Monday, October 21, 2024

Elon Musk "public enemy number 2"? Makes perfect sense to me

 

It’s bad enough that we’ve heard from this man way too much, using X to spread conspiracy theories like an infectious virus, but do we have to see him too:

 



Elon Musk has been declared by the German news magazine Der Spiegel as “public enemy number 2” behind you know who, and of course he uses that for one of his cheap PR stunts, declaring that he is “beefing up” security, which of course only Fox News takes seriously. 

Donald Trump, however, thinks he is “the second coming” like some self-appointed spokespeople for “God” like to say he is, so he returns to the desert locales in 100+ degree heat, feeling god-like immunity while his ignorant supporters sweat to his lies, some of them suffering from heat stroke or left high and dry without the promised bus rides, too “excited” to remember to bring something to hydrate themselves. 

But where were the Trump-branded 6-ounce water bottles selling for $20 each? Oh, yeah, he tried that before…

 


…another one of his failed “products,” like “Trump Steaks,” “Trump Vodka” and egad—“Trump Fragrances,” all which of course quickly failed due to poor sales, the latter which he probably could have used at his recent Detroit rally with his inability to control his gastric muscles.

While Democratic-supporting Mark Cuban, here speaking at the 23:20 mark in this video, does his best not to inflame Musk’s juvenile anger…

 



…he admits that Musk doesn’t live in the “real world,” which I suppose means one where he exists like a Prince Prospero on the hill, who like Trump’s other billionaire dark money supporters, harangues “common people” like they are complete idiots who will believe anything they are told by an “elite” who deigns to even acknowledge their existence, which unfortunately most of them are (idiots).

Meanwhile, Musk is arousing suspicion with his million-dollar payouts to “lucky winners” of those who sign his America PAC "petition in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.” Those who accuse him of running afoul of election laws (and let’s face it, he is, because this is a barefaced effort to get others to register Republican and “win”), are merely trying to deprive him of his “freedom of speech” rights—which the Supreme Court’s anti-democracy Citizens United ruling allows billionaires and corporations to have more “say” than any 10,000 voters—and that he is protecting “democracy” against the “radical left.” You know, people like this...

       


                                                                                   

...and this  kind of person that Musk thinks is “defending” democracy, describing the January 6  insurrection as a “party”--albeit on a sinking ship--and his personal views of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:


 


By the way, that is a Georgia Republican election official.

On Reddit 1  there are some people who are not impressed with Musk, asserting that he is more successful at using and conning people into giving him money for his “services” rather than actually creating anything, much like Trump himself; Musk is just “better” at it:

You couldn’t be more spot on. People think he re-invented electric cars and space flights. He basically bought and stole the tech from people who actually came up with it.

Musk had been exposing himself since before he bought twitter, case in point his calling a British diver, who accused his offer of “help” in a cave rescue as a useless publicity stunt, a “pedo man,”

There were a lot of ways he could have responded, he could have built (paid people to build) a cave exploring submarine and attempted to demonstrate that it could be useful for cave rescue, he could have just said hey I was only trying to help and washed his hands of the situation, he could have said all right then well what assistance could I provide that you do think would be helpful, but no he lashed out and just made up allegations, giving me the impression that he's not the genius he claims to be but rather an extremely rich person making claims that sound great but are never backed up, and who cannot handle the slightest bit of criticism.

Musk, as noted in this Vanity Fair piece 2, has been engaging in despicable lies and conspiracies for a long time, such as in regard to COVID-19. This tweet exposed his “genius,” based on China's false claims:

 


After Musk reopened a Fremont, California Tesla plant in 2020 in violation of county COVID restrictions, a “deal” was reached in which Tesla agreed to certain conditions. But according to Business Insider

… those protocols, which include wearing a face mask, cleaning shared tools, and maintaining social distance, have been impossible to adhere to while doing their work and that supervisors have often been lax about enforcing them.

The result was, according the Washington Post, 450 workers were known to have contracted COVID in just a few months—and this after Tesla's vice president of environment, health, and safety claimed that there were “zero” COVID cases at the plant. When contradicted, the Tesla executive did as Musk wanted her to do, claiming that these infections occurred “outside the facility and primarily from family members or housemates.”

In this New Yorker article 3 we discover how Musk interfered in U.S. military support for Ukraine with his “friendship” with Vladimir Putin.

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’”  

SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me,  recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

It was feared that if Musk would for whatever reason become “upset,” he would cut-off Internet connectivity to “his” Starlink system after Russia conducted cyberattacks on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure,  and officials supporting Ukraine were afraid of doing anything to upset the mercurial character. But worse was that

at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.”

But Musk went further, giving Russian forces de facto support on the battlefield despite his claims of "misgivings" about Starlink being used for military purposes:

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.”

We are told that if Trump is elected again, this man will become the head of a “government efficiency committee.” What exactly does that mean? Taking a meat cleaver to government jobs accused of being held by workers who run "socialist" programs? Shut down executive branch departments he doesn’t like, such as the Department of Education or Transportation, Health and Humans Services, the CDC, FDA, EPA, FCC, EEOC—heck maybe even the SEC, which fined him and forced him to vacate the title of Chairman of the Board at Tesla for securities fraud in tweets regarding the sale of Tesla stock. 

Why give an emotionally immature and unstable man with so many axes to grind and petty personal squabbles so much power? Hell, he's such a "smart" guy he might even become Trump's top "adviser" on foreign, military and national security affairs. Put him in charge of migrant concentration camps.

Just another reason to send Trump packing on election day.

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