it’s going to lay off a quarter of its employees.
From bad to worse
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Brazilian men attacked by bees, dive into lake — where one of them is eaten by piranha.
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33,000 people trapped inside Disneyland Shanghai after COVID-19 outbreak.
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With America no longer occupying Afghanistan, heroin is now in short supply, so people are switching to Fentanyl.
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Oklahoma jail handcuffed prisoners to a wall, and then forced them to listen to “Baby Shark” on repeat as a form of torture.
Bedtime stories
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California middle school teacher goes on QAnon-inspired rants in class, somehow gets to keep her job.
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California man and the three bears: the bucket of KFC was just right.