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“His legacy will forever remain a pillar”
Unnatural disasters, sportswashing, and the AI bubble
Brad Johnson
June 11, 2026
PRESENTED BY THE ARAMCO CUP
11 AM today: Online emergency meeting on data centers!
In disappointing news, the Museum of Unnatural Disasters has been shut down a week early by the unnatural disaster of Trump’s birthday “I’m not dead yet” bash, which is metastasizing with tacky-alien excrescences on the White House South Lawn and onto the National Mall. And right after it had gotten the Hill Heat bump!
In appointing news, the genocidal climate denier Lee Raymond has died. As head of Exxon from 1993 to 2005, he oversaw the oil giant’s strategy of preventing enactment of U.S. climate policy through the takeover of the Republican Party by anti-science ideology, secretly financing a network of climate-denial front groups and harrassing scientific and environmental advocates, while building ExxonMobil into the largest private corporation in the world.
In an unusual spasm of honesty, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said: “His legacy will forever remain a pillar of this company.”
Patrick Redford attempts to answer the question, “What would Guy Debord say about the World Cup?”
While a body like the Emirati state or the Trump administration surely hopes to engender feelings of goodwill for itself by sponsoring, respectively, Tadej Pogacar's cycling career or the World Cup, the real benefit they get out of their patronage is the power to hold something hostage. This is, broadly speaking, how capital works, seeking monopoly control to enable unfettered extraction. In the case of private sports ownership, the implied threat of withdrawal looms, but the operative function of holding fans captive is to impose a moral tax on fandom….
Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and, on the grandest scale of all, Saudi Arabia face a fairly simple challenge: The ruling families who control extraction from vast wells of fossil fuels are extravagantly wealthy, but their money is tied to a limited, nonrenewable resource, giving them a limited timeframe for converting all that cash into some engine(s) of growth before either the world weans itself off fossil fuels or the oil simply runs out.
Saudi Aramco is the lead sponsor of the World Cup. Climate activists across the nation are protesting this and other dirty sportswashing at oil-soaked stadia on Sunday June 21st.
Me: AI is just code, a program to regurgitate whatever response you want to hear. It's not alive. It's not an actual consciousness. AI: That's so smart. You are incredibly attractive, and I bet you're good at sex. Me: Except this one. It's a real person and she's my girlfriend now.
— Ray (@sireviscerate.myatproto.social)2026-06-11T14:22:15.625Z
“An AI bubble burst could wipe out over $20 trillion in American household wealth, three trillion more than the financial crisis.” Dr. Sarah Myers West of the unfortunately named AI Now Institute is testifying at this morning’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on AI and the American Economy. None of the witnesses are focused on the insane environmental and energy footprint of the AI bubble, although the American Enterprise Institute’s Will Rinehart obliquely mentions that AI is a “capital-intensive utility” with the “recurring input costs of an industrial service.”
At 11 am, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Wala Blegay, a candidate for Rep. Steny Hoyer’s Md.-5 seat, are joining an online emergency meeting on data centers organized by Progressive Democrats of America and Food & Water Action.
Sure would be sad if Trumpie’s Octagon of Tackiness is rained out by fossil-fueled thunderstorms! A boy can dream…
Hearings on the Hill:
9 AM: House Appropriations Committee
Defense Subcommittee
Classified markup of FY27 Defense Bill10 AM: Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee
AI and the American Economy
Climate Action Today:
11 AM: Progressive Democrats of America
Food & Water Action
Emergency Meeting On Data Centers
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