Here’s one way to convert America to a tyranny: give up on all those ineffective checks and balances in the Constitution by giving immense power to an unelected person with a novel title and no oversight at all. I’m talking about this fucking guy.
Elon Musk has gleefully accepted the job of wrecking the country.
We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.
In an obscenely capitalist country like ours, the power of the purse is absolute. He’s already trampling over privacy concerns to steal everything else.
An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.
I wouldn’t expect Trump to care, or even be aware of the problem, but where is AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Ford, Boeing, Bank of America, etc., all those giant companies whose data is being stolen by a jumped-up South African immigrant and competitor? I don’t want my data handed over to Musk, but I’m small potatoes. Some billionaires ought to get on his case.
Unless, of course, they like this part, which involves diminishing the power of the government.
But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government’s own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they’re used. Congress’s authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.
In case you’re wondering how Musk is going to disembowel government, he’s just blatantly firing people and confiscating rights, even when he has no recognized authority to do so. People are just accepting it.
Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications that they’re receiving, as well as the unusual dictats transforming their workplaces in the name of DOGE, are happening late at night and on weekends.
On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” option where they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent out on January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)
Before Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”
Who needs knives in the night when you’re armed with authoritarian memos? He’s just doing it. No one is stopping him. We need more people to rise up and resist.
So much of what he is doing is ridiculously petty.
Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says that unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to DEI, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, which read, “Be kind to everyone.”
OK. No more kindness. These monsters, and the people who appointed them, and the citizens who voted those people in, need to be treated in kind. Do not accept their officious nonsense. Like this one, from the new secretary of transportation:
Rosa Parks might have a few words to say about that. Shut up and sit in the back of the bus, says Secretary Duffy. You’re a distraction. He’s got air traffic controllers to fire.
DOGE pronounced ‘Dodgy’?
re submoron @1: I think it is pronounced “dog shit”. There may be some hidden letters in the acronym.
What crazy Elon Musk is doing is highly illegal.
The courts have already ruled against him.
So now he is just ignoring the Federal courts.
The Rule of Law and Due Process have broken down or disappeared.
This is what a dictatorship looks like.
This is what Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner in economics has to say today.
Paul Krugman summing it up: So much damage — to U.S. credibility, to the Constitution and the rule of law, and possibly even to the very functioning of the government. And Trump only took power 2 weeks ago.
OK, the Trump regime has wrecked the US government, destroyed the Rule of Law, and set up a de facto dictatorship.
And no one can stop them right now.
What are we going to do, call the FBI? Which Trump also controls.
This looks a lot like what happened with the fall of the old USSR.
The USSR was the other superpower and then one day it just collapsed. No one really in charge any more.
All the captive slave nations made a mad dash for their freedom, including 14 of the 15 nations that were the Soviet Socialist Republics.
No one really in charge any more.
Average life spans in the USSR dropped sharply after that, 6 years for men to age 57.
So, what is going to happen in the new post USA?
I have no idea.
I don’t think anyone especially Trump, the GOP, and even the oligarchies have any idea.
They are just breaking things now and worrying about picking up the pieces later.
They have a vision of a future that is going to be glorious and all of their actions are toward that end. However. Their vision is ill-defined and has little to do with reality. They metaphorically have a cube and are trying to shove it into a round hole, and the more that their efforts do not produce their glorious vision the more they are going to fervently believe that the people who are preventing them from shoving the cube into the round hole must be punished for the good of all humanity (by which they solely mean themselves). There is no more justification for supporting the status quo – the MAGA have rejected all that is good about the status quo and are exalting all that is bad about it. Even if your intention is only to support what was good about the status quo the MAGA exaltation of all that is bad about it makes you complicit in their evil. No cooperation with MAGA. No more bipartisanship. Time to crank up the talk about what we want society to become to 11 and looking for cracks in the oligarchy.
Can anyone rationally deny that the elongated muskrat is powering the Death Spiral?? He is an illegal immigrant and unelected ahole who has seized control of federal finances.
Millions of people were compelled to invest in and pay into medicare and social security. Now these anal sphincters running this joke of a country want to steal that. WTF
And the news media just reports on why this criminal wants to destroy the government, not that it is illegal. They can’t even be bothered to ask Trump how he has the ability to fire people for following security protocols.
Stopping USAID funding, if it succeeds, will be the most horrific thing Republicans have done since invade Iraq. It surely can get worse, but how many are going to die because of this?
I keep hearing Martha and the Vandellas louder and louder: Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide !
