This is all so alarming. These things they’re working so hard on have nothing to do with quality of life or being human on this planet. And they’re highly polluting. Thank you, Heather, for being willing to wade into this muck
Totalitarianism is not a decent way to live for most of the people it controls. The Brave New World will lack a reason to live for most. These people are insane and delusional. The Earth is the only mother we will ever know. When they leave, they will go to a dead planet, because they have killed ours.
Today, May 8, the 80th anniversary of V-E Day is a day to reflect on why we fought -- together with our allies in Europe, both in the West and the East --- to borrow a phrase from Steven Spielberg's 'Band of Brothers.'
Totalitarianism arrived before the DNA double-stranded helix was discovered, before computers and the internet were invented, before anyone thought seriously of sending a rocket into space, much less colonizing Mars. Even without sophisticated technology, Nazi systems of control, intimidation, informing and blind obedience were terrifying. In occupied Paris, four cross-tabulating systems for identifying Jews by name, address, immigration status and occupation were created. In July 1942, Adolf Eichmann ordered the police to round up about 23,000 Jews in Paris and the north. 13,000 were bused to an outdoor stadium called the Vel' d-Hiv, kept there for 3 days without food, water or toilets, with some committing suicide by throwing themselves off the topmost bleacher. Families were sent to internment camps outside Paris, like Drancy, where parents were separated from their children. Adults were deported 'to the East' with the Prime Minister of Vichy ordering the children to follow weeks afterward -- alone, the delay caused by the need to complete the building of a fourth incinerator at Auschwitz.
About 75,000 French Jews, including 11,000 children, were eventually deported, with less than 2,000 (all adults) returning. While thousands of French collaborated with the Nazis in Vichy and the north, thousands more risked their own lives to hide their neighbors. Who lived and died was determined less by technology, and more by courage and love --- or by fear and loathing. Which people chose then, as well as which we choose now, is up to us, not to them.
Trump and Musk's " systems of control, intimidation, informing and blind obedience" are "terrifying." Just substitute "nazi" with Trump and the situations and outcomes will be the same. That's where we're headed soon, not Mars.
“Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted this weekend to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.
A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica decided to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that will grant them the authority to pass city ordinances.
The ballot, which also named a senior SpaceX representative as its mayor with 100% of the early vote, was never really in doubt.”
Elon thinks he can understand artificial intelligence without understanding natural intelligence, aka the ability to use your mind to get things done, and while totally ignoring wisdom, aka knowing what needs to be done by knowing the difference between right and wrong. Metaphorically speaking, he’s firing off a Space-X rocket without a guidance system.
His hubris is never ending. He has gotten this far by selling snake oil and the government goons who are giving away the world to him are so freaking stupid they believe he’s a genius. Especially the really “stable genius” in the White House. The idiocy is endless.
The man is a drug addict, and his monomania about Mars and the other things you so wisely point out are, I think, not unrelated to his drug use. I wish that his drug use were cited more often when writing about him in th MSM and places like this.
James. an excellent observation. No understanding for the necessity of wisdom and the difference between right and wrong. After reading this letter, I am once again glad to be in my 80s with no direct descendants.
This is the neofascist tech billionaires' wet dream. Look up "Network State". They been working at it for years already. The idea is to install "Zones", as they are called in China, places inside an existing state but where the state has no power, and that are governed in a fascist way by the wealthiest businessmen. Goal? Maximum profit for those wealthiest people, of course. Although for the most ideological among them, it's all about "freedom". As the inventors of neoliberalism already said (and Peter Thiel, who bankrolls venture capitalist JD Vance's career), for them capitalism and democracy are not compatible. The wealthiest need to be able to freely do whatever they want to be able to invent the next thing that will save humanity, they believe. And democratic elections, so governments run by the "mediocre" and "parasites" of society will always want to limit their freedom...
For more info, see Quinn Slobodian's outstanding "Crack-up Capitalism".
This replacement of modern nation state government structures by global CEOs carve ups of geographical territories for private fiefdoms with their own private legal systems is already well under way in the UK. A return to the Renaissance era City State model. Look up European Powell on substack for details.
The tech broligarchs want to create unregulated city-state entities—"free cities" (quite the Orwellian naming choice). Starbase is likely meant to become one such mini-principality sooner rather than later. Greg Abbott and his fellow Texas dictators have been ushering these mega-wealthy "libertarian" types to take over the state, hyping the ugly, misogynistic, theocratic libertarianism that's held an immovable deathgrip on all statewide levers of power for decades. I recommend reading this article (https://www.texasobserver.org/the-crypto-racket/), which examines the trend.
I don't think so. Nothing indicates that today's GOP neofascists want a genocide against the American people, and that is and remains a defining characteristic of Nazism. Not all forms of fascism are Nazism.
Putin's neofascism, or Xi's neofascism, for instance, are fascism, not Nazism.
It's important to make this distinction because depending on what danger we're facing, we need different strategies to fight back and be able to defeat them.
Neofascism often allows more than one political party, for instance. But it undermines the non-fascist party(s) entirely so that in real life, they have no chance of winning elections. If we don't know that, we may think that it's "not that bad yet" as long as there is still a Democratic Party and elections. Russia and Hungary have elections and therefore opposition parties too. But the fascist party that governs made it entirely impossible for them to truly raise money, and do all the other things that an opposition party needs to do to win elections.
Today, the neofascist GOP is actively trying to destroy the DNC's fundraising website. If they'd ever succeed in doing that, the DNC would still exist, but it wouldn't be able to compete in elections (especially knowing that, contrary to Trump, Kamala Harris and Democrats in general rely heavily on individual, small donations).
"I don't think so. Nothing indicates that today's GOP neofascists want a genocide against the American people, and that is and remains a defining characteristic of Nazism". Please explain to me why major cuts to Medicaid are not a subtle form of genocide.
You're right. Our home-grown "neo"-fascists are the same sadistic and greedy individuals as their European predecessors. We witnessed this with trump V.1. when hundreds of thousands died following Dear Leader's Covid recommendations. Given their de-funding of USAID and other humanitarian programs, their murderous intent extends across the globe. There can be no doubt they intend and welcome the millions of deaths that will result from the abrupt disruption/termination of food and medical supplies. Let there be no mistake: These fascists intend to turn the blue/green planet into a wasteland; if thousands of species go extinct and billions of us expire, that's the price the fascists are more than willing to pay. So, what do you call those who have the intent and the motivation to murder millions?
A genocide is never defined by its impact and always by its intention. If you read neofascist literature, they don't want to privatize all public services IN ORDER TO kill as many poor people as possible. They believe that that's a sad but unavoidable side effect. The Holocaust, which defines Nazism, was based on an ideology that believed that as long as there was still one Jew alive in the German empire, there would be a vital threat to Arian culture as a whole, so they HAD to kill them all.
There is clearly a lot of disdain for "basement dwellers" among today's neofascist Republicans, but as far as I can see, no one is arguing that we SHOULD kill entire demographics just to be able to survive as a culture... . As even Laura Loomer is already arguing instead, many Trump voters are on Medicaid and vitally need it, so she is fighting FOR keeping Medicaid rather than slashing it.
It is totalitarianism, and it is always evil, no matter if it is governed from the left (Communist) or right (Fascist). Their only goal is to retain ultimate power and keep the public under their thumb.
Communism is an ECONOMIC theory, not a political one. The fact that it's mostly totalitarian regimes who decided to use that name to justify what they did to their own citizens doesn't make their claim true...
It's Come to This - "Today, May 8, the 80th anniversary of V-E Day is a day to reflect on why we fought..."
The partying had begun in London and across Britain on the evening of the 7th. More organized celebrations were to follow on the two Public Holidays of the 8th and 9th. Yet many families did not feel like celebrating, Vi Bottomley was a twenty-four-year-old war widow in Liverpool:
I have a friend whose mother was a child during that time, and escaped the Germans with her extended family group hiding in the French countryside. The stories she told my friend of that time were of stealing lilacs, raiding chicken coops, and "playing" hide and seek. It was only as her dementia took command that my friend heard the realities of how she had lived.
Every spring, I steal a bouquet of lilacs for Monique.
When i was growing up in the 1960s, we always had a wall calendar given by the heating oil company, and my dad (who was 15 in 1945 but had brothers who served) would point out VE and VJ Day that was highlighted on the calendar each May and August, explaining what they were.
Also, in Paris, there is a somber memorial to the Jews that were taken from France. My grandson and I happened upon it during a visit 3 years ago. That was a dark period in the City of Light.
Musk having our data seems to me to be more dangerous than if China got its hands on our data. The tech bros are batsh*t crazy. Their ideas that no rules should apply to them or their ventures into space is insane! When there are no rules, people die. These tech bros, whose social and relational skills are minimal, are a recipe for disaster for a trip into space where no rules should apply.
This craziness should not be exported to another planet. This whole go to Mars business sounds like a combination of Lord of the Flies and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They pile so many micro doses of drugs on top of each other they live in an alternate reality where they are the savior and everyone else is their robot.
Insane and delusional is putting it mildly Daniel. Investing “Mars money” into Earth’s climate future would yield faster, broader, and more inclusive returns. But climate change is not a tech problem, it’s a political and economic one. We already have the solutions to decarbonize. What’s lacking is large-scale commitment. Mars is the ultimate mid-life crisis for these dumb f*cks - ego rockets to nowhere.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves here, insane and delusional thinking is exactly the correct description, why, because when our sun burns out guess what planet will be gone, earth, mars, and all the others in our solar system.
Musk is 55 years old and if he's lucky he has maybe another 40 years left and he's not going anywhere, let alone to Mars. He is after control of the planets communications systems and data. Secondly, all launching of space craft and satellites, another period.
Bottom line, he wants control of the human race.
I have a solution, put him on a rocket with all his demon sperm and launch him to deep space with no orbital return, throw Trump and Stephen Miller on there too.
These people prove a point that narcissism is a very serious problem in the human race.
Bill, are you proposing a kind of Noah's ark but for animals with human bodies?
If that the case we'll need quite a few of those. Maybe between the "very stable genius" and the white trash supremacist, can find a solution while we clean up the mess.
Kazz, don't forget we need to rush to start colonizing Mars, only 5 billions years left. It's good we have the scumbag president and Musk working hard at it now.
Don, now you do understand the need to rush to get to Mars. We are doing such a good job that I'm sorry we didn't get Musk's email asking to name 5 thing we did in our jobs last week.
Add to the above - exceedingly dangerous: the irresponsibly short time line, the lack of regulation, security clearance, ignoring established laws and scientific procedures, etc. The whole world should unite to stop the oligarchs who could destroy us and our planet in our lifetime.
I couldn’t agree more. There are so many problems that need attention here in this world and on our planet and that should be priority one, fuck mars. Musk’s agenda is power over humanity and money.
A quick internet search of the atmosphere of Mars, seems to make colonization an insane idea: low oxygen levels, thin atmosphere, and high carbon dioxide levels in that atmosphere. Also pretty darn cold.
I saw Musk interviewed on the Colbert Show about 10 years ago, when he didn't seem so insane. Elon was hell bent on going to Mars back then too. Then he did say something really crazy, that he wanted to set off an atomic bomb explosion on Mars to create a nuclear winter and manipulate some kind of atmosphere. The guy is basically an actual Bond villain.
It IS a totally insane idea. Everything that makes life on Earth possible is missing on Mars. The notion of diverting billions of dollars worth of non-renewable resources to send a handful of humans on a one-way trip to Mars is, without question, the stupidest idea in the history of human existence. Robots are perfect for the job of exploring the Red Planet.
Everything that is going on right now is wrong and crazy. I come from humble roots. We are sitting here in northern Minnesota, with two sons, who graduated from college who feel defeated about ever having the "American Dream" of being a home owner. School loans, extremely high prices for rent, high costs of everything else ... I know that part of their troubles are based on timing. If only they had began their live's journeys before prices of homes doubled. But when I read, day after day, of all the millions and billions being spent for ... colonization on Mars? ..... and our youth is desperate and no longer believing we live in a democracy ... it is simply maddening to me.
I could not agree more. This next week we are going to our grandson's graduation from Colorado State in mathematics. He is totally depressed and defeated. What's the point? The world is going to hell in a hand basket is how he feels. We can't feed our school children lunch, but we can play golf and host a birthday parade, pollute our water and skies - costing us, the taxpayers, millions.
Try being young on an Indian Reservation with 75% unemployment and no route to college or even safe drinking water. Or being a young Black for whom the American dream or meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion are fiction. We who are white and privileged are now coming face to face with all that is wrong and crazy. We have to stand up by the millions. Either that or crash and burn like the airplanes without any FAA oversight.
I was in HS when I started joining social and political marches.
Now I cannot hear, and have aches everywhere, but I know I must put up a good fight or shut up. Things were not great back in the "good old days". Our younger generations need to and must get motivated. Nothing ever gets handed to you.
My kids are working so hard to support their kids and cannot seem to find the time but I keep trying to engage them to be involved.
All this breaks my heart. People in their 30's (the generation that cannot afford to buy a home) are also considering never having children. They conclude that they cannot afford it. How can they save up for a down payment when rent is equal to a house payment? Something needs to change in the near future.
Only men have these fever dreams of getting off planet...women are much more sane and actually love this beautiful planet and want to take care of her.
It's not going to happen. Read Kelly and Zac Weinersmith's 'A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?'. It's a blast. Musk and those who go with him will end up like Laika, the first dog in space.
Best case scenario: something along the lines of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, except filled this time with billionaires and celebrities. Bon voyage!
It might survive largely because of its orbital distance from the Sun, but it will definitely get warmer for all those little Musk progeny that he's assuming will also still be living there when it happens. He may even be assuming that the additional warmth will change the climate for the better, much as some people wrongly believe that climate change here will have beneficial effects.
