Just kiddin! But I am proud of how tightly I grabbed him by the
pussy and how absurdly long I held on. That was, like, two full
days of nothin but Laird. A personal best and it will be difficult
to surpass even by sometime yoga instructional website The
Inertia.
But let us move away from Laird’s doctoral thesis and into his
home town of Malibu! There is a new YouTube serial called Malibu
Surf which… ummmm… I’ll let the show’s creator tell you.
“Imagine a world where 4 beautiful boys, 4 beautiful girls,
surf, sand, drama and romance are the norm! This is
real life for Rio, Joey, Ally, Jacob, Keaton,
Courtney, Sofia and Sean. They all live in Malibu, CA
and spend their days lying on the beach or surfing
and their nights causing mischief in Malibu or going
to parties. Some of them are friends…some of them
are frenemies… but all of them live in a world where
it’s a surfers paradise!”
I’ll admit I was slightly confused when I first read because it
is not Surfers Paradise and has nothing to do with Australia’s Gold
Coast. It is Malibu. And it opens with one girl asking another
girl, “What’s Maui like? I’ve never been there.” And
her answering, “It’s so different than here. Like, it’s kind
of the same how everyone knows everyone here but the surfing is so
much more corporate here.” And the the first one says, “Yeah, if
you don’t have a sponsor you’re kinda out.”
Fucking corporate Malibu surf scene with all its sponsored
groms.
Lame. Where’s the soul n shit?
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Indo’s Been Bombing! (A Dual Meaning)
By Michael Ciaramella
This escalates quickly...
Do you want the good news or bad news
first?
This is a question that’s presumably been around for ages, and
for good reason — the answer says a lot about a person.
Me? I’ll take the bad news every time. The same way that I’ll
eat my least favorite foods first and wait an hour for a set on a
pumping swell.
I prefer starting low and attaining something positive down the
line to a fleeting moment of happiness followed shortly by
despair. The promise of upward momentum puts my mind at ease.
But for the sake of this article, I’m going to defy my personal
preference. I’ll deliver the good news about Indonesia first,
followed by the very bad news, because it’s important to my
message.
The good news: Indo has been bombing!
Indonesia was recently pegged with a
colorful blob and the islands jumped for joy. Sumbawa, Lombok,
Bali, Java, Sumatra and every little reef pass in
between went ballistic for three days straight. Below is a
clip from Nias — one of the better zones from the swell.
So that happened over a week ago, but waves continue to
batter the archipelago from a series of Southern Ocean lows.
Speaking of which, how’s this triple-up headed that way next week?
Book your tickets, Aussie friends!
Or maybe don’t. Because, well…
The bad news: Indonesia, specifically its
capital Jakarta, was the site of a terrorist attack yesterday
evening. Two suicide bombers, three cops dead, a number of
civilians injured, and widespread panic is what most
reports are stating.
According to9 News Perth, officials are
warning people in high tourist areas, especially Kuta and Seminyak
in Bali, to be extremely cautious at this time. “The Department of
Foreign Affairs has issued an updated travel warning, reminding
holiday visitors to be vigilant,” the report says.
And dammit, this is a tricky one. Not the Indo event
specifically, but the whole Islam/terrorist thing.
First of all, I feel it’s pointless to waste your time
worrying about being hit by an attack. Much like with
sharks, if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. Of course
there are things you can do to lessen your odds of becoming a
victim, like avoiding high risk areas (major cities/Reunion
Island/Ariana Grande concerts/SoCal), but at the end of the day you
can’t let fear handicap the most enjoyable parts of your
life.
The more I think about it, the more connections I see between
terrorist organizations and sharks.
For instance, there’s a group (conservatives) who want to
destroy them at all costs. It’s somewhat noble, in the sense that
they’re trying to protect “innocent” lives, but the means of
achieving their goals are often shortsighted, inhumane, or
downright impossible (how many sharks are you going to kill, and
what happens if you do fuck up the food chain? How do you
defeat terrorism, when the very act of bombing people in these
regions only multiplies their number of adherents?)
Then there’s the other side (liberals). They find it
repugnant to cast blame on Muslims or sharks but totally acceptable
to cast blame on those who cast blame on Muslims or sharks. They
don’t have any real answers, other than the cold, hard fact that
they retain the moral high ground on any and all issues. In their
eyes, doing nothing is often better than doing something drastic.