On Monday, their tariffs went into effect. The stock market tanked, as expected. Later they pulled the tariffs. The market is back up today. Apparently they dropped the tariffs “because” they got some sort of agreement with Mexico and Canada. Per one thing I saw, the agreement with Canada had been in the works for months during the Biden admin, which Trump/Musk knew. It seems likely that they were just manipulating the market to get richer.
A Coup Is In Progress In America
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Techdirt is correct: A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise.
O.K. so the illegal immigrant sociopathic elongated muskrat is disembowelling this country. When will somebody disembowel him? Or, at the least send him back to bigoted south africa with no access to his criminal wealth?
Good question.
No one has an exact count of how many people will starve to death after USAID dies.
USAID is the world’s largest provider of food assistance internationally. This goes to famine areas, refugee camps, disaster relief etc..
They run things like a detention camp for captured ISIS soldiers in Syria. If we don’t feed those soldiers, then what? They either starve to death or we let them go.
It could be thousands, tens of thousands, maybe a million people
This is from an old version of the USAID website. The current website is shut down.
This is what Musk calls a radical, leftist agenda.
Feeding women and children under the age of 2 in crisis situations overseas.
Raven No. 4: I see it as looking more like Berlin in the 1930s. Scapegoat minorities. Prosecute your opposition. Eliminate checks and balances. This is exactly how the Third Reich started, though it’s still too soon to say how far down that road we’re going.
This is a classic example of no good deed goes unpunished. I wish that people who hate liberals could go back in time and spend a year working pre-union when there were no vacations, sick time, benefits, people worked 50 and 60 hour weeks with no overtime for starvation wages payable in scrip at the company store.
I wish that people who hate liberals could go back in time and live for a year with no social security, medicare, workers comp, free public education, truth in labeling laws, consumer protection laws, and all the other things people now just kind of expect (though may be in for a rude awakening if Trump completes his dismantling of the federal government).
Any reductions in human misery have come largely at the behest of liberals who pushed it through over fierce conservative opposition. And the American people have rewarded their benefactors by throwing them out of office and installing Caligula.
So fine. Let them get good and hard what they voted for. The laws of cause and effect are still in full force. I just wish so many innocent people weren’t going to suffer alongside them.
A lot of them literally the typical idiot college boys: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-doge-musketeers-the-secret-team-elon-wants-to-keep-in-the-shadows/
Could he have done it without buying Twitter? I doubt that.
(All that chortling over his business stupidity in so doing, well, didn’t age too well)
My senators and lone representative are going to get sick of hearing from me. I called them all yesterday–only Barrasso’s aide answered the phone–so I left messages. Hageman’s aide picked up today, and I was quite pleased to be met with busy signals at Barrasso’s and Lummis’s offices. I managed to get through to leave a message for Lummis–aide there not picking up–and the last I checked, Barrasso’s phone was still busy (though I’m not putting it past his people to simply leave the phone off the hook). It may or may not do any good as this is a very Republican state, but I suspect that the Republican majority isn’t any happier about this than the rest of us. Case in point–just look at the bills in the Wyoming State Legislature. There is one of them that was reported to be highly unpopular with 70% of the Republican voters in the state. (If you’re interested in looking it up for some reason, it’s HB 199, which proposes to give families $7,000 per child if they are homeschooled or go to religious schools. The kicker is that there will be no oversight, while HB 200 proposes that teachers must publish their entire curriculums at the beginning of each school year. Those are not the only two bills on education. The state legislature really has it out for teachers this year.)
John @16: He’s certainly not stupid, but to borrow Reginald Perrin’s boss CJ’s phrasing, he didn’t get where he is today by not being a sociopath.
“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)
Yeah right.
I was one of those low productivity workers in the public sector before I retired. I spent the last few years of work dealing with private consultants trying to tell me how to do my job efficiently. One who was engaged to review a major essential project I had submitted a budget for stated that one of the objectives was impossible to attain and that the remainder would cost 3 times as much as I had estimated. When it became obvious 6 months later that the work had to be done I was given the go ahead. The project came in on time and only 10% over the budget I estimated, not bad considering the 6 months delay. And the impossible objective? I had a simple solution which more than 20 years later still works. The consultants fee for that particular bit of idiocy though added 60% to the final cost.
As for efficiency I was assigned to a particular job out in the field but first had to be shown how to do it by an overpriced consultant. So there I was the vehicle fully loaded ready for an early morning start. An hour and a half later the consultant showed up and before we started work he went antique shopping. This was the pattern for a largely wasted and very expensive week in the field.