Mars also doesn't have the active magnetic core to act as a shield against solar radiation. Exposure to radiation is a problem for astronauts, too. How will he replicate anything similar on Mars or will everything just be underground? All the probes and rovers we've sent are mechanical, not human flesh and blood with psychological needs like emotional connections. If we don't solve our political power struggle stuff here on earth, we'll just continue those on Mars and elsewhere. Rumpy wants to make America first. What about putting Earth first? It's the only home we have and there is no planet B.
My daughter was involved in a project with NASA and MIT to help develop a process for creating glass material from moon rock, which is extremely difficult. It made me realize (duh) that you cannot bring building materials into space; you need to create structures with the materials native to the environment. We are many many many decades away from creating living environments on Mars or any other extraterrestrial location. This isn’t “Hello Tommorrow.” Why isn’t anyone telling him this?
And the Martian surface is worse than the moon's. The surface rocks on the red planet are full of peroxides that are highly reactive and would somehow need to be chemically reduced in smelting to make metals for building, etc. Once metal is made it would have to be coated to prevent rapid rusting/oxidization.
And then there are the high radiation levels at the surface, as others have mentioned. Colonies would have to be buried underground to reduce that health risk.
Mars will do fine. A customer gave me a book he'd written, years ago, called The Case For Mars. An ex-Lockheed Martin engineer, he was a lot like Musk in that he thought he was smarter than everyone else. His signed copy of his (probably self published) book stayed with me all these years.
It talked of all these imaginary resources Mars had, like accessible water, and ignored the difficulty of living without, while trying to create, oxygen. The elaborate confining shelters he designed would have worked fine on a dying Earth, so why Mars? He was not happy when I told him it was delusional.
Poem "Fire and Ice" Some say the world will end in fire, some day in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire, but if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.:
Perhaps they are thinking of Mars as the next Siberian gulag, and dissidents will be sent there to work in Martian mines. It will take billions of years for the sun to incinerate Earth, but in the meantime, mightn’t it be a handy dumping ground for undesirables to be rehabilitated through hard unpaid labor?
Carol, the cold problem will be solved by the progressive increment of volume of the sun that will increase Mars temperature to livable levels in about 4 billions years. You'll see.
Mars is completely unsuited to human life. There’s no water, it appears, and the thin air would not keep humans alive. There’s very little oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.
Craig, I would love it if Musk were on the first ship out to Mars. However, I think he is too much of a coward to go. He prefers ordering others about and telling us all how he would do it better. I suspect he wouldn't pass the drug test anyway.
I think that Musk, Thiel, Yarvin and other tech fools read way too much bad sci-fi as adolescents. They really believe their delusional of grandeur and superiority.
Ever seen a pic. of Yarvin? I swear that this is 'Revenge of Nerds LXVII: the ultimate retribution'. I suspect many of these megalomaniacs were bullied as kids or teens. The question that crosses my mind remains whether a singular focus on information technology and programming has narrowed the minds of some of these 'gurus' into thinking there is a single, optimal solution to the messy business of governance.
Craig, Musk believes that, as the sun will incinerate our plante Earth and humanity billions of years from now, we must colonize Mars. To that I say, why wait, Elon? Leave now, and bring your techie teens with you. Just leave our data.
The insanity and chaos continues and spread every day. This is a true battle for our existence as a Democratic society. Let's be clear...the regime's view of our future does not include "we the people", but only the few rich and powerful. If we don't stand up and say no to this insanity right now, American Democracy will be lost. It's our choice. Are you in?
Surely they don't think we'll willingly submit to this? I really don't want to give Yarvin's writing the time of day, but does he articulate some method for brushing off an enraged peasantry? Besides—apparently, given what RFK is doing—destroying public health so that we all die of preventable and treatable illnesses.
It's our fault, Kathleen, we libs, Dems, independents, and progressives.
We're still stuck in past ideas about democracy and our American republic. Naively, we think "we the people" can have a government with agencies and law serving "we the people."
We don't appreciate the Russian greater ideal -- that an entire country exists mainly instead to float a few of its oligarchs and related billionaires who are superior to mere people. They are superior because, as Timothy Snyder shows in "The Road to Unfreedom," they don't at all need pesky facts and evidence. They have instead a marvelous fable about superior whiteness -- with their variant religio-drama ever vigilant against all those gays, those not-in-the-home women, and so many people of color in all their multiplicity threatening to poison the superior Christo White homogeneity.
The orange guy in the White House. Superior. Above the law. His agent, apartheid Afrikaner Musk, in turn himself an agent for Putin, also above silly American law.
For their cause, their wealth, their fable, they can destroy the U.S. government.
Trouble is, Carolyn, that schools with testing as their chief marker all do very well categorizing, packaging, abstracting others -- but do abysmally using humanities to see others as individuals.
I beg to differ with you, Phil. Everyone single person in America, plus the world, was caught off guard to what the 1% and Musk were conjuring up until Project 2025 cane into full view. Kamala warned us. There is a ton of blame to go around but it doesn’t do any good to throw sticks at us. WE are THE PEOPLE who own the government! Not the other way around. We are fighting for all of our lives or haven’t you noticed?
In August, 2024 a meeting was held in the Southwest Harbor, ME Public Library about the dangers of Project 2025. -Lin was there and about 100 other concerned citizens. There were maybe 5 people under the age of 55 in attendance including the very able moderator. For over 90 minutes she told about how the Republican oligarchs were going to implement Project 2025. Unfortunately, most of what she told us has come to pass.
Note: This meeting was close to Leonard Leo's mansions that he bought with the blood money of the oligarchs who brought down Roe v. Wade and financed the myriad meetings held to develop Project 2025. As a reminder Leo's list of judges brought us Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey-Barrett that were forced through by McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate. Leonard Leo held fundraisers in his home in ME for Susan Collins in 2020 which raised millions for her reelection campaign.
The lying POS Trump told us he had nothing to do with Project 2025 and knew nothing about it. While this lie may not get 4 Pinocchios it is mostly true. Trump is clueless as to the EO's he is signing and has done nothing to stop Musk or any of the Project 2025 operatives.
Thanks for those details, Gary. Gloom and rage. Too little, too late - the horse was already bolting. And we'd known for years that when confronted with a misdeed he would immediately lie. Who was it he identified as one of his former wives, in a photo, having first declared he didn't know her? E Jean Carroll, I think. So now we have two madmen at large, one an egotistical fool, the other with technical ability and unlimited wealth at his disposal. Starve them: let no-one go to the parade, and don't watch it live.
Same thing happened in Ellsworth, ME in October of 2024. Some serious people organized a program to explain Project 2025 to anyone who was interested in learning about it. It was sponsored by the Hancock County Democrats. They even had very nice pamphlets printed that you could take with you with all the details about Project 2025. The speakers were very well informed. The program was held in a public building at 7 pm on a weekday evening. My husband & I and maybe 15 other people attended the excellent presentation!
How do you get people to learn about something that they'd rather not know about?
Maybe hold the meeting on a weekend, so the time doesn’t impinge as much on working folks? As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points out, survival takes precedence over higher order concerns…
That's not true, Marlene. There have been several significant warnings of the machinations of the billionaire class, not just in the US but across the world. Oliver Bullough has been shouting about this from the rooftops for years. There was the Panama Papers -
On the US specifically, Jane Mayer's 'Dark Money' probes the influence of money on US elections and Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America' traces the history of the plans of the 1% to control US democracy.
More recently, the Brennan Center has undertaken a survey to try and find out how these people manipulated the 2024 election -
The billionaire class bought and paid for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey-Barrett. ALL of the Supreme Court justices that voted to repeal Roe v Wade were raised Catholic.
And they all hate women and the poor. the Bible says absolutely nothing about abortion or conception that supports pro-life. Fuck the Patriarchy.
It's perhaps a measure of the level of economic chaos that Trump has engendered in only 100 days that Leo and Charles Koch are now suing the administration.
Wendell Berry was probably first to track the billionaires' predations, in 1977, in "The Unsettling of America." He was focused then on how the moneyed were buying in to U.S. research campuses -- turning what had been our public interests to their private domains.
In 2003 Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police" inventoried how the rich had bought in to all the standardized testing and corporate textbook packagers.
In 2005 Jennifer Washburn's "University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education" followed up on the predations Wendell Berry saw nearly 30 years earlier.
Minae Mizumura probed the withering of schools in "The Fall of Language in the Age of English" (English translation, Columbia U Press, 2016).
In 2020 Kurt Andersen published "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America." This made up for what he missed in his 2017 "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: a 500-year history." The earlier book covered how for long Americans entertained massive delusions. The latter book looked more at how elites from high finance organized their evils.
In 2022 Sheldon Whitehouse Chronicled the far-right takeover of federal courts in "The Scheme."
There are also many good books by scientists looking at mental health effects of our billionaires' predations.
I've been arguing for over 25 years now against the sequences of events too many are just seeing these days for the first time.
I knew a quarter century ago what the far right foundations were doing since the Powell memo set them up beginning with its issuance in 1971. I knew they started with the schools -- and more vitally I could see how those foundations voided school humanities and big-time instead installed testing's logic machineries.
The reason so many didn't see any of this sooner was that the testing did its job. All accepted it. All took for granted the way testing elevated the abstracted) logic of categories and linearity. None could see the damages the billionaire classes were long doing as they grew the wealth gap. Our humanities -- much, many -- saw it, but they were absent from the schools. People in our media never accessed them in school, so routinely ignored all the key novels, memoirs, biographies, histories, and essay collections that long and well documented what too many are only now waking up to.
Movies, too, Marlene. And songs. Were there. But were personal. Leviathan grew.
It may sound a little harsh, but the fact is that the lower IQ portion of the population will always be guided and driven by those with a higher IQ. Unfortunately, that "higher class" seem always divided into those whose main care and interest is "The People" and those whose main care and interest is "Themselves".
Currently, we are governed by "Themselves." And for those who would say "But trump has no brain!" - I agree. Cunning and sly, yes, but not an intellectual genius. His function in MAGA (which I can no longer dignify with the name "Republican Party") is the same as an amulet, or a sliver of the "True Cross" in medieval times - something that can be brandished to the faithful to confirm that all their dreams will come true. If trump is ever reduced to complete paralysis by a stroke, his body will be carried around and displayed in a velvet chair - and one of Musk's DOGE team will claim to have invented a machine that interprets all "His" wishes for the masses. Trump and the Electorate are not running this country - all the "boys in the back room" are. Cardinal Richelieu lives.
This is a brilliant observation, m'Lady. But I do agree with others who beg to differ as to the intelligence of the people in charge--those behind the scenes who manipulate the Felon with flattery and Big Macs. The fact that they are determined to Make the World Better For Mediocre (and Worse) White Men means that their common denominator in the smarts department is pretty friggin' low. And, as a lifelong educator who has spent 40 years teaching people with supposedly high IQs, I can safely say that it doesn't take a Mensa membership to be an effective and educated person. All it takes is attention, discipline, and a willingness to learn. Those are the three things most glaringly absent in this administration, because they all require people to put their penises back in their trousers and to leave their egos at the door. The absolutely worst students I have had have been the supposedly super smart ones who haven't a lick of sense or an ounce of energy: just lazy bumps on a log who think that their presence is enough. Oh: and I would say that at least 90% of those were blokes.
Well said, Linda. "...Mediocre (and Worse) White Men..." is the absolute key here. Mix it with the male-dominated White Christian Nationalists and you've got this great cocktail we're in right now.
Not sure, Lady E., that MAGA leaders or the billionaires have higher IQ.
They certainly do have the logic that testing delivers: abstracted rationality for categories and all the linear-only, linear-causal conceits. This lets them excel at packaging. But there's not an iota of the humanly decent or humanly attentive in any of them, as there isn't, either, in any of those tests.
I didn’t read Phil as being sarcastic. “We're still stuck in past ideas about democracy and our American republic. Naively, we think "we the people" can have a government with agencies and law serving "we the people."”
If we don’t continue ‘those past ideas’ where do we go, then. To Mars?
Marlene, I read the Heritage Foundation’s “drop” of the Mandate for Leadership (aka Project 2025) when it first came out. Thought it was an Onion spoof until I started going through it (the whole thing was/is available online & if you haven’t checked it out & all that’s affiliated via their site—such as online classes—it’s a real eyeopener/shocker….just have a barf-bag handy!🤮). I was appalled that it took SO LONG for the MSM to even mention it—I tried to engage my friends to take it seriously, but it wasn’t until lately that they even started paying attention…don’t know why it, after so many months, finally caught folks “by surprise”. Of course the foundation of this goes back to before Reagan was POTUS w/ the Powell Memo & Project 2025 is a more “curated” vision or “evolution”, with some heavy-hitting ($$$) backers. Here is info about said Memo: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
You fought a devastating civil war to determine the meaning of your Constitution and as an afterthought the meaning of freedom itself. Your country's prosecution of the Vietnam war led to a bitter examination of the meaning of patriotism. None of those issues were truly settled. Now you're facing an arguably more serious challenge on the meaning of American democracy, freedom, patriotism and the rule of law all wrapped up in one, thanks to Trump. If you get through this eventually you will have the opportunity to finally put these questions to bed. One thing you cannot do is just muddle through again.
Let's add more recent catastrophic events that show us that we are still a teenaged nation with lots to learn. We don't take ANY interest in the lessons of other nations. Just like teens, we think we know everything and our elders are just "old fashioned and out of date".
True. We didn't learn from the French that the Vietnamese were not going to accept a colonial power. But very recently we didn't learn from the Russians that Afghanistan wouldn't allow a foreign power to dominate them. So we replicated that 20 year mistake. Our ignorance is only exceeded by our arrogance.
And then Iraq. "We'll dump Hussein, install our guy, and the oil will pay for the whole adventure." We are still the same stupid teens. And remember that most teenagers go insane for a few years before they grow up - if they survive that long.
