Bogus, batshit, banal, bizarre, or bicubic: Assorted News

[Upthorn]

I suppose I'd have to say I'm not meant to exist

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Mysterious sphere washes up on Japanese beach, triggering speculation



Don't you dare tell me that's not a kaiju egg.

[nosimpleway]

oh no the snail has broken free

[Niku]

he destroyed his cage
yes
YES

[Mongrel]

More than a century and a half later, he's still stealing Confederate ships for the Union.



Traitors mad. Too bad.

[Mongrel]

CNN: The Pras Michel case, or, "How Malaysian crook Jho Low, at the heart of the biggest financial scandal for decades, was paying a member of the Fugees $100 million to work as an agent of influence for China."

During this period Low also financed The Wolf of Wall Street, causing the FBI to confiscate several of Leonardo DiCaprio's personal items (including an Oscar).

Mainly though, I think an amusing demonstration of how wildly foreign intelligence agencies often overpay for supposed influence when they are very bad at their job of, you know, having some vague idea of how their target nation works.

[Mongrel]

30-ton shipment of ammonium nitrate disappeared while en route, while being shipped by rail from Wyoming to California

(it probably just leaked out from a bad bottom gate, like someone laying a trail of unabomber/desperate farmer breadcrumbs running down the tracks, but still makes for quite the story)

[Mongrel]

Look, I know this one's from 2020, but hear me out.

12-Year Old Gets DJ Equipment Confiscated After Throwing a Rave in School Bathroom

FUCKING. LEGEND.

[Mongrel]

Also HuffPo's actual page for this could go in the Jernalism thread:

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

So, you may have seen the story about five rich guys who took a tourist submarine to sightsee the Titanic and which has now "gone missing". Lots of dunking going on because the joke that the Titanic is still killing rich guys beset by hubris over a hundred years later is an easy one. But my first thought was "Who the fuck takes a sub run by a CORPORATION down to the fucking abyss?", which is a thought maybe some of you had as well. Death from submarine failure always sounded pretty horrible to me, no matter the type of failure, like holy shit give me a plane crash over that any day.

But okay, maybe this was a serious, professional company or something and I was overthinking it?

Nah. I saw a couple pictures and was immediately struck by how this thing looked more nightmarish than I imagined, literally like a screenshot from Iron Lung - including being fucking bolted in from the outside.

Then I saw this and like, holy shit, could this outfit be any more cartoonishly evil.

[Yoji]

Okay, this story is hitting me like crypto news. It's all about rich douchebags trying to do something incredibly risky that they don't understand, doing it in the dumbest way possible, and it makes less sense the more I try to read about it.

[KingRoyal]

From a 2019 Smithsonian article about the company (emphasis mine)

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate)

[Thad]

Trapping a CEO who previously complained about safety regulations on his own submarine is the kind of shit Superman used to do in the 1930s.

[Friday]

So the question is when they find the wreck a year from now will the CEO have killed the other passengers to prolong his own oxygen

taking bets now

[Mongrel]

Depends on if something failed whereby they lost propulsion (in which case they will eventually find the mummified occupants), or if the hull failed.

If they latter they might find some debris, or they might not ever find a thing. With the pressure at 12,000 feet down, they're so dead they might've been retroactively wiped from existence.

[nosimpleway]

I'm seeing articles that the window in the cabin was rated down to 1500 feet. They were going 4000 feet deep.

lol

lmao

[Büge]

Nah. I saw a couple pictures and was immediately struck by how this thing looked more nightmarish than I imagined, literally like a screenshot from Iron Lung - including being fucking bolted in from the outside.

As soon as I heard that, I realized they'd never seen The Right Stuff