When the time came to do the work myself I was heavily committed to another project so I spent about 10 minutes showing another technician how to use the equipment and explaining the procedure. No need for a wasted week of leisurely antique shopping on the public’s dime. He departed with a program the consultant estimated would take 2 weeks of field work. He was back in a week, job done.
If you want government to run efficiently get rid of the Muskrats infesting the workplace.
Rob, sure. I remember talk about his impending penury, too.
I just asked my useless bubbly friend, and it says (citations elided):
“When Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, his net worth was approximately $187 billion, while Twitter was valued at $44 billion. As of now, Musk’s net worth has increased to around $235 billion, whereas X (formerly Twitter) is currently valued at about $8.8 billion.”
@Rob Grigjanis #18:
“Great!”
“Super!”
[OT]
I’ve iterated my protocol for my bubbly cloud, such as:
∀x (Prompt(x) → (Explicit(x) → (AnswerDirectly(x) ∧ ¬Commentary(x))) ∧ (Keyword(x) → AnswerLiterally(x)) ∧ (LimitScope(x) → (SpecificData(x) ∧ ¬BroaderContext(x) ∧ ¬MultipleQueries(x))))
(That shows which freebie I am using. It is a nice toy)
John @20: So you don’t think he’s a sociopath, despite the last 10 years or so of statements and actions (I think the relevant phrase is res ipsa loquitur)? Just a smart businessman, doing smart business.
Could he have done it without buying Twitter? I doubt that.
He quite possibly could have, given that his Xhithole wasn’t the only reliable source/outlet for loony-right disinformation. It’s not like he wasn’t able to dominate our attention before he bought the site.
Rob: Actually, yes, he is pretty stupid. AND possibly a sociopath.
@JM:
This is just a dumb and stupid point that keeps brought up because people can’t figure out that if you did something stupid but somehow it worked out, then must have been smart.
“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”
Whoever said that seems to think all public-sector jobs, by definition, are less “productive” than private-sector jobs. Which is the kind of gross errors of prejudice we get when we let for-profit scammers define all our terms for us…
“John @20: So you don’t think he’s a sociopath”
Whatever in my response gave you that idea?
I literally wrote (and I quote!): “Rob, sure.” in response, and so you imagine I disputed you?
To be as direct and as explicit as I can, I have no idea whether or not he is a sociopath as you define the term. People are complicated. So, not disputing you, but not in accord, either.
Yes, I acknowledge what you wrote. But do you remember threads here about him purchase of Twitter and how stupid it was and so forth? Because that was my actual point.
Sociopath or not, those prognostications and beliefs have been, um, the opposite of vindicated. Demonstrably. As this post shows.
RB @24: He’s ignorant and evil. That is not the same as stupid. But I’ve said all I have to say on this sickening topic.
“This is just a dumb and stupid point that keeps brought up because people can’t figure out that if you did something stupid but somehow it worked out, then must have been smart.”
Copium.
JM:
I don’t think you understand what “Copium” means but then again, you are a fucking troll so keep on sucking off Musk.
[OT]
“Copium” is a blend of the words “cope” and “opium,” and is often used online in a humorous or sarcastic way to describe a fictitious, self-administered drug people use to deal with disappointment or stress, especially in competitive or frustrating situations. Essentially, it’s something people “inhale” to help them “cope” with difficult truths or failures.
(Be aware that homophobic attempted insults are deprecated here, lotharloo)
John @27: First, shame on me for not clocking out when I said I would. Can’t help it.
I often sympathize with you when people cherry-pick your comments. But sometimes you make it hard. Your very next sentence after “Rob, sure” was “I remember talk about his impending penury, too.”.
You’re actually not a bad guy when you’re not being a fucking weasel.
[meta]
“Your very next sentence after “Rob, sure” was “I remember talk about his impending penury, too.””
True. And I explained that: “Yes, I acknowledge what you wrote. But do you remember threads here about him purchase of Twitter and how stupid it was and so forth? Because that was my actual point.”
The rest was a return to my original point.
Maybe I should have written something like “fair enough, but still [blah]”, since obs I confused you.
@John Morales:
I know what copium means and it is not calling bullshit on dumbass ideas. We know why Musk bought Twitter: to turn it into a financial, social media, …., monopoly to replace Facebook, Amazon, visa, mastercard and so on. He has failed in every single aspect and that is why it is a failure and the biggest financial blunder in history. Trump beating Kamala does not change any of these.