The fact that so many Americans still fly a Confederate battle flag tells us we never resolved that conflict. That flag should have been treated like a Nazi swastika. Union troops should have never left the South. The KKK should have been eradicated. Arrested and jailed for life. Millions of African Americans should have been given or allowed to keep the 40 acres and a mule they were promised. And there should have been Federal troops in place to make sure they could vote.
Of course, even after 20 years of Northern occupation, the Southern Planters - elite bigots and haters - would continue to fight for the "Cause". Same, same.
There is an American pattern here. We actually think we can march into a region, use our superior weaponry to bring a people to their knees and then walk away saying "Problem solved". The truth is if you are going to conquer a country, you need to stay and run it. Very messy. Maybe we should just think a little more before we make war.
Is there really much difference between Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Southern United States? Did we change their cultures? What if we had let the South go? Millions of former slaves would have migrated North. The Plantation Slavers would have had to figure out how to grow cotton without them. The North would have benefited from the new residents - we KNOW that immigrants work hard, pay taxes and commit much less crime. Hmm. Ironies abound.
And at least we wouldn't have the American Taliban running our government of the North right now! Isn't that really who has aligned with the Tech Oligarchs and a Real Estate Con Artist?
What an UnHoly Alliance. The Triumvirate of Terror and Bad Taste. The TTT. Trump/Tech/Taliban.
Vietnam was possibly the worst example of US exceptionalism in foreign policy. As Daniel Ellsberg is said to have told a government official: "We weren't on the wrong side, We were the wrong side."
Yet it's impacts are still felt by some in the US today.
Yuval Noah Harari's latest offering, Nexus, provides a guide to understanding the potential of what Heather has laid out in this letter.
The data that citizens freely provided for the services they need, can, in the wrong hands be weaponised against them. Think the Chinese social credit score... When all of this data is connected without oversight, and using AI, the people running it will have power like never before.
Be patient, please, Richard. Especially in opening pages.
He spends a lot of time explaining his two main labels, "inevitability" and "eternity." The former: we can take things for granted. The latter: we can discard facts, evidence, agencies, law -- because we're forever in a poisonous spectacle of "others" ever threatening pure, innocent us.
Philosophy is great to understand but change comes with taking control of the narrative. When Biden sends a plane with “illegals” (their words) to places like Columbia no one takes notice. When Trump does it, all over the media.
Sandra, I try in my world. The people that I try to reach firmly believe that DOGE is cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. I have shared HCR's Facebook post of this letter before wandering over here to engage with all the Substack LFAA readers and asked questions specific to the FFA, NOAH, and SSA. If I can, I'll report back on what they tell me.
It’s impossible to reach confirmed MAGA. Only actual bad events, like a tanking economy, might reach some. The rest believe it’s a “temporary reset” before promised prosperity.
I hear you! Sometimes I think talking about the programs our county already had in place is helpful. We need short list about what we are doing right. (dems) and what we could do better.
Reading these quotes from Musk unveils a mind that has gone off the rails. When I ask why that is the case, I have to wonder what he is trying to gain. It can't be that he wants more money. For other people, getting rid of regulations that hamper business growth puts more money in the owerns' pockets. Musk doesn't need more money. He might want to get people to Mars to show he can do it.
But I am seeing, instead, a person who has no goals that make sense at all to a well functioning human. He is flailing because he has too much. And because he has too much, he has no restraints. Then it comes to me that money is not only the root of all evil but is a poison. Having too much of something can be lethal. Those we would consider to belong to the monied class are unmoored from what it looks like to be healthy and to care for the well-being of our neighbors. Musk embodies that malady.
Melinda, it has taken me several decades of nonscientific research to come to a conclusion: People who are self-absorbed have a high probability of becoming insane as they age. This is not dementia, but a different kind of insanity.
I have known examples, both personally and from a distance, who confirm my postulate. People who are focused on their own needs and wants, their own ideas and goals, without taking a break to consider or serve others, eventually lose touch with reality. For some, their insanity is relatively harmless and they become eccentric, weird, incapable of relating to other people, thus, isolated.
Others' insanity makes them sociopathic. They have lost all semblance of empathy or compassion. They are incapable of grasping how their self-serving actions could harm others or why that even matters.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have both led lives of self-absorption. They are both insane and fall into the latter, sociopathic category.
This sounds like a dream-conspiracy unfolding in a limited series made-for-small screen TV. A prequel or premiere of yet to come dystopian screen play as it becomes reality and morphs into regular news broadcasting by season two. Why do I feel we are living Hunger Games meeting The Apprentice?
"Alarming" is putting it mildly! This has been one of the most horrifying articles I've ever read from Dr. Heather. Consider also that she has distilled her many hours of researching this topic into this article and we're probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg of the Musk-Starlink-Mars takeover of our country's resources, including his data mining efforts.
Kathleen, I totally agree. If this planet is destroyed, it will happen because of the actions of a handful of self-absorbed A-holes intent on gutting every tiny sliver of usable materials for their own profit long before the sun goes supernova.
I too had read about Trump pushing Starlink on countries to lower their tariffs. Super poor countries like Vietnam sign up hoping that they can get a reduction in economies that only export because their population cannot afford to buy imported goods.
Also, about the gathering of data, I attended a talk by a tech security expert who told us that it was dangerous to consolidate all information in one place, because it makes any hack that much more devastating. So, now my daughter is saying that an advantage of Germany not having modernized their medical system to put things online is that our data cannot be hacked. That is starting to seem like a benefit even though it can seem annoying to some.
Substacker Zev Shalev has been doing a series on the Tech Bros collaborative damages to our nation, and their bigger goals with it in his series The New Feudalism. I recommend it. https://www.narativ.org/s/the-new-feudalism
Read slowly unless you can stomach the dystopian ideas in one sitting.
Musk and his wealthy collaborators should go to Mars and leave the earth to ordinary people who want to live in a community that allows face to face contacts. Wealthy people living in castle like homes appear lost being a human.
Musk and Trump think that any money spent on our schools, health care, infrastructure, etc is waste, fraud and abuse because they think all the money belongs to them. They themselves, if they were all alone, with no one to work in their businesses or buy their products or pay taxes, would be poor indeed. We the people generate wealth, and that money needs to benefit all of us, and not line their pockets or fulfill their crazy techno dreams.
I think maybe the Industrial Revolution and technological progress that our primate minds and souls cannot possibly keep up with happened?
I guess the odds are stacked against us. We and the people who raised us grew up with small town and medium town and big town newspapers, and national legacy newspapers, and many with the time to read them and wash our dirty smudgy fingers afterward (and with NPR and its tote bags for the educated elites), and three homogenized networks of evening news and some with tv trays with tv dinners if we didn’t have the time (plus the MacNeil/Lehrer Report—for the educated elites with their black & white 13” TVs and bunny ears). Investigative journalists were so glamorous, portrayed by Robert Redford and all, that we knew their names! And we believed in deep throat and in horrible people like Barry Goldwater doing the right thing in the Senate because they were patriots first. So that is a tough frame of reference from which to predict that our current Republican Senate is a unified gelatinous spineless blob of Me-First-Power-Good! What-Constitutional-Oath? Whose-Constituents? criminality. We have probably known for a while that the Democratic Senators just go around writing a “strongly worded letter” when hell really does break loose, but even so it was hard for us to conceive that the propaganda of American exceptionalism and the shining city on the hill and the world’s most deliberative body would not, could not get it together and do the right in the end. And that the country certainly would not be demanding it of them in time.
And then the folks who came after us only knew USA Today and Gannett and iHeartMedia and cable and “fair and balanced” and truthiness in Fox News and then the Internet and the algorithms and siloing and Breitbart and OAN Network and fake news and the dark web and the Facebook and the IG and the TikTok and the Snapchat and the Twitter and then the truth (ha!) social and the X and…
The End.
So of course, the US Senate does not contain any profiles in courage and is just ruled by lobbyists and billionaire donors and above all a single ruthless charismatic autocratic criminal.
And of course, the American public is not informed, is not discerning, is completely apathetic, is totally turned off and tuned out, and quite a bit more scared and desperate than a pre-Reagan time when we had just come off a couple of decades of civil rights advancements, and the wealth chasm was perhaps still just a fault line and there was still a middle class and heroin was a cautionary tale (again) and there was no fentanyl nor a large group of hopeless displaced ignored citizens in hollowed out factory towns and small farmless dried up rural communities desperate for it.
So. The odds are totally stacked against us, and Obama is right: No one is going to rescue us. We have to do that ourselves. But it seems like we need an intervention first. And who is going to stage that? What degree of rock bottom will it take for a nation-wide auto-intervention, and as always with rock bottom, will it be (is it) too late?
Thank you for that, Bow! You're now due for much needed and well deserved half hour coffee break! Yes, the fall is bad enough - but it's hitting the rock bottom that will cause the problem. We'll have people fighting to survive - and people fighting to have trump survive. And a vast swathe in the middle, wandering around aimlessly, looking for a "Magic Savior."
I just hope he turns out to be a Liberal - not some Gollum the Project 25 guys dream up.
Two things, no, three, happened to me yesterday, and so I'll take my leave from here now. -- unless medical miracles can be made to appear..
I received word that, TEN DAYS ago now, Mass General had received data from the transponder I've been loosely tethered to for 12 years which had beamed out an afib event. (My day wa s spent spiraling between phone calls, next day appointments in Boston I couldn't easily accomplish, a video call, then no call at all, realizing my cardiologist had not yet seen the data either. etc. etc.)
Then , also yesterday, I realized I was experiencing a sharp decline in the vision of my right eye which makes reading and typing way more difficult than I've ever experienced..
And third, my remarks yesterday here to Phil Balla detailing his profound -- and previously ignored -- error in his mistaken understanding of the links he keeps repeatedly asserting between the Powell Memorandum, achievement testing, the decline of humanities, and educator's and schools perfidy in all this is far better explained by other variables in modern society have all managed to elude him or escape him entirely or, perhaps, outright ignore.
The only out for me at this point is withdrawal from Substack. I'll have to content myself with showing up -- peacefully, of course -- on the streets. with the rest of you June 14 . . .
Yep. It’s the full-blown epitome of reductionist-materialistic thinking, the philosophy that has dominated ‘modern’ Western thinking for 400 years, and still does. The quantum physicist David Bohm already said that “this fragmented thinking may well lead to our extinction.” The tech bros seem absolutely determined to make this prophecy come true.
How can we think for a minute that we are going to colonise a place that has no air or water ? Is there no sane person left in the governement ? And in the mean time we are asked to recycle ! Do we hate our children ?
This information is particularly scary to me, coming as it does the day after I got a letter from Social Security mentioning that it had compared data from various sources and telling me they will reduce my benefits if I don't contact them in 10 days - from the date of the letter - with corrections to their assumptions. I paraphrase. Fortunately my congressional representative has offered help the their constituents who are have issues with the SSA. I've asked for their help.
The Doge incel boys have got your data, Jan. Things on you you've probably forgotten.
You're just one of the first specially targeted by them.
Pam Bondi at DOJ? Hegseth at DoD? Kash Patel at the F.B.I.? Kristi Noem at Homeland Security? J.D. Vance in the hock to Peter Thiel? They all serve Trump and Musk. Who in turn serve Putin and his oligarchs and their eastern Orthodox priests for hatred of the West.
Thanks Phil... HCR, this is a Serious Post... "Cybersecurity experts outside the administration disagree that a master database is secure or safe, as DOGE is bypassing normal safeguards, including neglecting to record who has accessed or changed database information. The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School explains that data can be altered or manipulated to redirect funds, for example, and that there is substantial risk that data can be hacked or leaked. It can be used to commit fraud or retaliate against individuals."
...
Knowledge Is Power... The Standard Practice for Managing USG Systems was access by need-to-know by Vetted Individuals with proper Clearances that are periodically reviewed.... I have worked in that Space... DOGE's Whiz Kids are, Kids... Musks Operational MO, is Move Fast, and Crash & Burn Fast, and then Move-On... Compare a Tesla to Porsche, and the Tesla comes across as a Crude Brick... I Fear What Bad Actors Could Do With That Info... Don't Forget That Musk Is Chummy With Putin & Xi... They Are Not Friends Of The USA... Musk has bought DJT, and DJT gave Musk the 'Keys' to the USG... Musk's Business Empire has always been built with USG Contracts... Now Musk Is Using The USG To Extend His Empire... Recall How Musk Used The White House & DJT To Sell Teslas.... Musk's Hallucinogens, and Accelerants are taking a Toll... A Wounded Animal Is The Most Dangerous...
Deport the foreigner Musk back to South Africa and don't allow him back into the US. The blaming of Joe Biden for everything that Musk and Trump are fucking up is getting rather old.
Fortunately, no one has died from the Newark fiasco--yet. When are the airlines going to fight back? Are they afraid to publicly say anything. It's likely they are going to each lose billions of dollars this year because people are afraid to fly or to travel to the US.
Many of us commenting here have been terrified of what Musk's incompetent doge boys are doing with out data. A Social Security worker in New York said that their office gets at least one complaint a day that Musk's boys have updated their records as being dead. And there are hundreds of SSA offices across the US.
Coming back from the dead is not as simple as updating their SSA records. Pretty much ALL of their funds are frozen and since they are "dead" it's very difficult to be "undead."
Musk and Trump and the rest of his incompetent sycophants don't give a damn about any of them including whether they die.
The blaming of Biden is getting so old. A meme circulating this week proclaimed that Trump was renaming the San Andreas Fault "Biden's Fault" -- I thought that summed it up pretty well while also being funny.
Gary, I'd love to see Musk deported. But then I thought about it more. He would still control Starlink. Once the MAGAs have been ousted, we should nationalize Starlink and SpaceX. I view them as utilities that serve the public.
