What are they teaching in journalism school nowadays?

Another mass murder by an asshole with a rifle, on a day ending with the letter “y”. But this article! Jesus!

The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.

Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Bank’s downtown Louisville branch.

Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he used a rifle to open fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including three police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but it’s unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots.

The article briefly mentions the victims by name, but after that, it’s got a more important job to do. It spends 22 fucking paragraphs going on and on about what a nice normal guy the killer was. The governor of Kentucky has to tell us what an “incredible friend” he was, they interview old high school friends and buddies from his college fraternity, they reach the depths of banality by getting a quote from the husband of a neighbor.

Sturgeon “seemed like a real normal dude, every day he’d wave to me,” Allgeier’s husband, Michael, added.

What the fuck? The mass murderer was known to sometimes wave to people? This is news? I learned nothing from it other than that the killer was otherwise a mundane person who lived an ordinary, if privileged, life before going on a shooting rampage. The article says nothing about the victims, short of naming them, and should have been slashed to bits by an editor before publishing.

And it took three ‘reporters’ to cobble together this unquestioning story about a bad man.

I hope they feel a little bit of shame today.

What meritocracy?

Elon Musk is doing a fine job of wrecking the reputation (what there was of it) of rich people. Here’s his idea of a clever joke.

Juvenile. Stupid. He bought this thing for $44 billion, and now he spends all his time mocking it and literally deprecating it. He threw away over $20 billion so far, and is determined to destroy all the rest.

Worse is what he’s doing to Matt Taibbi. I don’t much care for Taibbi — he’s also juvenile and gullible — but he was defending Musk, incompetently, and was paid by Musk to fire off that damp squib called the “Twitter Files,” but now Musk is cutting off Substack, where Taibbi makes his money, and has gone so far as to ‘shadow ban’ Taibbi on Twitter.

Musk is a petty 3 year old child. I browsed his Twitter feed to see what’s going on in his brain, and even his deep thoughts are shallow and trivial. Like this one:

Wait, what? Your left arm is the same age as your right, and the two are genetically identical, and typically have similar environmental exposure. How is this an example of precision? How does this tell us that aging can be fixed?

Although…I did once meet a man, a truck driver, whose left arm was ruddy, scaly, and weathered, while his right was pale and smooth. He liked driving with the side window down, and his left arm resting on the door. I guess I’ve cured aging, then — simply stay out of the sun.

Noah was a prevert

I never thought of it from this angle before, but maybe Noah was a devious guy with a bestiality obsession, and he invented that whole flood nonsense as an excuse to check out animals’ genitals. That makes more sense than the book of Genesis, that’s for sure.

It also suggests how we ought to view all those weirdos today who are insisting on laws to check out children’s genitals. There’s no social catastrophe, just a lot of perverts who think they have a cunning excuse.

It’s all inbreeding

I just learned about a curious connection. Remember UATX, that fake conservative university, is having another summer session this year (you’re too late to apply, I’m afraid). Again, it’s going to be held in Dallas, not Austin, because they’ve been granted the use of some buildings in an office park called Old Parkland.

Guess who owns it?

Conservative billionaire and corrupt villain of the week, Harlan Crow.

The more I learn about these people, the more incestuous they look.

Noticed! At last!

I got a mention in the latest issue of the college newspaper, the University Register. Only in the April Fools’ issue, unfortunately, and they misspelled my name, of course.

“The only current known readers of the UR are PZ Meyers and one of his spiders.”

Not mentioned is that PZ Meyers only manages to skim the paper 5 days after it was published.

Or that the spiders only read at a first grade level, so far.

I’m not lurking, really

I’ve been in my office all day, talking to no one. Instead, I’ve graded two sets of lab reports, prepared two lectures for tomorrow, and am nearly done grading an exam. There are a few million things I’d rather do today, but at least I’ve cleared that annoying pile of work.

If I’m a good boy and get some more done in time, I’m going to the movie theater tonight — I hear that the Dungeons & Dragons movie is entertaining…but I also see that it’s 2 hours and 14 minutes long. It’s fluff! It shouldn’t be that long!

I also shouldn’t be spending my whole weekend working, either.

How AI will destroy us

Adam Conover sums up the state of AI.

I agree with him, mostly. What all the AI hype is about is finding a way to sneakily glean the products of human intelligence from their babbling on the internet, scrape it up into a goulash without paying any people for it, and use it as a marketing tool — a bad marketing tool. Tell me, does anyone seriously believe that claiming there’s “AI” in your search engine is a great selling point? People are starting to catch on that it’s all annoying nonsense. It’s “the algorithm,” that excuse marketers were using previously to justify unwanted behind-the-scenes rules on Twitter or Facebook that they claimed were there to increase the likelihood you would see stuff you wanted to see, but was actually an excuse to make sure you got served up lots of ads and spam.

The only advantage to AI is that it does cut out direct human intervention and gives the companies the means to circumvent paying authors and artists, so it might be cheaper. For now. Until the companies kill off their competition and starts gouging customers again, as they inevitably will.

Behind the AI facade, of course, is the real villain of the story, capitalism. Skynet isn’t going to kill us all, we’re instead going to be drowned in a glurge of computer-generated bullshit that will temporarily bring great profit to the techbros of silicon valley, all the Elon Musks of the world.