John @34: Hate to burst your bubble, but nothing about you has confused me in the 12 years I’ve been commenting here.
So you were not confused when you imagined I was disputing you via “Rob, sure”, and when I tell you to your face I was not — outside your laboured interpretation of my return to my original point after acknowledging your irrelevant comment (it did not address my point) — and that continues a 12-year streak of not being confused.
(Wrong, but not confused. Gotcha)
“We know why Musk bought Twitter: to turn it into a financial, social media, …., monopoly to replace Facebook, Amazon, visa, mastercard and so on.”
I personally thought he bought it as a toy at the time (he could sure afford it), but after the fact, well… I think he was always planning what has happened.
(Just lucky, eh?)
But fair enough, lotharloo. Due to exceptional luck, Elon is a living, breathing counter-example to the aphorism “a fool and his money are soon parted.”
—
Maybe a bit of levity would not go astray:
I’m really curious how many Trump voters are now having regrets, or if roughly 50% of voters are still thinking this is all fine. I can imagine there are lots of Palestinian Americans right now cheering Trump’s support for permanent displacement of Gazan residents. /s
I’d be fine with you ruining your own country if it weren’t for the fact you’re going to take us with you.
According to various news sources, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee has proposed amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump a third term. Note that the 22nd limiting presidents to two terms was pushed by Republicans in the late 1940s because Roosevelt was elected four times. How partisanship doth alter perspectives. Of course, Ogles may be too stupid to know that the 22nd was a Republican supported measure.
lotharloo@35–
Not quite right. Musk bought Twitter because he made some very unwise impulsive statements about how he would buy it for $45B to Save Free Speech, and then when he tried to back out, he found that his usual unaccountability didn’t work when it comes to making promissary statements and he was forced to go through with the purchase, kicking and screaming and trying every dubious legal strategy in the books to get out of it.
Now, having been forced to purchase Twitter, he is bending it to his purposes. Most of these purposes will fail — why on Earth would anyone with a working brain give X access to their finances? But he has been extremely successful at leveraging control of X into the right-wing political grift market.
All the talk about how Musk was smart to buy Twitter generally ignores that he tried to back out of doing it. Maybe we just have a system where above a certain level of wealth, you can only fail up. Trump isn’t smart either – but brains aren’t what it takes to untie a knot with a sword.
What talk about him being smart to buy it, monad?
I said he did it with an ulterior purpose, in hindsight, and as amusement, at the time.
Nothing about being smart.
—
Gates could have done it. Zuck could have done it. Etc.
No. That too is copium.
Well, according to you, he must just have been rich enough to fall up. Or something.
Hey, maybe he’s just ‘cunning’, not ‘smart’. ‘Devious’, not ‘cluey’. Etc.
(Copium!)
Latest headline.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing with the US military helping the Israeli army.
I don’t even know what to say here.
I suppose from the GOP/fundie xian standpoint, if you are going to go Nazi, might as well go for it all and start exterminating groups of people in the way.
Cthulhu, I really don’t want to live in the USA any more.
@ ^
Really feel like I’m in a Peter Sellers movie. So the President… wants to make Gaza… a resort for the wealthy??
8-O
Here’s another possibility: Musk is stupid, and is, knowingly or not, allowing himself to be used and manipulated by smarter people who either share his goals, or at least appeal to his vanity, to get him to advance their evil-genius plans while letting him think he’s the brains of the outfit.
#QElon clearly isn’t a “self-made man” — a large part of his success comes from being part of an ecosystem of people and interest-groups who coddle, flatter and encourage him while he tells them what they want to hear.
I wasted all of Tuesday at work hunting down terms in strange places and so did dozens of other people I work with.
It was all very productive. Why I’m now quite certain any old random right wing snowflake can trawl through our websites in peace. None of them need fear their little hands or… egos will shrink from encountering knowledge that people different from them exist. Surely this is what every voter wanted last November.
By the way, what was that thing about eggs again?
Owen Jones Elon Musk Stages Coup D’Etat youtube clip 10 mins long.
StevoR, I am assured he is a know-nothing fool, so he can hardly stage anything, no?
And he’s a failure, of course. Lucky to fail up, and whatnot. With
Owen Jones apparently does not share that particular opinion, but hey… that’s what I’m told, right here.
Well, and that maybe — dum dum duuuum — that Éminences grises are his handlers.
Kinda the reverse of Swift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_(poem)):
“So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.”
[See, he can’t simultaneously be an evil overlord wannabe (supervillain!) and also a foolish fool controlled by others (loser!)]