And let's face it. Musk has violated so many laws, that he really belongs in a prison serving multiple life sentences. But where? How about Alcatraz! He can easily afford to fund the renovations to house a prisoner of one. Give him an electric golf cart and all the Ketamine he wants.
As I have been for over 25 years trying to get humanities and essay writing back in the schools so people could see beyond testing's priorities, could see the millions of "others" badly hurt by what the billionaires were doing.
You are totally on the mark Phil. Ironically named SOL testing assesses little, teaches nothing, and bankrupts the very core of education. Written responses, particularly in longer form, such as essays, demand a personal investment of organized thought. It’s an effort that demonstrates a level of understanding at the same time the act itself teaches.
Any gamer can at a minimum eke out a pass from SOL without any subject matter mastery. SOL testing provides at most a demeaning human experience. Come to think of it, this is exactly what corporate life needs to cultivate most.
Thanks Phil... Those efforts are Valuable.. I think that it will take more than that as well... We should teach our Kids to become Life-Long Learners with a lot of Curiosity... I went to some Good Schools, but I am mostly Self-Taught... We should instill a Thirst-4-Knowledge in our Children... Mainstream Culture's Superficial Thirst For Spectacle Has Given Us DJT...
Things much worse, dear Apache, than thirst for spectacle.
Although Putin has long used his spectacle of a crazed, degenerate West spectacularly threatening Russian white, Orthodox purity.
As his U.S. asset in the White House used the spectacle of "immigrants eating the dogs and cats" and much more alarmism he learned from Putin and Orban.
Testing kills what you call thirst for knowledge and a lot of curiosity. It puts the abstractions of categories and linearities in place of the humanities they replaced. America got blinded as to what the billionaires were doing -- active, well-funded campaigns by Heritage and ALEC and many more to inure people to the human costs mounting, and to blind them additionally by testing's unhuman priorities.
My mother-in-law worked with our Congresscritter's office to increase her SSA benefits because of one of the donut hole issues created when Reagan forced all of the Federal workers to be part of the SSA pool. Her ex gets over $5000/mo and she gets less than $900. After a year of trying to deal with the OMB we gave up. If her ex dies first she will get the entire $5k each month plus her SS but until then $900.
$5K? I was able to wait until age 70 to start taking SS, but I don't get that much. And I was able to pay the max into the system for over thirty years. Hmmm. There's got to be some strange math in the system somewhere.
I was a "lucky" beneficiary of that change as it wiped out the WEP and GPO penalties. Now I'm getting the benefits I'm entitled to from working nearly 30 years before my 16 years teaching in public school. It's a whopping $400 increase up to $600/month - minus MediCare.
Yes - same here. Now they are wanting to reduce the earlier (pre-2024) payments from SSA - but they were already reduced because of the pension offset. They are just wrong. I really hope it doesn't affect my current payments; it's finally enough to live on.
SSA does have a Office Inspector General (OIG). But, I would ask my attorney to handle any direct contact with SSA.
Sometimes your local Congressional Rep's Staffers are quite capable of taking first steps. (Staff are not prosecutors. ) But, any communications with your licensed attorney are confidential as a matter of law & the Attorneys' "Work Product" is also protected.
Yes. I was strategizing looking for assistance to help confirm, identify the particular MO ... then others certainly NOT the client --- nail the Perps.
Item one: Some of us have been “extremely concerned” about the theft of our private data since Musk’s DOGE thugs stormed the SS administration in March.
Item two: AI is clearly a bad idea on so many levels. Using computers to help solve problems such as climate disruption is fine. But this ain’t that.
Item three: Aside from the venality and cruelty, Musk is clearly insane. The obsession with Mars and a dying sun that won’t happen for another 4 billion years is enough to make that statement. He is willing to throw our living Earth under the metaphorical bus to get there. Then there is the repopulation fantasy and the gobbedly gook about being a 3000 year old alien. I don’t think he was joking. I think he is delusional. And rich enough to do untold damage.
Annabel you succinctly encapsulate my reactions to this much needed elucidation of the machinations and madness at ‘play’ here. Thank you, and thank HCR.
If elmo had to take a drug test (as do many govt employees on their way to that level of authority and responsibility) he’d outright fail and not be hired. Money buys influence. I don’t know anything about ketamine, but. We know by his own admission he is full of it.
He certainly seems to be grossly exceeding the useful dosage, which to me needs to be monitored by appropriately qualified observers and may require limitations in when, where, and how much can be used. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7994242/
I try to take the minimum of any prescribed drugs, such as using only 2 hydrocodone (of the 20 prescribed), tablets after triple hernia surgery. I quit accepting Vicodin prescriptions after dental work, preferring to accept the pain rather than the distorted thinking I experienced after just one dose. I had dosed off after an early dental appointment and was awakened by a loud noise outside, dreaming it was the pesky terrorists that drove through the neighborhood every 4th day at noon, shooting wildly at anything and every thing. I felt annoyed, thinking I'd have to get my gun and find my ammo to at least shoot back at them (like I had done in Vietnam when we had a little bit of harassing gun fire coming in at a combat engineering camp). As my head slowly cleared, I began to realize I don't have any ammo, nor any guns and there were certainly no terrorists driving through the neighborhood every 4 days.
Vicodin gives me headaches worse than migraines. I discovered with my recent knee replacement surgery that hydromorphone (dilaudid) is the worst drug ever for messing with my brain. I had to refill one pain med because I could NOT take the hydromorphone, but I have about half of that refill left.
Ask for Toradol/keterolac. It’s a massive anti-inflammatory without all the crazy side effects. I have both pills and injections and found it works better than Oxy, morphine or any of the other myriad migraine rescue medications. It does wonders when my arthritis acts up and I can barely walk. Doctors don’t normally prescribe it and I’ll never understand why. It can be hard on the kidneys.
I used to take a lot of Ibuprofen but quit totally as they are trying to find out how much kidney damage I accumulated from the only suspected cause, Ibuprofen.
My kidney damage was caused by the lithotripsy they did for kidney stones. I’m sure of it. Since it doesn’t take as much Toradol to clear up my pain I figure I’m better off than constantly taking ibuprofen and Tylenol is useless.
I ended up using a free medication deactivation packet provided by a local drugstore in California for the 19 of 20 prescribed hydrocodone tablets I didn't use. Though that is not so clear in the link, see https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-650.pdf
"...The goal is to give people a convenient way to dispose of unused or expired opioids, or other prescription drugs, so they’re not misused and do not pollute the environment.
Kelly Juleson-Scopino demonstrated how to pour expired liquid medication into one of the disposal pouches. The pouches can also destroy unwanted pills, most illicit drugs, vape fluids, and opioids including fentanyl..."
Oregon has a "drug take back" program; pharmacies and police agencies collect unused prescription meds and illegal drugs (should you find some inconveniently in your possession) in an anonymous, locked drop box. Keeps stuff out of the landfill and sewer systems.
Students and 2 friends did describe finding illegal drugs hidden in their personal areas, suspected to have been hidden by roommates, or frequent visitors that didn't want them found in their own personal areas. They seemed to usually just flush them down the toilet, not wanting to get anyone in trouble, but at least once doing it front of the person suspected of hiding them (without accusing the person of hiding them.
I tend to suggest they get help before it becomes necessary for me to get help for them. So far it seems several have gotten the help they needed, though two left the school voluntarily, before eventually getting the help they needed.
I tend to trust recovered former addicts more than people who haven't found out the hard way, what adverse affects from drugs can be. They are often the best anti-drug advocates (speaking from experience I don't need or want).
Absolutely agree. He is clinically insane. Psychotic and delusional and because people have bought his bullshit that he’s a “genius” he keeps getting away his lunacy. FFS— he’s so stupid that he doesn’t even know that if/when Earth is incinerated in billions of years Mars will be too? This is the same man who thinks babies will have bigger brains if women have C-sections. He’s an idiot who is only good at conning people.
He is as warped as chump. I recommend that people read changes to Terms of Service and such because I’ll bet that they add stuff absolving them of responsibility if they use our information like I think they will. Or keep lawyers on retainer.
AI can be a useful tool for some aspects of scientific research, but it cannot create knowledge. It can at best help refine existing knowledge and make analogies. But it cannot create hallucinate and get things wrong. Whatever AI touches must be carefully examined to see if it corrupts the ground truth or extends it in a useful way. It will be a long time before computers can be trusted to do real research.
In the meantime DOGE is killing the goose that has laid the golden eggs, because government funded research is the foundation upon which US businesses were built, NIH and NSF funded labs have made discoveries that more than paid for the investments the government made. Without continuing these grant programs, labs will shut down in the USA and move to other nations that are not run by fantasist fascists. Australia, Europe, and China are already recruiting our best and brightest to go work in labs they are funding. Discoveries that could have been made in the USA and turned into products by US companies will instead be made overseas and monetized by our less foolishly led global competitors.
Annabel, I absolutely put the fascination with AI in my "in what world is this a good idea?" department. I cannot comprehend any way that it makes sense.
“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”????? I guess the FAA is really important for space travel. Geez, this guy is the Lex Luthor of our time! Send him to Mars right now!
Send the whole lot, immediately with a 1000 dollars in pocket change. I would be fine with diverting the necessary funds to that …and so poetic given the proposal offered immigrants to repatriate.
I've long had the idea that he should pilot the next Tesla roadster to be shot into space... pack it with as much oxygen as it will hold and send him on his way into the cosmos.
'Musk continued: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”' Guess what, Elon? Humanity IS forever destined to be confined to Earth. You fricken idiot!
I do hope that Ray Bradbury's short sci-fi novel The Martian Chronicles comes true. You may recall that in the novel, the Martians kill all the astronauts who are on the first few space missions.
This consolidation of data and the anticipated dastardly abuse has me scared shitless. And no one will give a f*ck to help those damaged by the criminal abuse they weilded. The total recklessness of this Administration is beyond the pale.
Thanks for signaling this article Steve. The author, as she ends her terrifying scenario, warns the reader that America must respond quickly to these threats if there is to be any hope of the continuation of democracy. I cannot see that happening. If 75% of the citizens of our country were reading Dr. Richardson's articles each day, I think we'd have a chance. But that will never be the case, sadly.
You’re welcome. And yes, time is of the essence. DOGE is moving fast to beat any effort that might develop to stop it. The forces of darkness have often been more creative than the forces of light. One exception was the Sustainable America plan authorized by President Clinton. First published in 1996 by the Presidents Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), it was a plan for cultural transformation put together by a team led by then EPA head Carol Browner with active involvement by Al Gore. The tragedy of this project is it never got any publicity… No coverage by the New York Times for example… And then Al Gore never mentioned it during his 2000 campaign because he was afraid the Republicans would label him as a tree hugger. This plan and all the relevant documents are still online and available to inspire those of us who (like me) seek to create an awareness of how much better the future can be if we come together as one.
I don’t want anything controlled by billionaires! I never gave Elon Musk, President Trump, Big Balls,etc my permission for any of my personal data to be looked at, and never ever to be collected at all. No one needs my information. Collecting personal data without my consent and permission on what’s being collected, is a hard no. The government has some information about me on the necessary documents, other than that, no other information is needed. My adult daughters don’t have permission or access. They won’t until I give them my information.
Doge is not really saving any money
I want to write more, but I can’t keep my eyes open.
While I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, Vicki, I would like to interject a thought about rejecting “billionaires.” I believe we should always be cautious about over-generalizing. Not ALL billionaires are awful, bad, corrupt, and/or sleazy people. I know Bernie Sanders continually slams “Billionaires,” but several years ago his “line” used to be “millionaires and billionaires,” but once HE discovered that HE was a millionaire, the “millionaire” part got dropped. And, yes, I know that there is a HUGE difference (dollarwise) between the two entities, I’m willing to go out on a limb to say that some billionaires can be considered as worthy of our trust. I have recently been listening to the speeches of IL Gov. JB Pritzker. Yes, according to Forbes magazine, he is worth $3.7 billion (2025), but, from what I’ve been able to uncover, he has made great strides in improving the IL budget deficit by passing BALANCED budgets for several years and while doing that he has not “borrowed” money from state employee retirement funds. (That has been a problem in IL for over 60 years and has been perpetuated by Republican and Democratic administrations.) Not only has Pritzker been fiscally responsible, I look forward to seeing/hearing him speak to the larger public, especially on such “powerful” MAGAphones as FOX News.
Yes, the state pension funds (police, fire, teachers, etc.) are still struggling, but a problem that took 60 years to create ain’t gonna be solved in 1 year.
So, overgeneralization is probably something to be avoided, especially since it might come back to bite us in “the end.”
Thank you. I don’t usually over generalize in lumping people into a category because of their race, religion, etc. I understand all billionaires and others who have wealth are not all alike. JB Pritzker is doing great things. As are others.
Yup, I hope I didn’t come across too sternly or like a grump! We need to stick together, and I’d urge Bernie to erase “Billionaires” from his speeches. We need rich, poor, middle class Americans to educate Trump and his MAGA Millions!! Hey, Donald - “due process” - like when you have been on trial numerous times…
Good thing I was ablebto keep my eyes open till I finished reading your comment Vicki. Now, after writing this reply I'm the one going back to bed...💤💤💤💤
As the Sun goes that way, it’s not simply inner planets. It’s the end of the solar system. I doubt anyone wants to stick around for that, as if one could.
I read Trump is selling a massive announcement next week that will be amazing and it doesn’t have to do with tariffs. Right after he goes to the Saudi’s or talks Netanyahu into giving him Gaza. He wants us to be hanging on the edge of our seats until this announcement that I’m sure is something that enriches him further. I’m puzzled why the Saudi’s, with all their money, need him to develop real estate there. How can they even stand to listen to him talk?