(Don’t kill sharks, don’t bomb the Middle East/blame Islam, because
it’s “immoral” and the repercussions could be worse than the issues
at hand.)
Then there’s the concept of what a “terrorist” even is.
I once took a class on terrorism (in Australia, no less!) that
opened my eyes to the concept of perspective. It made me reconsider
several truths that I once held self-evident.
For instance, is an ISIS member a terrorist because he beheads
American POWs or makes a bomb out of himself, with hopes of
taking civilians’ lives along with his own? Is a shark a terrorist
because it occasionally eats people?
The easy answer, the most emotionally-charged answer, is yes.
Their disregard for our western values/aquatic playtime is
unjustifiable, their murderous tendencies inhumane.
But let’s take a second to really think about it.
Imagine you were (like me) born in 1993, but instead
of suburban Pennsylvania you were raised in bumblefuck Afghanistan.
At the age of eight, your country was bombed and ransacked by
the West as a result of the 9/11 attacks — an atrocity
perpetrated by exactly zero Afghan pilots. For years you watched
these Western nations bomb your home, take over your villages,
and disrupt your political system. Innocent friends and family
killed in the pursuit of “justice”.
So, assuming that you come from a group the
West deemed as unscrupulous and were treated as such, are
you a terrorist for fighting back against the
intruders in any way possible? Even if it means killing innocent
people to strike fear in the Western world — the only means of
power you really have?
Put yourself in that position. Feel the bomb-blown sand in your
eyes, hair, teeth. The stillness of a once-familiar corpse at your
feet. How would you react?
I’m not saying you’d be right to retaliate, but how can
someone take the definitive stance that you’d be wrong for
aligning with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or even ISIS? That you’re
bloody pissed at what the West has done to your people, your
home?
This is one mediocre example of a simple, if under-appreciated
sentiment: terrorism is in the eye of the victim. To
many Middle Easterners, we’re saviors. To others, we’re the
terrorists.
You can argue that our intentions are more noble or our means
more moral than the ISISes of the world, but they
probably feel just as justified in their own minds. A man in
the sky told them so.
In essence, we’re killing over ideologies (and oil), they’re
killing over ideologies. The idea that the West maintains a
monopoly over “legitimate” violence is ludicrous.
Now, sharks are slightly different because, well, they’re not
human. Sad as it may be, I can’t justify giving sharks equal
and empathetical treatment to a person. Even a member of a
“terrorist” organization. Darwin’s rules, not mine.
That said, I do care about the ecosystem and sharks’ role
in it. If a few people gotta die to maintain the balance of
the ocean, that’s cool with me. If we can kill a few sharks (and
save people) without affecting the overall ecosystem, I’m cool with
that too.
The problem is, it’s difficult to achieve objective scientific
answers for these types of questions. Much like it’s difficult to
discern the effects of “terrorist” eradication.
Anyways, have fun in Indo!
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Opinion: Laird and Healey are wrong!
By Chas Smith
Does research mean anything?
As a younger man I spent copious amounts of
time in the middle east. Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Egypt,
Palestine and with terrorists. Or at least what we here in the west
define as “terrorists.” Hezbollah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas,
Al-Qaeda, The Muslim Brotherhood, etc. I drank tea, chatted,
laughed, argued, disagreed and was once nabbed and thrown into a
blood-stained dungeon then interrogated for almost ever.
Do I know what’s going on in the mind of a terrorist?
Fuck no.
Do Laird Hamilton and Mark
Healey, who have spent copious amounts of time in the
ocean and with sharks, know what’s going on in the mind of that
predator?
Fuck no.
Their claim that menstruation leads to an uptick in shark attack
because it kind of makes sense and/or they have seen sharks
sniffing girls in the water has simply not been corroborated by any
study whatsoever. Zero studies. None. And shall we read from a
shark doctor on Broadly?
We asked Dr. Tricia Meredith, who literally wrote the book
on the olfactory response of sharks. For her dissertation, she
hooked sharks up to a device that introduced controlled amounts of
prey odors (smells associated with a shark’s next meal) into a
shark’s nose, then measured the electrical impulses in their nasal
cavity. She weakened the concentration of these prey odors to
determine how diffuse an odor a shark could still pick up. Dr.
Meredith found that sharks can detect prey odors as minute as one
part per billion—still superhuman, but not better than other fish
with similar schnozzes. One part per billion is roughly the
background scent level of the ocean. If a shark’s sense of smell
was any better they would be flooded with stimulus, the olfactory
equivalent of those people who can’t deal with the sound of
chewing.