@John Morales
Somehow I did not think you were that gullible but I’m always happy to change my mind.
@chrislawson
That was always a lie. If you believe that, then how do you explain his insistence to know the exact number of bots on the platform and why did he care so much about the bot number? If the “freedom of speech” was the real reason, he would not care too much about it. You would care a bit to try and negotiate the price but that would be it.
The reality is that Elon Musk’s ambitions and ego are truly astronomical. We are talking about a person who thinks about colonizing Mars, space exploration, AGI, implanting human brains with implants, and so on. In line with this ego, his plan was always to buy Twitter and turn it into a global app even bigger than WeChat. And this is why the bot number makes a big difference. He has been taking twitter in the same direction as well.
lotharloo, please. I just said it in as many words.
(unlike my unfinished sentence in the 2nd para @ 51, where I obs fucked-up the editing)
But sure. Gullible, that’s me.
The US reverting to the mean. Remember the Trail of Tears?
As for our little troll problem, it hasn’t escaped my notice that there is a pattern to the trolling: it comes out whenever billionaires and especially Musk are criticized. Now why might that be?
garydargan @ #19:
The thing here is that you’re using “productivity” in the sense of “achieving a desired outcome with the minimal expenditure of resources”, whereas they’re using it in the sense of “marginal GDP per hour worked”. The key thing to realise here is that from this point of view, cost and value are literally the same thing.
In that latter sense, the expensive consultant who doesn’t actually get anything useful done is unquestionably “more productive”, by definition, simply because they charge more, and hence add more to GDP. Someone who charges $1000 dollars for an hour’s notional work is 10 times “more productive” than someone who charges $100 dollars, regardless of whether the desired outcome is achieved or not. In fact, it’s probably better if the desired outcome isn’t achieved, because then they can continue charging $1000/hr indefinitely, increasing GDP (and hence productivity) all the while.
This sort of thinking is everywhere, and it’s why our society is fucked. Well, it’s one of the reasons…
“As for our little troll problem, it hasn’t escaped my notice that there is a pattern to the trolling: it comes out whenever billionaires and especially Musk are criticized. Now why might that be?”
It is because you are, in the vernacular, a fuckwit.
@raven, 45:
Genocide was always the plan and it was blatantly obvious by anyone with a functioning brain. Israeli army reduced the whole region into rubble. I don’t remember the current stats but the vast majority of the residential buildings in Gaza are either fully or partially destroyed. There are no infrastructures left. The whole place is reduced to rubble.
I am pretty sure B. Genocideyahu’s plan was something like this: Reduce Gaza to rubble and take over the security of the region and then wait for US elections. Plan A: In case of Trump victory, they would just go ahead, finish the genocide, annex the whole thing, bribe Trump and give him “permits” to build shitty hotels their to make money, a complete victory for him and then focus West bank. Plan B: In case of Kamala victory, he would have simply waited; he would have kept the Israeli forces there, to be in “charge of security and ensure the safety of Israelis (wink wink)”. He would have waited 4-8 years until the next Republican victory and then back to Plan A.
I predict in a year or two, the focus will shift back to West bank and they will try to implement the exact same plan in West bank. Another Republican victory in 2028 will basically mean a full genocide of Palestinian people. There will not be any resistance from US or Israeli public who are by now dominated by majority fascist and racist people. The will for genocide is the dominant political force in Israeli and its implementation simply requires US cooperation and persuasion of a few Arab countries.
Here, an Israeli fascist openly talking about annexing Gaza and West bank because “ancestral homeland” and “they are all terrorists who want to kill us all!” https://pulseofisrael.com/2025/02/04/sovereignty-shift-dc/
And the majority of Israelis support these kinds of fascist ideas.
@11. shermanj : “O.K. so the illegal immigrant sociopathic elongated muskrat is disembowelling this country. When will somebody disembowel him? Or, at the least send him back to bigoted south africa with no access to his criminal wealth?”
Hey! What has South Africa done to deserve that? Of course, South Africa has gotten much better since and is no longer an Aparthied state.
I wonder if Musk is planning to change that too or merely push an adapted form of apartheid (anti-DEI reversing diversity and promoting only one race of people and, of course, encouraging exclusion & inequity too) on his adopted nation – the one where he’s a really bad hombre illegal immgrant actually massively hurting the country. .
I wonder if civil court cases can affect Musk if enough of them occur?
John Morales@16,
You seem to have forgotten Musk did his best to back out of buying Twitter.