If Musk and Trump have my data, I demand to know Trump’s grades in school, his tax records and all of his medical records for the past 10 years. Oh and let’s have Musk’s mental health records too.
How many of the people who voted for Trump understood that they were really voting for someone who believes in the necessity of colonizing Mars? What are we, the people, prepared to do about this misplaced priority?
Not one MAGA I know has changed their mind. They believe the USA is broken and Trump is fixing it. We read honest intelligent info while the others watch Fox, Newsmax and false info on Meta. HCR info continue to fall on the ears of already believers.
Ignorance is a disease, we get it from not paying attention. It corrupts the mind and stills the imagination. The people who actually brought the current corruption to fruition were "low information voters". MAGAts are very low information folks as well, as they only have one line of false information they will tolerate.
But whose job is it to inform them? If ½ of insta post attacked the issues instead of people we would be slaying trump. Getting tired of see in posts saying MAGA are uneducated or worse
Social Security has the personal data of millions of people, data we Americans entrusted to Social Security so it could fulfill its function of administering Social Security accounts and distributing Social Security checks. Doge has no authority to look at the data, nor does it have any need to. Doge says they require access to the data to combat "waste, fraud, and abuse." But Doge has no evidence of widespread fraud or abuse in the system. Before anyone grants them access to the data, they must first prove that waste and abuse exist. They have not. As far as abuse goes, it is Doge who is abusing us by violating our data privacy to rummage around in it, while the law fumbles about wondering if maybe this is illegal. By the time any ruling is made to enjoin Doge from touching that data, they will have the data and be busy building the data models Musk wants to use against us.
“ Social Security checks. Doge has no authority to look at the data, nor does it have any need to. “
It’s very probably this: Other people in the rump cabinet, DHS and ethni-phobes like S. Miller, have a keen interest in the SS database to track down recent immigrants who’ve been working and got SSNs and are paying SS deductions and payroll tax deductions into “the system.” That’s all. Nothing to do with any puported goal of doge. Oh yeah, and as someone put it, to “seek out places where there is trust in the American system and destroy it”, which they are doing.
'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' may have been the actual inspiration and source material, possibly gleaned from one of the lost chapters of Emmanuel Goldstein's manifesto(whether he wrote it or actually ever existed was always hard to ascertain). Threatening to the Party's designs and intentions, the mysterious and subversive book within the book that is 'Nineteen Eighty-four'. Adding to the bewilderment, George Orwell was dead within a year of its publication but had mentioned that he meant it to be a warning, not a how-to manual.
Narcissistic authoritarians with no capacity for empathy have through all history seized control of organizations—religions, corporations, universities, and nations and led them to ruin. More than one novel narrates living the event from the view of the victims.
This presidency and its MAGA disciples are doing to the U.S. exactly what was done to the corporations he and his flying monkeys bankrupted while screwing over contractors and employees that he used along the way. When the same narcissist personality leads just two political parties, the ruling authoritarians ultimately support each other rather than the citizen constituents.
This is all so alarming. These things they’re working so hard on have nothing to do with quality of life or being human on this planet. And they’re highly polluting. Thank you, Heather, for being willing to wade into this muck
to keep us updated.
Totalitarianism is not a decent way to live for most of the people it controls. The Brave New World will lack a reason to live for most. These people are insane and delusional. The Earth is the only mother we will ever know. When they leave, they will go to a dead planet, because they have killed ours.
Today, May 8, the 80th anniversary of V-E Day is a day to reflect on why we fought -- together with our allies in Europe, both in the West and the East --- to borrow a phrase from Steven Spielberg's 'Band of Brothers.'
Totalitarianism arrived before the DNA double-stranded helix was discovered, before computers and the internet were invented, before anyone thought seriously of sending a rocket into space, much less colonizing Mars. Even without sophisticated technology, Nazi systems of control, intimidation, informing and blind obedience were terrifying. In occupied Paris, four cross-tabulating systems for identifying Jews by name, address, immigration status and occupation were created. In July 1942, Adolf Eichmann ordered the police to round up about 23,000 Jews in Paris and the north. 13,000 were bused to an outdoor stadium called the Vel' d-Hiv, kept there for 3 days without food, water or toilets, with some committing suicide by throwing themselves off the topmost bleacher. Families were sent to internment camps outside Paris, like Drancy, where parents were separated from their children. Adults were deported 'to the East' with the Prime Minister of Vichy ordering the children to follow weeks afterward -- alone, the delay caused by the need to complete the building of a fourth incinerator at Auschwitz.
About 75,000 French Jews, including 11,000 children, were eventually deported, with less than 2,000 (all adults) returning. While thousands of French collaborated with the Nazis in Vichy and the north, thousands more risked their own lives to hide their neighbors. Who lived and died was determined less by technology, and more by courage and love --- or by fear and loathing. Which people chose then, as well as which we choose now, is up to us, not to them.
Trump and Musk's " systems of control, intimidation, informing and blind obedience" are "terrifying." Just substitute "nazi" with Trump and the situations and outcomes will be the same. That's where we're headed soon, not Mars.
Stepford Starbase…
“Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted this weekend to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.
A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica decided to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that will grant them the authority to pass city ordinances.
The ballot, which also named a senior SpaceX representative as its mayor with 100% of the early vote, was never really in doubt.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/03/elon-musk-spacex-texas
Elon thinks he can understand artificial intelligence without understanding natural intelligence, aka the ability to use your mind to get things done, and while totally ignoring wisdom, aka knowing what needs to be done by knowing the difference between right and wrong. Metaphorically speaking, he’s firing off a Space-X rocket without a guidance system.
His hubris is never ending. He has gotten this far by selling snake oil and the government goons who are giving away the world to him are so freaking stupid they believe he’s a genius. Especially the really “stable genius” in the White House. The idiocy is endless.
The man is a drug addict, and his monomania about Mars and the other things you so wisely point out are, I think, not unrelated to his drug use. I wish that his drug use were cited more often when writing about him in th MSM and places like this.
James. an excellent observation. No understanding for the necessity of wisdom and the difference between right and wrong. After reading this letter, I am once again glad to be in my 80s with no direct descendants.
This is the neofascist tech billionaires' wet dream. Look up "Network State". They been working at it for years already. The idea is to install "Zones", as they are called in China, places inside an existing state but where the state has no power, and that are governed in a fascist way by the wealthiest businessmen. Goal? Maximum profit for those wealthiest people, of course. Although for the most ideological among them, it's all about "freedom". As the inventors of neoliberalism already said (and Peter Thiel, who bankrolls venture capitalist JD Vance's career), for them capitalism and democracy are not compatible. The wealthiest need to be able to freely do whatever they want to be able to invent the next thing that will save humanity, they believe. And democratic elections, so governments run by the "mediocre" and "parasites" of society will always want to limit their freedom...
For more info, see Quinn Slobodian's outstanding "Crack-up Capitalism".
This replacement of modern nation state government structures by global CEOs carve ups of geographical territories for private fiefdoms with their own private legal systems is already well under way in the UK. A return to the Renaissance era City State model. Look up European Powell on substack for details.
Horrifying.
😱🤢
The tech broligarchs want to create unregulated city-state entities—"free cities" (quite the Orwellian naming choice). Starbase is likely meant to become one such mini-principality sooner rather than later. Greg Abbott and his fellow Texas dictators have been ushering these mega-wealthy "libertarian" types to take over the state, hyping the ugly, misogynistic, theocratic libertarianism that's held an immovable deathgrip on all statewide levers of power for decades. I recommend reading this article (https://www.texasobserver.org/the-crypto-racket/), which examines the trend.
I don't think so. Nothing indicates that today's GOP neofascists want a genocide against the American people, and that is and remains a defining characteristic of Nazism. Not all forms of fascism are Nazism.
Putin's neofascism, or Xi's neofascism, for instance, are fascism, not Nazism.
It's important to make this distinction because depending on what danger we're facing, we need different strategies to fight back and be able to defeat them.
Neofascism often allows more than one political party, for instance. But it undermines the non-fascist party(s) entirely so that in real life, they have no chance of winning elections. If we don't know that, we may think that it's "not that bad yet" as long as there is still a Democratic Party and elections. Russia and Hungary have elections and therefore opposition parties too. But the fascist party that governs made it entirely impossible for them to truly raise money, and do all the other things that an opposition party needs to do to win elections.
Today, the neofascist GOP is actively trying to destroy the DNC's fundraising website. If they'd ever succeed in doing that, the DNC would still exist, but it wouldn't be able to compete in elections (especially knowing that, contrary to Trump, Kamala Harris and Democrats in general rely heavily on individual, small donations).
"I don't think so. Nothing indicates that today's GOP neofascists want a genocide against the American people, and that is and remains a defining characteristic of Nazism". Please explain to me why major cuts to Medicaid are not a subtle form of genocide.
You're right. Our home-grown "neo"-fascists are the same sadistic and greedy individuals as their European predecessors. We witnessed this with trump V.1. when hundreds of thousands died following Dear Leader's Covid recommendations. Given their de-funding of USAID and other humanitarian programs, their murderous intent extends across the globe. There can be no doubt they intend and welcome the millions of deaths that will result from the abrupt disruption/termination of food and medical supplies. Let there be no mistake: These fascists intend to turn the blue/green planet into a wasteland; if thousands of species go extinct and billions of us expire, that's the price the fascists are more than willing to pay. So, what do you call those who have the intent and the motivation to murder millions?
A genocide is never defined by its impact and always by its intention. If you read neofascist literature, they don't want to privatize all public services IN ORDER TO kill as many poor people as possible. They believe that that's a sad but unavoidable side effect. The Holocaust, which defines Nazism, was based on an ideology that believed that as long as there was still one Jew alive in the German empire, there would be a vital threat to Arian culture as a whole, so they HAD to kill them all.
There is clearly a lot of disdain for "basement dwellers" among today's neofascist Republicans, but as far as I can see, no one is arguing that we SHOULD kill entire demographics just to be able to survive as a culture... . As even Laura Loomer is already arguing instead, many Trump voters are on Medicaid and vitally need it, so she is fighting FOR keeping Medicaid rather than slashing it.
It is totalitarianism, and it is always evil, no matter if it is governed from the left (Communist) or right (Fascist). Their only goal is to retain ultimate power and keep the public under their thumb.
Communism is an ECONOMIC theory, not a political one. The fact that it's mostly totalitarian regimes who decided to use that name to justify what they did to their own citizens doesn't make their claim true...
Hard to “like “ this, but thank you
It's Come to This - "Today, May 8, the 80th anniversary of V-E Day is a day to reflect on why we fought..."
The partying had begun in London and across Britain on the evening of the 7th. More organized celebrations were to follow on the two Public Holidays of the 8th and 9th. Yet many families did not feel like celebrating, Vi Bottomley was a twenty-four-year-old war widow in Liverpool:
"𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦’𝑑 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐼 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑟𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑𝑛’𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝. 𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑒. 𝐼 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑐𝑟𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑦 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑢𝑡. 𝐼 𝑘𝑒𝑝𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓 𝐽𝑎𝑐𝑘 [ℎ𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑏𝑎𝑛𝑑]. 𝐻𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑘𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝐷 𝐷𝑎𝑦. 𝐼 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑤 𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑖𝑚, 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑑.
𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑘𝑒𝑝𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒, 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒. 𝐻𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑚𝑎𝑛, 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑗𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐻𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑐𝑘𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑛’𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑟𝑚𝑦 𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑛𝑜, ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑜 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑑𝑜 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑏𝑖𝑡. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡? 𝐻𝑒’𝑑 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦, ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦, 𝑠𝑙𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑢𝑝𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑠."
https://www.ww2today.com/p/45-05-08-victory-in-europe-day?utm_campaign=email-post&r=3zw8i&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thank you for reminding us of the cost so personally. Millions must have felt the same thing.
I have a friend whose mother was a child during that time, and escaped the Germans with her extended family group hiding in the French countryside. The stories she told my friend of that time were of stealing lilacs, raiding chicken coops, and "playing" hide and seek. It was only as her dementia took command that my friend heard the realities of how she had lived.
Every spring, I steal a bouquet of lilacs for Monique.
Ally, lovely and meaningful tribute.
Lest we forget.
When i was growing up in the 1960s, we always had a wall calendar given by the heating oil company, and my dad (who was 15 in 1945 but had brothers who served) would point out VE and VJ Day that was highlighted on the calendar each May and August, explaining what they were.
Also, in Paris, there is a somber memorial to the Jews that were taken from France. My grandson and I happened upon it during a visit 3 years ago. That was a dark period in the City of Light.
Doug, I had a friend whose mother lived through the roundup of French Jews as a child.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: “First, let’s get rid of the [Technocrats].”
Insane and delusional. Trump and Musk.
Also corrupt. All profits from These ventures should go directly to the Treasury.
Musk having our data seems to me to be more dangerous than if China got its hands on our data. The tech bros are batsh*t crazy. Their ideas that no rules should apply to them or their ventures into space is insane! When there are no rules, people die. These tech bros, whose social and relational skills are minimal, are a recipe for disaster for a trip into space where no rules should apply.
This craziness should not be exported to another planet. This whole go to Mars business sounds like a combination of Lord of the Flies and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They pile so many micro doses of drugs on top of each other they live in an alternate reality where they are the savior and everyone else is their robot.
Insane and delusional is putting it mildly Daniel. Investing “Mars money” into Earth’s climate future would yield faster, broader, and more inclusive returns. But climate change is not a tech problem, it’s a political and economic one. We already have the solutions to decarbonize. What’s lacking is large-scale commitment. Mars is the ultimate mid-life crisis for these dumb f*cks - ego rockets to nowhere.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves here, insane and delusional thinking is exactly the correct description, why, because when our sun burns out guess what planet will be gone, earth, mars, and all the others in our solar system.