There is one sensory arena where sharks excel, but it isn’t
smell. Sharks are incredibly electroreceptive, meaning they can
detect teeny tiny electromagnetic fields in water. Sharks possess a
science fiction-y and awesomely-named organ called the ampullae of
Lorenzini, which are pores, located on the snout, that end in
jelly-filled bulbs. These bulbs contain nerves that detect electric
fields in the water as small as five millionths of a volt per
centimeter. Sharks use the ampullae of Lorenzini to navigate the
ocean and detect prey. All ocean-dwelling animals emit an
electrical field: Muscle contractions release bioelectricity, and,
as Dr. Kajiura says, “any animal in the ocean with a thin, leaky
mucus membrane acts as a battery in seawater,” because of the
differing pH levels inside and outside the animal. Dr. Kajiura was
talking about gills, but “thin, leaky mucus membrane” could also
double as the least sexy description of a vagina ever (and that’s
including Martin Lawrence’s infamous SNL monologue).
So there you go. Maybe Laird and Healey are right. Maybe they
have some kind of sixth sense born of time spent in the ocean and
know what sharks are really thinking. Maybe the right
study hasn’t been conducted yet.
And maybe I’ll be able to predict ISIS’s next move.
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Healey: “Laird is right!”
By Derek Rielly
"Not sexist, just nature," says world's
second-greatest waterman…
While I admit to taking too much pleasure in a good ol
web beatup, in this case Laird Hamilton vs The
World, it might be time to jam on the brakes with
a little real talk.
Yesterday, Laird Hamilton, a man who lives in the ocean and
whom, I think, we can safely call the greatest waterman ever, made
a fairly innocuous comment to the gossip site TMZ. Blood attracts
sharks. Ergo, it might be dangerous for a menstruating woman to
swim.
The story, like every other one, was determined to find some
connection between identity politics, sexism and so forth, with
Laird’s honest opinion; an opinion formed from fifty years in the
ocean.
Mark Healey, who actually swims with great white sharks unlike
the key-jockeys at the Huff Post and the Sun
(and BeachGrit), jumped onto
our Instagram and wrote:
“The logic is that predators that are tuned to hunting mammals
and have exponentially more powerful senses of smell than we do,
pick up on that. The idea is, these predators would much rather
follow a female animal that has or is giving birth so that they can
get an easier/low-risk meal. The menstruation cycle likely triggers
more of a response than just blood. I’ve seen it happen a handful
of times while filming sharks and was able to know that the gals
who the sharks wouldn’t leave alone were on their periods (yes, I
asked). Not sexist, just nature.”
Who you going to believe?
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Famous surfers love bad science!
By Chas Smith
Laird Hamilton and Kelly Slater agree! To soar your
wings must be stitched from the gossamer of conspiracy!
And Laird-Gate has broken wide open. U.S.
congresswoman Maxine Waters condemned the world’s most famous
surfer today for suggesting that sharks single out women in the
lineup and The Huffington Post is still as angry as their
stepchild Zach Weisberg is with me. That Dead Whale
at Trestles, a favorite BeachGrit
commentator, smartly brought Kelly Slater, the world’s other most
famous surfer, into the conversation, writing:
The Huffington Post piled on. “Turns out being one of the
most admired surfers in the world doesn’t make you immune from
promoting bad ― and blatantly false ― science.”
Kelly Slater’s immune system reigns on.
Except does it?
Robert Kelly Slater regularly promotes the widely debunked Chem
Trail conspiracy along with the disputed notion that chia seeds are
better to eat than spread onto ceramic statue heads.
Which makes me wonder. To be widely accepted by the entire
non-surfing population as amazing and cool and admired does a
surfer have to have a pocketful of bad – and blatantly false –
science?
It seems that the answer is a definitive yes.
And we all want John John Florence to reach Huffington
Post levels of fame don’t we? So what conspiracy should he
promote?
Should he:
a) Claim that Jay-Z and Beyoncé are part of the global
Illuminati.
b) Push that Zionists were the masterminds behind 9/11.
c) Believe that the moon landing was faked.
d) Say that JFK was killed by the CIA.
e) Promote the idea of a Deep State.
f) Tell anyone who will listen that Barack Obama is a non-U.S.
citizen Muslim.
g) other
Let’s make John John Huffington Post famous
together!