I see others have already made the point I made @61. What I’m not seeing is any sign of john Morales responding to or acknowledging the point. I’ve never said, or thought, Musk was stupid – but he did his best not to buy the asset which (here I agree with John) has been key to his rise to power.
KG, you wrote “You seem to have forgotten Musk did his best to back out of buying Twitter.”
I seem to, do I?
Nope.
And also, what chrislawson wrote @42.
Different people, different opinions.
Point being, this is being said in hindsight.
Sure. Maybe it was a fuck-up. And a fix-up.
(You quite sure he didn’t spend $44B just on a whimsy gone wrong?)
“What I’m not seeing is any sign of john Morales responding to or acknowledging the point.”
Nelson was also famous for the telescope thingy. Just sayin’.
“… but he did his best not to buy the asset …”
And so, he failed. Upwards.
Now, he’s worth more, he’s got regulatory capture (which I actually predicted, on this site), and so on.
(So, whence this OP? The piccie of him doing his thing?)
—
KG, seriously!
“What I’m not seeing is any sign of john Morales responding to or acknowledging the point.”
It is a stupid and ignorant (and, more importantly, an incorrect point.
I fully acknowledge it, as a perception. I personally don’t know his mind.
I have not forgotten, go back and check all those threads. I was there.
So, go on. Dispute me.
(I used to respect you)
Go on, go for it, KG.
Trump (and even more so, J.D. Vance) should watch their backs. Musk cannot legally become POTUS – but then he cannot legally seize control of the US Treasury Department payments system.
“Trump (and even more so, J.D. Vance) should watch their backs.”
Astounding acumen!
(Stabby stabby not the go; back-watching is)
“Musk cannot legally become POTUS – but then he cannot legally seize control of the US Treasury Department payments system.”
Sure.
Musk (just the last name) can not (cannot) do certain stuff, yet he has done stuff.
See the OP for details.
So, whatever he has done is obviously not something he can not (cannot) do.
By virtue of having been done, I mean.
(Must be those Éminences grises, right? The Deep state stuff)
John Morales@66,
I just put “Musk tries to back out of buying Twitter” into a search engine. Multiple responses confirming that he did, of which the top was this: Elon Musk files to back out of deal to buy Twitter.
So go on, produce the evidence that he did not do so.
I used to have some respect for you, intensely irritating as you often were. But you are now simply obsessed with your own inflated opinion of yourself, with which the vast majority of your comments are concerned.
“So go on, produce the evidence that he did not do so.”
Heh. No, I grant he did so.
(Bad luck for all of us that he failed bigly (Trump’s rendering of “big league”) im so doing)
—
Still. I must not have fun with you; I promised.
You seem to have overlooked the word “legally” in my #67. No-one can legally go into a bank branch, point a gun at the cashier, and demand that their sack be filled with money. Yet bank robberies still occur.
“But you are now simply obsessed with your own inflated opinion of yourself”
That is your perception, which is yours.
(I have a rep!)
“You seem to have overlooked the word “legally” in my #67. ”
Oh, dear! Woe is me!
I’m seriously concerned about you, John. The rate at which you’re contradicting yourself suggests some kind of cognitive malfunction. Take a break.
The USA has been subjected to a fascist coup. Faster, I think, than anyone predicted. Resistance by any means possible is urgent.
[sorry, too early to be so rude]
I should not have been so dismissive and sarcastic.
For old times’ sake, if nothing else.
—
“You seem to have overlooked the word “legally” in my #67.”
You seem to have overlooked that what he has done, he has done.
Truly, what you quoted @71 is basically a tautology.
Here:
—
Sure. Cognitively malfunctioning, that’s what I’m doing.
(Seemingly. Suggested. Something like that)
Righto.
Name one of this alleged contradictions. Quote me.
(At this rate, there must be quite the stash of them, nay?)
—
Not that I’m suggesting you are projecting your own dotage upon me.
BTW, someone who claims to be would surely engage me, no?
(O hypocrisy!)
[I wait]
The imperative mood.
No.
[Your serious concern is notable, KG, no less than what you do about such]
Looking at Trump’s new Gaza plans, I wonder what all the “Genocide Joe” proponents are now saying about it.
O right, they never gave a single shit about even a single Palestinian life, it was always just about finding any excuse to throw your vote away. They will either act as if they never appropriated the Palestinian cause or they’ll find a way to blame the Democratic Party for it anyway.
@75. KG :
Truth. Quoted for and seconded by me.