Musk is 55 years old and if he's lucky he has maybe another 40 years left and he's not going anywhere, let alone to Mars. He is after control of the planets communications systems and data. Secondly, all launching of space craft and satellites, another period.
Bottom line, he wants control of the human race.
I have a solution, put him on a rocket with all his demon sperm and launch him to deep space with no orbital return, throw Trump and Stephen Miller on there too.
These people prove a point that narcissism is a very serious problem in the human race.
Plot right from Don't look up.
The way he micro doses I don’t think he’ll live that long without micro chips and machines to keep him “alive”.
Bill, are you proposing a kind of Noah's ark but for animals with human bodies?
If that the case we'll need quite a few of those. Maybe between the "very stable genius" and the white trash supremacist, can find a solution while we clean up the mess.
LOL, which one.
Kazz, don't forget we need to rush to start colonizing Mars, only 5 billions years left. It's good we have the scumbag president and Musk working hard at it now.
Palm slap to the forehead - thanks for reminding me Ricardo, I forgot about how soon that is. Not a moment to waste!
😄
5 Billion? You had me worried. I thought you said 5 Million!
I started packing yesterday.
Don, now you do understand the need to rush to get to Mars. We are doing such a good job that I'm sorry we didn't get Musk's email asking to name 5 thing we did in our jobs last week.
Absolutely. Well said.
Add to the above - exceedingly dangerous: the irresponsibly short time line, the lack of regulation, security clearance, ignoring established laws and scientific procedures, etc. The whole world should unite to stop the oligarchs who could destroy us and our planet in our lifetime.
I couldn’t agree more. There are so many problems that need attention here in this world and on our planet and that should be priority one, fuck mars. Musk’s agenda is power over humanity and money.
I wish Musk would go to Mars and stay there.
I tend to agree as to the two who are mentioned. Further description is not needed nor are their goals or means by which to attain it hidden agendas.
The plays from the get-go are the same, evil vs good and the rest of that compilation, throw in luck and discovery, and here we are, it’s Thursday.
A quick internet search of the atmosphere of Mars, seems to make colonization an insane idea: low oxygen levels, thin atmosphere, and high carbon dioxide levels in that atmosphere. Also pretty darn cold.
I saw Musk interviewed on the Colbert Show about 10 years ago, when he didn't seem so insane. Elon was hell bent on going to Mars back then too. Then he did say something really crazy, that he wanted to set off an atomic bomb explosion on Mars to create a nuclear winter and manipulate some kind of atmosphere. The guy is basically an actual Bond villain.
It IS a totally insane idea. Everything that makes life on Earth possible is missing on Mars. The notion of diverting billions of dollars worth of non-renewable resources to send a handful of humans on a one-way trip to Mars is, without question, the stupidest idea in the history of human existence. Robots are perfect for the job of exploring the Red Planet.
Everything that is going on right now is wrong and crazy. I come from humble roots. We are sitting here in northern Minnesota, with two sons, who graduated from college who feel defeated about ever having the "American Dream" of being a home owner. School loans, extremely high prices for rent, high costs of everything else ... I know that part of their troubles are based on timing. If only they had began their live's journeys before prices of homes doubled. But when I read, day after day, of all the millions and billions being spent for ... colonization on Mars? ..... and our youth is desperate and no longer believing we live in a democracy ... it is simply maddening to me.
I could not agree more. This next week we are going to our grandson's graduation from Colorado State in mathematics. He is totally depressed and defeated. What's the point? The world is going to hell in a hand basket is how he feels. We can't feed our school children lunch, but we can play golf and host a birthday parade, pollute our water and skies - costing us, the taxpayers, millions.
Try being young on an Indian Reservation with 75% unemployment and no route to college or even safe drinking water. Or being a young Black for whom the American dream or meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion are fiction. We who are white and privileged are now coming face to face with all that is wrong and crazy. We have to stand up by the millions. Either that or crash and burn like the airplanes without any FAA oversight.
Or, now, in Memphis where Musk is polluting the air with his data center. What good will all the data be when all the people are dead?
I was in HS when I started joining social and political marches.
Now I cannot hear, and have aches everywhere, but I know I must put up a good fight or shut up. Things were not great back in the "good old days". Our younger generations need to and must get motivated. Nothing ever gets handed to you.
My kids are working so hard to support their kids and cannot seem to find the time but I keep trying to engage them to be involved.
Yes, my grandson just graduated from UCSD and has no hope.
All this breaks my heart. People in their 30's (the generation that cannot afford to buy a home) are also considering never having children. They conclude that they cannot afford it. How can they save up for a down payment when rent is equal to a house payment? Something needs to change in the near future.
Only men have these fever dreams of getting off planet...women are much more sane and actually love this beautiful planet and want to take care of her.
MisTBlu, in your critique you forgot to take into consideration that we have only 5 billions years left on this hearth before a full crisis. ;-)
It's not going to happen. Read Kelly and Zac Weinersmith's 'A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?'. It's a blast. Musk and those who go with him will end up like Laika, the first dog in space.
Best case scenario: something along the lines of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, except filled this time with billionaires and celebrities. Bon voyage!
I was just thinking this sounds like a dystopian sci-fi novel. Truth is often stranger than fiction.
There was a time when his visionary schemes were earthbound -
https://engineerine.com/elon-hyper-tunnel/
But Mars will be fried just like Earth when our sun goes into its death spiral!
It might survive largely because of its orbital distance from the Sun, but it will definitely get warmer for all those little Musk progeny that he's assuming will also still be living there when it happens. He may even be assuming that the additional warmth will change the climate for the better, much as some people wrongly believe that climate change here will have beneficial effects.
Don't forget the telephone sanitizers...😉
Russell, do I detect a fellow Douglas Adams fan?
An ardent fan.
Same here!
And Good Riddance to the MUSKrat and all the billionaires who need to get their grubbing hands off our Earth.
Amen to that!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/07/two-thirds-of-global-heating-caused-by-richest-study-suggests
Mars also doesn't have the active magnetic core to act as a shield against solar radiation. Exposure to radiation is a problem for astronauts, too. How will he replicate anything similar on Mars or will everything just be underground? All the probes and rovers we've sent are mechanical, not human flesh and blood with psychological needs like emotional connections. If we don't solve our political power struggle stuff here on earth, we'll just continue those on Mars and elsewhere. Rumpy wants to make America first. What about putting Earth first? It's the only home we have and there is no planet B.
These people have zero concept of emotional connections. Last night I asked my husband if they watched the movie The Martian.
My daughter was involved in a project with NASA and MIT to help develop a process for creating glass material from moon rock, which is extremely difficult. It made me realize (duh) that you cannot bring building materials into space; you need to create structures with the materials native to the environment. We are many many many decades away from creating living environments on Mars or any other extraterrestrial location. This isn’t “Hello Tommorrow.” Why isn’t anyone telling him this?
And the Martian surface is worse than the moon's. The surface rocks on the red planet are full of peroxides that are highly reactive and would somehow need to be chemically reduced in smelting to make metals for building, etc. Once metal is made it would have to be coated to prevent rapid rusting/oxidization.
And then there are the high radiation levels at the surface, as others have mentioned. Colonies would have to be buried underground to reduce that health risk.
Karen, would he listen if they did tell him?
Of course not… sigh.
And will be cremated with earth in five billion years. Ha, get on up there muskrat
Well, Musk isn't working with a full deck. Add his ketamine use, and it's a,very alarming picture.
It’s not just ketamine. Now he’s added Ozempic then Mounjaro and I’m sure there are hefty doses of other barbiturates and amphetamines.
With luck, he'll kill himself off soon...
That makes Mars an appropriate destination for the MAGA types.
Not bad enough Stephanie. Maybe the Sun?
Mars will do fine. A customer gave me a book he'd written, years ago, called The Case For Mars. An ex-Lockheed Martin engineer, he was a lot like Musk in that he thought he was smarter than everyone else. His signed copy of his (probably self published) book stayed with me all these years.
It talked of all these imaginary resources Mars had, like accessible water, and ignored the difficulty of living without, while trying to create, oxygen. The elaborate confining shelters he designed would have worked fine on a dying Earth, so why Mars? He was not happy when I told him it was delusional.
Your reply makes sense Jen. Remember that the delusional have only 5 billion years to figure it out. It's a race against time. 😳
Thanks
Poem "Fire and Ice" Some say the world will end in fire, some day in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire, but if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.:
The sun's not nearly far enough . . . nor fiery enough!
Carol, all you say is true which is why it would be great for Musk to be the first one to go there and hopefully stay a while.
Sounds like a great place for Musk to keep his severed head frozen in a vain attempt to live forever. How about tomorrow?
Perhaps they are thinking of Mars as the next Siberian gulag, and dissidents will be sent there to work in Martian mines. It will take billions of years for the sun to incinerate Earth, but in the meantime, mightn’t it be a handy dumping ground for undesirables to be rehabilitated through hard unpaid labor?
Carol, the cold problem will be solved by the progressive increment of volume of the sun that will increase Mars temperature to livable levels in about 4 billions years. You'll see.
Mars is completely unsuited to human life. There’s no water, it appears, and the thin air would not keep humans alive. There’s very little oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.
Craig, I would love it if Musk were on the first ship out to Mars. However, I think he is too much of a coward to go. He prefers ordering others about and telling us all how he would do it better. I suspect he wouldn't pass the drug test anyway.
I think that Musk, Thiel, Yarvin and other tech fools read way too much bad sci-fi as adolescents. They really believe their delusional of grandeur and superiority.
Ever seen a pic. of Yarvin? I swear that this is 'Revenge of Nerds LXVII: the ultimate retribution'. I suspect many of these megalomaniacs were bullied as kids or teens. The question that crosses my mind remains whether a singular focus on information technology and programming has narrowed the minds of some of these 'gurus' into thinking there is a single, optimal solution to the messy business of governance.
Looked up Yarvin photo. Gads, awful.
The worst thing to happen to the planet is --- human beings.
Humans ruin everything!
Some of them Stephanie. ;-)
True, present company excluded!
Craig, Musk believes that, as the sun will incinerate our plante Earth and humanity billions of years from now, we must colonize Mars. To that I say, why wait, Elon? Leave now, and bring your techie teens with you. Just leave our data.
Great idea!
The insanity and chaos continues and spread every day. This is a true battle for our existence as a Democratic society. Let's be clear...the regime's view of our future does not include "we the people", but only the few rich and powerful. If we don't stand up and say no to this insanity right now, American Democracy will be lost. It's our choice. Are you in?
While I believe that humanity must transcend nation-states toward a global communalism, this tech-wreck is not what I had in mind.
Surely they don't think we'll willingly submit to this? I really don't want to give Yarvin's writing the time of day, but does he articulate some method for brushing off an enraged peasantry? Besides—apparently, given what RFK is doing—destroying public health so that we all die of preventable and treatable illnesses.
It's our fault, Kathleen, we libs, Dems, independents, and progressives.
We're still stuck in past ideas about democracy and our American republic. Naively, we think "we the people" can have a government with agencies and law serving "we the people."
We don't appreciate the Russian greater ideal -- that an entire country exists mainly instead to float a few of its oligarchs and related billionaires who are superior to mere people. They are superior because, as Timothy Snyder shows in "The Road to Unfreedom," they don't at all need pesky facts and evidence. They have instead a marvelous fable about superior whiteness -- with their variant religio-drama ever vigilant against all those gays, those not-in-the-home women, and so many people of color in all their multiplicity threatening to poison the superior Christo White homogeneity.
The orange guy in the White House. Superior. Above the law. His agent, apartheid Afrikaner Musk, in turn himself an agent for Putin, also above silly American law.
For their cause, their wealth, their fable, they can destroy the U.S. government.
Silly us who don't appreciate our superiors.
Stop blaming the side that cares about others. If you want to blame someone for the descent into hell, blame Murdoch and Fox.
I think his comment was satire?
:-/ My bad. :-)
". . . the side that cares about others."
Trouble is, Carolyn, that schools with testing as their chief marker all do very well categorizing, packaging, abstracting others -- but do abysmally using humanities to see others as individuals.
I beg to differ with you, Phil. Everyone single person in America, plus the world, was caught off guard to what the 1% and Musk were conjuring up until Project 2025 cane into full view. Kamala warned us. There is a ton of blame to go around but it doesn’t do any good to throw sticks at us. WE are THE PEOPLE who own the government! Not the other way around. We are fighting for all of our lives or haven’t you noticed?
We had years to read 2025, but didn't. Blind to the warning. What's happening now is beyond humor or even irony.
In August, 2024 a meeting was held in the Southwest Harbor, ME Public Library about the dangers of Project 2025. -Lin was there and about 100 other concerned citizens. There were maybe 5 people under the age of 55 in attendance including the very able moderator. For over 90 minutes she told about how the Republican oligarchs were going to implement Project 2025. Unfortunately, most of what she told us has come to pass.
Note: This meeting was close to Leonard Leo's mansions that he bought with the blood money of the oligarchs who brought down Roe v. Wade and financed the myriad meetings held to develop Project 2025. As a reminder Leo's list of judges brought us Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey-Barrett that were forced through by McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate. Leonard Leo held fundraisers in his home in ME for Susan Collins in 2020 which raised millions for her reelection campaign.
The lying POS Trump told us he had nothing to do with Project 2025 and knew nothing about it. While this lie may not get 4 Pinocchios it is mostly true. Trump is clueless as to the EO's he is signing and has done nothing to stop Musk or any of the Project 2025 operatives.
Thanks for those details, Gary. Gloom and rage. Too little, too late - the horse was already bolting. And we'd known for years that when confronted with a misdeed he would immediately lie. Who was it he identified as one of his former wives, in a photo, having first declared he didn't know her? E Jean Carroll, I think. So now we have two madmen at large, one an egotistical fool, the other with technical ability and unlimited wealth at his disposal. Starve them: let no-one go to the parade, and don't watch it live.
Same thing happened in Ellsworth, ME in October of 2024. Some serious people organized a program to explain Project 2025 to anyone who was interested in learning about it. It was sponsored by the Hancock County Democrats. They even had very nice pamphlets printed that you could take with you with all the details about Project 2025. The speakers were very well informed. The program was held in a public building at 7 pm on a weekday evening. My husband & I and maybe 15 other people attended the excellent presentation!
How do you get people to learn about something that they'd rather not know about?
KMD, that's called stupidity and there's no known cure for it.
Maybe hold the meeting on a weekend, so the time doesn’t impinge as much on working folks? As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points out, survival takes precedence over higher order concerns…
When what's happening goes beyond humor or irony, it's called tragedy Anne-Louise.
Trump disavowed Project 2025. He was lying of course.
That's not true, Marlene. There have been several significant warnings of the machinations of the billionaire class, not just in the US but across the world. Oliver Bullough has been shouting about this from the rooftops for years. There was the Panama Papers -
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers
Then the Paradise Papers -
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/what-are-the-paradise-papers-and-what-do-they-tell-us
On the US specifically, Jane Mayer's 'Dark Money' probes the influence of money on US elections and Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America' traces the history of the plans of the 1% to control US democracy.
More recently, the Brennan Center has undertaken a survey to try and find out how these people manipulated the 2024 election -
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark-money-hit-record-high-19-billion-2024-federal-races
It's all out there.
The billionaire class bought and paid for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey-Barrett. ALL of the Supreme Court justices that voted to repeal Roe v Wade were raised Catholic.
And they all hate women and the poor. the Bible says absolutely nothing about abortion or conception that supports pro-life. Fuck the Patriarchy.
The prime mover behind the attempts to subvert the judiciary is Leonard Leo, a prominent Catholic conservative and member of the Federalist Society.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/04/leonard-leo-federalist-society-conservative-abortion
https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-scotus-elections-nonprofits-discrimination?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=river
It's perhaps a measure of the level of economic chaos that Trump has engendered in only 100 days that Leo and Charles Koch are now suing the administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/trump-tariffs-lawsuit
Leo ... also a member of Opus Dei.
For the record, Russell, let's add a few.
Wendell Berry was probably first to track the billionaires' predations, in 1977, in "The Unsettling of America." He was focused then on how the moneyed were buying in to U.S. research campuses -- turning what had been our public interests to their private domains.
In 2003 Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police" inventoried how the rich had bought in to all the standardized testing and corporate textbook packagers.
In 2005 Jennifer Washburn's "University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education" followed up on the predations Wendell Berry saw nearly 30 years earlier.
Minae Mizumura probed the withering of schools in "The Fall of Language in the Age of English" (English translation, Columbia U Press, 2016).
In 2020 Kurt Andersen published "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America." This made up for what he missed in his 2017 "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: a 500-year history." The earlier book covered how for long Americans entertained massive delusions. The latter book looked more at how elites from high finance organized their evils.
In 2022 Sheldon Whitehouse Chronicled the far-right takeover of federal courts in "The Scheme."
There are also many good books by scientists looking at mental health effects of our billionaires' predations.
All grist to the mill!
I'm totally with "we the people," Marlene.
I've been arguing for over 25 years now against the sequences of events too many are just seeing these days for the first time.
I knew a quarter century ago what the far right foundations were doing since the Powell memo set them up beginning with its issuance in 1971. I knew they started with the schools -- and more vitally I could see how those foundations voided school humanities and big-time instead installed testing's logic machineries.
The reason so many didn't see any of this sooner was that the testing did its job. All accepted it. All took for granted the way testing elevated the abstracted) logic of categories and linearity. None could see the damages the billionaire classes were long doing as they grew the wealth gap. Our humanities -- much, many -- saw it, but they were absent from the schools. People in our media never accessed them in school, so routinely ignored all the key novels, memoirs, biographies, histories, and essay collections that long and well documented what too many are only now waking up to.
Movies, too, Marlene. And songs. Were there. But were personal. Leviathan grew.
It may sound a little harsh, but the fact is that the lower IQ portion of the population will always be guided and driven by those with a higher IQ. Unfortunately, that "higher class" seem always divided into those whose main care and interest is "The People" and those whose main care and interest is "Themselves".
Currently, we are governed by "Themselves." And for those who would say "But trump has no brain!" - I agree. Cunning and sly, yes, but not an intellectual genius. His function in MAGA (which I can no longer dignify with the name "Republican Party") is the same as an amulet, or a sliver of the "True Cross" in medieval times - something that can be brandished to the faithful to confirm that all their dreams will come true. If trump is ever reduced to complete paralysis by a stroke, his body will be carried around and displayed in a velvet chair - and one of Musk's DOGE team will claim to have invented a machine that interprets all "His" wishes for the masses. Trump and the Electorate are not running this country - all the "boys in the back room" are. Cardinal Richelieu lives.
This is a brilliant observation, m'Lady. But I do agree with others who beg to differ as to the intelligence of the people in charge--those behind the scenes who manipulate the Felon with flattery and Big Macs. The fact that they are determined to Make the World Better For Mediocre (and Worse) White Men means that their common denominator in the smarts department is pretty friggin' low. And, as a lifelong educator who has spent 40 years teaching people with supposedly high IQs, I can safely say that it doesn't take a Mensa membership to be an effective and educated person. All it takes is attention, discipline, and a willingness to learn. Those are the three things most glaringly absent in this administration, because they all require people to put their penises back in their trousers and to leave their egos at the door. The absolutely worst students I have had have been the supposedly super smart ones who haven't a lick of sense or an ounce of energy: just lazy bumps on a log who think that their presence is enough. Oh: and I would say that at least 90% of those were blokes.
Well said, Linda. "...Mediocre (and Worse) White Men..." is the absolute key here. Mix it with the male-dominated White Christian Nationalists and you've got this great cocktail we're in right now.
Not sure, Lady E., that MAGA leaders or the billionaires have higher IQ.
They certainly do have the logic that testing delivers: abstracted rationality for categories and all the linear-only, linear-causal conceits. This lets them excel at packaging. But there's not an iota of the humanly decent or humanly attentive in any of them, as there isn't, either, in any of those tests.
Not higher IQ, but drive, grandiosity, greed and a bloated sense of entitlement.
Phil was sarcastic.
We're all a bit too rattled for finesse.
I didn’t read Phil as being sarcastic. “We're still stuck in past ideas about democracy and our American republic. Naively, we think "we the people" can have a government with agencies and law serving "we the people."”
If we don’t continue ‘those past ideas’ where do we go, then. To Mars?
Daniel Solomon spoke correctly, R. M.
Yeah. I guess i got worked up. ‘We the people’ have let it slip from under us. Good ideas trashed by bullies. Gotta reclaim.
Marlene, I read the Heritage Foundation’s “drop” of the Mandate for Leadership (aka Project 2025) when it first came out. Thought it was an Onion spoof until I started going through it (the whole thing was/is available online & if you haven’t checked it out & all that’s affiliated via their site—such as online classes—it’s a real eyeopener/shocker….just have a barf-bag handy!🤮). I was appalled that it took SO LONG for the MSM to even mention it—I tried to engage my friends to take it seriously, but it wasn’t until lately that they even started paying attention…don’t know why it, after so many months, finally caught folks “by surprise”. Of course the foundation of this goes back to before Reagan was POTUS w/ the Powell Memo & Project 2025 is a more “curated” vision or “evolution”, with some heavy-hitting ($$$) backers. Here is info about said Memo: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I was NOT "caught off guard", and I'm sure I wasn't alone. They telegraphed every move. All we had to do was pay attention and fill in a few blanks.
You fought a devastating civil war to determine the meaning of your Constitution and as an afterthought the meaning of freedom itself. Your country's prosecution of the Vietnam war led to a bitter examination of the meaning of patriotism. None of those issues were truly settled. Now you're facing an arguably more serious challenge on the meaning of American democracy, freedom, patriotism and the rule of law all wrapped up in one, thanks to Trump. If you get through this eventually you will have the opportunity to finally put these questions to bed. One thing you cannot do is just muddle through again.
Good points Russell.
Let's add more recent catastrophic events that show us that we are still a teenaged nation with lots to learn. We don't take ANY interest in the lessons of other nations. Just like teens, we think we know everything and our elders are just "old fashioned and out of date".
True. We didn't learn from the French that the Vietnamese were not going to accept a colonial power. But very recently we didn't learn from the Russians that Afghanistan wouldn't allow a foreign power to dominate them. So we replicated that 20 year mistake. Our ignorance is only exceeded by our arrogance.
And then Iraq. "We'll dump Hussein, install our guy, and the oil will pay for the whole adventure." We are still the same stupid teens. And remember that most teenagers go insane for a few years before they grow up - if they survive that long.
The fact that so many Americans still fly a Confederate battle flag tells us we never resolved that conflict. That flag should have been treated like a Nazi swastika. Union troops should have never left the South. The KKK should have been eradicated. Arrested and jailed for life. Millions of African Americans should have been given or allowed to keep the 40 acres and a mule they were promised. And there should have been Federal troops in place to make sure they could vote.
Of course, even after 20 years of Northern occupation, the Southern Planters - elite bigots and haters - would continue to fight for the "Cause". Same, same.
There is an American pattern here. We actually think we can march into a region, use our superior weaponry to bring a people to their knees and then walk away saying "Problem solved". The truth is if you are going to conquer a country, you need to stay and run it. Very messy. Maybe we should just think a little more before we make war.
Is there really much difference between Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Southern United States? Did we change their cultures? What if we had let the South go? Millions of former slaves would have migrated North. The Plantation Slavers would have had to figure out how to grow cotton without them. The North would have benefited from the new residents - we KNOW that immigrants work hard, pay taxes and commit much less crime. Hmm. Ironies abound.
And at least we wouldn't have the American Taliban running our government of the North right now! Isn't that really who has aligned with the Tech Oligarchs and a Real Estate Con Artist?
What an UnHoly Alliance. The Triumvirate of Terror and Bad Taste. The TTT. Trump/Tech/Taliban.
Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Vietnam was possibly the worst example of US exceptionalism in foreign policy. As Daniel Ellsberg is said to have told a government official: "We weren't on the wrong side, We were the wrong side."
Yet it's impacts are still felt by some in the US today.
https://apnews.com/article/saigon-vietnam-war-americans-50-years-f6b8b5823b99038fcdb87bdbcd4c0125
including Donald Trump apparently, who successfully dodged the draft five times
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/g-s1-63164/despite-improving-relations-u-s-will-be-absent-from-vietnams-war-anniversary-parade
"Our ignorance is only exceeded by our arrogance"
BINGO!!
Yuval Noah Harari's latest offering, Nexus, provides a guide to understanding the potential of what Heather has laid out in this letter.
The data that citizens freely provided for the services they need, can, in the wrong hands be weaponised against them. Think the Chinese social credit score... When all of this data is connected without oversight, and using AI, the people running it will have power like never before.
Thank you, Frank, for the nod to Yuval Noah Harari. One of our very best.
Not only are they fixed now for unprecedented power, but much worse, given their allies around Putin.
Also, professor Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power'.
I'm going to live off grid and grow vegetables.
Thanks, Phil. Now I do feel sillier.
Thanks for the quote - I'll add "The Road to Unfreedom" to my reading list!
Be patient, please, Richard. Especially in opening pages.
He spends a lot of time explaining his two main labels, "inevitability" and "eternity." The former: we can take things for granted. The latter: we can discard facts, evidence, agencies, law -- because we're forever in a poisonous spectacle of "others" ever threatening pure, innocent us.
Philosophy is great to understand but change comes with taking control of the narrative. When Biden sends a plane with “illegals” (their words) to places like Columbia no one takes notice. When Trump does it, all over the media.
Your actions speak louder than words. How about join the protesters?
This sure looks like sarcasm to me! An I wrong, Phil?
Correct you are, Cheryl.
And I think I'd best avoid such a tone in the future.
They are in fact
1) a waste of time and resources
2) yet another outsized Elon scam to amass more wealth
3) less than zero interest in people or even humanity
Updates are not enough. What are we doing about it. How can we get this message out
Sandra, I try in my world. The people that I try to reach firmly believe that DOGE is cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. I have shared HCR's Facebook post of this letter before wandering over here to engage with all the Substack LFAA readers and asked questions specific to the FFA, NOAH, and SSA. If I can, I'll report back on what they tell me.
It’s impossible to reach confirmed MAGA. Only actual bad events, like a tanking economy, might reach some. The rest believe it’s a “temporary reset” before promised prosperity.
I hear you! Sometimes I think talking about the programs our county already had in place is helpful. We need short list about what we are doing right. (dems) and what we could do better.
I can report that the two that I know most about (NOAA and FFA) fell on deaf ears and tons of either propaganda or "Biden's fault".
You can't change them, we must focus on us changing our narrative. Blame is getting us nowhere
i get it
Conversation, hitting on some vital sore spots, may suffice in many key ways, Sandra.
When Texas sues people and companies because they are adversely affecting the environment, you know that it has to be really, really bad.
Reading these quotes from Musk unveils a mind that has gone off the rails. When I ask why that is the case, I have to wonder what he is trying to gain. It can't be that he wants more money. For other people, getting rid of regulations that hamper business growth puts more money in the owerns' pockets. Musk doesn't need more money. He might want to get people to Mars to show he can do it.
But I am seeing, instead, a person who has no goals that make sense at all to a well functioning human. He is flailing because he has too much. And because he has too much, he has no restraints. Then it comes to me that money is not only the root of all evil but is a poison. Having too much of something can be lethal. Those we would consider to belong to the monied class are unmoored from what it looks like to be healthy and to care for the well-being of our neighbors. Musk embodies that malady.