The reality we share, the events we’re witnessing and being affected by planet~wide are stressing out a lot of people and a lot of us I suspect are losing sleep and struggling with it. I sure am for one.
I would urge people particularly those who are progressive and want to make things better be kind to each other. Do the best to do that please. Seems to me there’s far more than enough cruelty in the world already. If w eare going to err let it be on the side of showing mor ecompassion to others not less.
@AugustusVerger:
That is not correct though. A lot of the Arab-American’s voted for the Orangilini. I believe it was a combination of stupidity and sexism rather than not caring about Palestinians.
@ ^ lotharloo : They – well many Arab-Americans – wanted to punish Biden for supporting Israel in Gaza and beig complicit in a genocide which, ok, fair enough, but then they forgot or wilfully refused to compare Kamala with the only alternative – Trump – and recognise that Trump would be worse. How could Trump be worse?! They’d say or think. Well, now, as of earlier today, if not before, they’re starting to find out and regret it. I didn’t expect to be proven right on this quite so quickly or nastily and it gives me no pleasure at all to say told ya so but some people did try to warn them..Oh and, yeah, the people who talked about Trump not starting wars and now Trump threatens to go to war with Iran which he came very close to doing last term. Think we’ll dodge that metaphorical catastrophic bullet this time around? With Trump seeing eye to eye with and 100% behind Netanyahu?
If Trump had said he was going to ethnically cleanse Gaza pre-election, if Trump had said before the election what his plans have been revealed as today, I wonder how many Arab-Americans would’ve voted for him or deliberately stayed home and refused to vote for Kamala becoz “Jen-o-side”
JoeBibi? (Who was supported and funded by Biden after October 7th which is unsurprising given political realities exhibits A, B & C, Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush & Jeremy Corbyn. Oh and the whole historic old time & end times Israel alliance history, plus evangelical and religious supporters and their lobbies, etc..)Look what I stumbled upon
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2015/12/15/elon-musk-is-a-terrible-human-being/
Actually, Gaza was never Jewish or Israeli.
It was the home of the Philistines.
The ancient Jews fought many wars with the Philistines but never managed to conquer them.
It was also under Roman control for 600 years.
Perhaps the Italians should put in their claim for their ancient province.
Gaza has been under the control of the Philistines, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and up until recently, the Egyptians.
None of these ancient claims should matter in the 21st century.
Maybe the Gaza should belong and be ruled by…the people that actually live there now rather than the descendants of people who have been dead for hundreds and thousands of years.
Colbert interview Why Do We Need USAID? Stephen Talks To Samantha Power, Fmr. USAID Administrator 10 mins long.
@ raven : Gaza is coastal and flat and seas are rising and temperatures rising too making many places increasingly less and less habitable.
Ethically, you are spot on. People living in laad A shouldcontrol their owbn future and country. If country is even a good idea at all arbitrarily
Practically I fear that everyone should be preparing to abandon the whole area and that large parts nof our globe are soon going to become unliveable for some of increasingly most of the year and peopel overlook far tooeasily the implciations of the hockey stick curve and its conseqeucnes climate~& consequent-habitability~wise.
I don’t think there’s any winners from that. Or this long term. Short term wealthy and long term.. well, overwhelmingly grim to contemplate.
Colbert’s monologue tonight – Aussie time – here is worth seeing too (I mean when isn’t Colbert esp his monologues?) China Is Big Mad Over U.S. Tariffs | How Is Musk Allowed To Do This? | Egg Surcharge At Waffle House 11 mins long in total – the middle section which is the salient one here starts at the 3 minutes 1 second mark onwards. Oh and why does the last segment of this bring the name Kolnago to mind…
@ #88 : Clarity fix & expansion :
People living in lands A, b, c…z, etc.. should control their own futures and countries as collective asemblages of people. If the idea of “countries” is even a good idea at all given the thing of arbitrarily splitting the planet w eshare up into arbitrary factions with differnt flags and leaders who then whip poeple upand get peopel killed and treat peopel diuffernetly depending on which flag and leaders and place they happen to eb born into makes sense.
To paraphrase an old Isaac Asimov quote which Ithink sums it up bloody well – even if Asimov himself is problematic as Fuck and .. yeah, anyhow :
Source : Pretty sure originally in ‘I Asimov a Memoir’ (exact title?) which is on my bookshelf but can’t be fucked to find exact page number, publisger etc yet again right now so citing using web search :
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/556866
Which is a pity coz lead up to those lines was excellent too in my view.
@StevoR:
You are giving voters way too much credit. Trump is not a first time president. He has a record and it was completely pro Netanyahu. He used the word Palestinian as an insult. He was cheering the genocide every step of the way. Every Arab American who voted for Trump or 3rd party is a fucking moron. There is no benefit of the doubt.
Does Musk have Secret Service protection? Can we just shoot him? Isn’t that the American Way?
John Morales@76,
No, I’m not going to engage you further, because that just feeds the obsession which I think is at the root of your deterioration – which I’m far from being the only one to notice. I’m not making any sort of vow, but I have no intention of responding directly to any of your comments until further notice.
chigau@85,
Good find! You and PZ seem to have been almost the only contributors to that thread to see Musk for what he is (I was already a commenter here but made no appearance in that thread – IIRC I had very little knowledge and no particular opinion of him at that point). I wonder how many of the fanbois would retract their hero-worship at this point. Or would they insist Musk has transformed from angel to demon over the past decade?
I think it likely almost everyone is still underestimating the scope of Musk’s ambition. His control of the Starlink satellite fleet, together with the effective immunity from any legal process in the USA – unless Trump decides otherwise – come close to giving him independent power on a global scale. And with the data he has harvested from government systems, and the unknown code changes his minions have made, it may not be long before he is completely beyond Trump’s control, even if Trump were to turn on him.
[meta]
“No, I’m not going to engage you further, because that just feeds the obsession which I think is at the root of your deterioration – which I’m far from being the only one to notice.”
Whatever that unspecified obsession you ostensibly perceive may be.
Got it, O concerned one.
Conveniently, this way you don’t have to actually adduce any of my alleged self-contradictions, you know, the ones that seriously concern you. I shall never know what you imagined those to be, alas.
@95 KG:
I completely agree. He is a sick sick fucker with boundless ambitions. He could even have a demented ambition like conquering the entire world, being the first global dictator and also sending people to Mars and calling himself the ruler of Mars as well. Is it likely he has this ambition? Probably not but will I be surprised if he has it? Nope.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on what this situation reminds me of, and this finally did the trick:
Cue flashback to:
Mr. Morales, you are showing clear signs of dementia. You need medical help. Go, seek it out, please, for your own sake.
I have been staying away from this blog for years to avoid getting in a pissing match. But I just felt the need to find a group of people other than friends and family who are angry enough at the shit going one, not only the coup being carried out by Musk and his script kiddies.
I’m a little surprised at the lack of reaction on Panda’s Thumb. Science has never been under attack in the US like it is right now.
Anyway, nice to see Pharyngula is still here with all the regulars.
Hardly any left PaulBC.
But sure, we have newbies such as BB who are too slothy to venture remote diagnoses)
Ah well, can’t resist.
Um, do you imagine I wrote what you quoted there?
(One of us shows signs of dementia, for sure. But it ain’t me)
@ ^ Morales
Dude, their comment was perfectly clear whereas no one has a clue what the fuck you’re on about.
Also, regulars doesn’t mean fossils from 2009, hate to break it to you, it’s 2025 grampa.
You are not everyone.
Dude.
You can hardly be breaking something you are repeating, no?
(But sure, your hate is palpable. Can’t dispute that)
(PS of fucking course I know it’s a Star Trek quotation. Or, what you would call a ‘quote’)
I’m a fossil from 2005, actually.
But sure, I don’t qualify as a ‘regular’, in your estimation.
Silentbob.
lotharloo@53–
I forget sometimes that sarcasm doesn’t always carry over into text. When I said Musk wanted to save Free Speech, I hoped the capital letters were sufficient to convey my contempt for his definition of Free Speech (i.e. neo-Nazi hate speech should be protected, anything that might cost him money or influence should be suppressed). To make it clear, I agree with you that Musk insisting he is a champion of Free Speech is one of the most deranged self-delusions in recent history.
As for the bots, that whole issue came up when Musk realised the courts were not going to waive his promissary statement just because he no longer wanted to keep that promise. The bots were part of his argument that Twitter had inflated its value. This is quite possibly true, but it turns out that arbitrary post-hoc conditions do not make a compelling legal argument for breaking a contract.
Welcome back @PaulBC
I was wondering why you hadn’t posted here in a while.
Hemidactylus@108 I have some hobbies keeping me busy like 3D printing and Cricut die cutting, mostly of tessellations. I am not sure I am really “back”. I may lurk for a while. I post to Panda’s Thumb every now and them, where the discussion is less contentious and even the trolls are polite.