Melinda, it has taken me several decades of nonscientific research to come to a conclusion: People who are self-absorbed have a high probability of becoming insane as they age. This is not dementia, but a different kind of insanity.
I have known examples, both personally and from a distance, who confirm my postulate. People who are focused on their own needs and wants, their own ideas and goals, without taking a break to consider or serve others, eventually lose touch with reality. For some, their insanity is relatively harmless and they become eccentric, weird, incapable of relating to other people, thus, isolated.
Others' insanity makes them sociopathic. They have lost all semblance of empathy or compassion. They are incapable of grasping how their self-serving actions could harm others or why that even matters.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have both led lives of self-absorption. They are both insane and fall into the latter, sociopathic category.
This sounds like a dream-conspiracy unfolding in a limited series made-for-small screen TV. A prequel or premiere of yet to come dystopian screen play as it becomes reality and morphs into regular news broadcasting by season two. Why do I feel we are living Hunger Games meeting The Apprentice?
Don't forget the set in Gilead part.
Warren Zevon once sang: "Bring lawyers, guns and money...the shit has hit the fan." Although I would eliminate the ammunition...
"Alarming" is putting it mildly! This has been one of the most horrifying articles I've ever read from Dr. Heather. Consider also that she has distilled her many hours of researching this topic into this article and we're probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg of the Musk-Starlink-Mars takeover of our country's resources, including his data mining efforts.
Kathleen, I totally agree. If this planet is destroyed, it will happen because of the actions of a handful of self-absorbed A-holes intent on gutting every tiny sliver of usable materials for their own profit long before the sun goes supernova.
This is undeniably what is happening to America now - the early stages. Listen to this Venezuelan woman describe how it happened in her country.
https://substack.com/@democraticwarrior/note/c-114873470?r=73vlo&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
This is how we can stop it from happening. Please help me get this idea to well connected people who can get this started:
https://substack.com/@lisawinfeld/note/c-114133014?r=73vlo&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Until Fox and Newsmax are held accountable for lying, we can’t expect change
I too had read about Trump pushing Starlink on countries to lower their tariffs. Super poor countries like Vietnam sign up hoping that they can get a reduction in economies that only export because their population cannot afford to buy imported goods.
Also, about the gathering of data, I attended a talk by a tech security expert who told us that it was dangerous to consolidate all information in one place, because it makes any hack that much more devastating. So, now my daughter is saying that an advantage of Germany not having modernized their medical system to put things online is that our data cannot be hacked. That is starting to seem like a benefit even though it can seem annoying to some.
Substacker Zev Shalev has been doing a series on the Tech Bros collaborative damages to our nation, and their bigger goals with it in his series The New Feudalism. I recommend it. https://www.narativ.org/s/the-new-feudalism
Read slowly unless you can stomach the dystopian ideas in one sitting.
Musk and his wealthy collaborators should go to Mars and leave the earth to ordinary people who want to live in a community that allows face to face contacts. Wealthy people living in castle like homes appear lost being a human.
Move fast and break people
Agreed
Musk and Trump think that any money spent on our schools, health care, infrastructure, etc is waste, fraud and abuse because they think all the money belongs to them. They themselves, if they were all alone, with no one to work in their businesses or buy their products or pay taxes, would be poor indeed. We the people generate wealth, and that money needs to benefit all of us, and not line their pockets or fulfill their crazy techno dreams.
Currently reading a book about the Black Death. (1346)
The attitudes of trump. Musk et all exactly - and I MEAN "exactly" - mirror those of the feudal lords in Medieval Europe.
What happened to the progress we made in the last 600 years?
I think maybe the Industrial Revolution and technological progress that our primate minds and souls cannot possibly keep up with happened?
I guess the odds are stacked against us. We and the people who raised us grew up with small town and medium town and big town newspapers, and national legacy newspapers, and many with the time to read them and wash our dirty smudgy fingers afterward (and with NPR and its tote bags for the educated elites), and three homogenized networks of evening news and some with tv trays with tv dinners if we didn’t have the time (plus the MacNeil/Lehrer Report—for the educated elites with their black & white 13” TVs and bunny ears). Investigative journalists were so glamorous, portrayed by Robert Redford and all, that we knew their names! And we believed in deep throat and in horrible people like Barry Goldwater doing the right thing in the Senate because they were patriots first. So that is a tough frame of reference from which to predict that our current Republican Senate is a unified gelatinous spineless blob of Me-First-Power-Good! What-Constitutional-Oath? Whose-Constituents? criminality. We have probably known for a while that the Democratic Senators just go around writing a “strongly worded letter” when hell really does break loose, but even so it was hard for us to conceive that the propaganda of American exceptionalism and the shining city on the hill and the world’s most deliberative body would not, could not get it together and do the right in the end. And that the country certainly would not be demanding it of them in time.
And then the folks who came after us only knew USA Today and Gannett and iHeartMedia and cable and “fair and balanced” and truthiness in Fox News and then the Internet and the algorithms and siloing and Breitbart and OAN Network and fake news and the dark web and the Facebook and the IG and the TikTok and the Snapchat and the Twitter and then the truth (ha!) social and the X and…
The End.
So of course, the US Senate does not contain any profiles in courage and is just ruled by lobbyists and billionaire donors and above all a single ruthless charismatic autocratic criminal.
And of course, the American public is not informed, is not discerning, is completely apathetic, is totally turned off and tuned out, and quite a bit more scared and desperate than a pre-Reagan time when we had just come off a couple of decades of civil rights advancements, and the wealth chasm was perhaps still just a fault line and there was still a middle class and heroin was a cautionary tale (again) and there was no fentanyl nor a large group of hopeless displaced ignored citizens in hollowed out factory towns and small farmless dried up rural communities desperate for it.
So. The odds are totally stacked against us, and Obama is right: No one is going to rescue us. We have to do that ourselves. But it seems like we need an intervention first. And who is going to stage that? What degree of rock bottom will it take for a nation-wide auto-intervention, and as always with rock bottom, will it be (is it) too late?
Thank you for that, Bow! You're now due for much needed and well deserved half hour coffee break! Yes, the fall is bad enough - but it's hitting the rock bottom that will cause the problem. We'll have people fighting to survive - and people fighting to have trump survive. And a vast swathe in the middle, wandering around aimlessly, looking for a "Magic Savior."
I just hope he turns out to be a Liberal - not some Gollum the Project 25 guys dream up.
Two things, no, three, happened to me yesterday, and so I'll take my leave from here now. -- unless medical miracles can be made to appear..
I received word that, TEN DAYS ago now, Mass General had received data from the transponder I've been loosely tethered to for 12 years which had beamed out an afib event. (My day wa s spent spiraling between phone calls, next day appointments in Boston I couldn't easily accomplish, a video call, then no call at all, realizing my cardiologist had not yet seen the data either. etc. etc.)
Then , also yesterday, I realized I was experiencing a sharp decline in the vision of my right eye which makes reading and typing way more difficult than I've ever experienced..
And third, my remarks yesterday here to Phil Balla detailing his profound -- and previously ignored -- error in his mistaken understanding of the links he keeps repeatedly asserting between the Powell Memorandum, achievement testing, the decline of humanities, and educator's and schools perfidy in all this is far better explained by other variables in modern society have all managed to elude him or escape him entirely or, perhaps, outright ignore.
The only out for me at this point is withdrawal from Substack. I'll have to content myself with showing up -- peacefully, of course -- on the streets. with the rest of you June 14 . . .
Sayonara.
Bowpeep, this is gold. Thank you.
It's simple, just walk out the door and protest
Yep. It’s the full-blown epitome of reductionist-materialistic thinking, the philosophy that has dominated ‘modern’ Western thinking for 400 years, and still does. The quantum physicist David Bohm already said that “this fragmented thinking may well lead to our extinction.” The tech bros seem absolutely determined to make this prophecy come true.
How can we think for a minute that we are going to colonise a place that has no air or water ? Is there no sane person left in the governement ? And in the mean time we are asked to recycle ! Do we hate our children ?
This information is particularly scary to me, coming as it does the day after I got a letter from Social Security mentioning that it had compared data from various sources and telling me they will reduce my benefits if I don't contact them in 10 days - from the date of the letter - with corrections to their assumptions. I paraphrase. Fortunately my congressional representative has offered help the their constituents who are have issues with the SSA. I've asked for their help.
The Doge incel boys have got your data, Jan. Things on you you've probably forgotten.
You're just one of the first specially targeted by them.
Pam Bondi at DOJ? Hegseth at DoD? Kash Patel at the F.B.I.? Kristi Noem at Homeland Security? J.D. Vance in the hock to Peter Thiel? They all serve Trump and Musk. Who in turn serve Putin and his oligarchs and their eastern Orthodox priests for hatred of the West.
Thanks Phil... HCR, this is a Serious Post... "Cybersecurity experts outside the administration disagree that a master database is secure or safe, as DOGE is bypassing normal safeguards, including neglecting to record who has accessed or changed database information. The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School explains that data can be altered or manipulated to redirect funds, for example, and that there is substantial risk that data can be hacked or leaked. It can be used to commit fraud or retaliate against individuals."
...
Knowledge Is Power... The Standard Practice for Managing USG Systems was access by need-to-know by Vetted Individuals with proper Clearances that are periodically reviewed.... I have worked in that Space... DOGE's Whiz Kids are, Kids... Musks Operational MO, is Move Fast, and Crash & Burn Fast, and then Move-On... Compare a Tesla to Porsche, and the Tesla comes across as a Crude Brick... I Fear What Bad Actors Could Do With That Info... Don't Forget That Musk Is Chummy With Putin & Xi... They Are Not Friends Of The USA... Musk has bought DJT, and DJT gave Musk the 'Keys' to the USG... Musk's Business Empire has always been built with USG Contracts... Now Musk Is Using The USG To Extend His Empire... Recall How Musk Used The White House & DJT To Sell Teslas.... Musk's Hallucinogens, and Accelerants are taking a Toll... A Wounded Animal Is The Most Dangerous...
Deport the foreigner Musk back to South Africa and don't allow him back into the US. The blaming of Joe Biden for everything that Musk and Trump are fucking up is getting rather old.
Fortunately, no one has died from the Newark fiasco--yet. When are the airlines going to fight back? Are they afraid to publicly say anything. It's likely they are going to each lose billions of dollars this year because people are afraid to fly or to travel to the US.
Many of us commenting here have been terrified of what Musk's incompetent doge boys are doing with out data. A Social Security worker in New York said that their office gets at least one complaint a day that Musk's boys have updated their records as being dead. And there are hundreds of SSA offices across the US.
Coming back from the dead is not as simple as updating their SSA records. Pretty much ALL of their funds are frozen and since they are "dead" it's very difficult to be "undead."
Musk and Trump and the rest of his incompetent sycophants don't give a damn about any of them including whether they die.
The blaming of Biden is getting so old. A meme circulating this week proclaimed that Trump was renaming the San Andreas Fault "Biden's Fault" -- I thought that summed it up pretty well while also being funny.
Gary, I'd love to see Musk deported. But then I thought about it more. He would still control Starlink. Once the MAGAs have been ousted, we should nationalize Starlink and SpaceX. I view them as utilities that serve the public.
And let's face it. Musk has violated so many laws, that he really belongs in a prison serving multiple life sentences. But where? How about Alcatraz! He can easily afford to fund the renovations to house a prisoner of one. Give him an electric golf cart and all the Ketamine he wants.
Yes, indeed, Apache. "Serious."
As I have been for over 25 years trying to get humanities and essay writing back in the schools so people could see beyond testing's priorities, could see the millions of "others" badly hurt by what the billionaires were doing.
You are totally on the mark Phil. Ironically named SOL testing assesses little, teaches nothing, and bankrupts the very core of education. Written responses, particularly in longer form, such as essays, demand a personal investment of organized thought. It’s an effort that demonstrates a level of understanding at the same time the act itself teaches.
Any gamer can at a minimum eke out a pass from SOL without any subject matter mastery. SOL testing provides at most a demeaning human experience. Come to think of it, this is exactly what corporate life needs to cultivate most.
Thanks Phil... Those efforts are Valuable.. I think that it will take more than that as well... We should teach our Kids to become Life-Long Learners with a lot of Curiosity... I went to some Good Schools, but I am mostly Self-Taught... We should instill a Thirst-4-Knowledge in our Children... Mainstream Culture's Superficial Thirst For Spectacle Has Given Us DJT...
Things much worse, dear Apache, than thirst for spectacle.
Although Putin has long used his spectacle of a crazed, degenerate West spectacularly threatening Russian white, Orthodox purity.
As his U.S. asset in the White House used the spectacle of "immigrants eating the dogs and cats" and much more alarmism he learned from Putin and Orban.
Testing kills what you call thirst for knowledge and a lot of curiosity. It puts the abstractions of categories and linearities in place of the humanities they replaced. America got blinded as to what the billionaires were doing -- active, well-funded campaigns by Heritage and ALEC and many more to inure people to the human costs mounting, and to blind them additionally by testing's unhuman priorities.
Thanks Phil.... DJT is the Perfect Asset... Putin Read His Mark Perfectly....
Especially one on ketamine.
That is horrible! Thank goodness your rep can help! I sincerely hope it works out for you.
My mother-in-law worked with our Congresscritter's office to increase her SSA benefits because of one of the donut hole issues created when Reagan forced all of the Federal workers to be part of the SSA pool. Her ex gets over $5000/mo and she gets less than $900. After a year of trying to deal with the OMB we gave up. If her ex dies first she will get the entire $5k each month plus her SS but until then $900.
$5K? I was able to wait until age 70 to start taking SS, but I don't get that much. And I was able to pay the max into the system for over thirty years. Hmmm. There's got to be some strange math in the system somewhere.
GJ and James. THE LAW CHANGED in January, before Biden left office.
If you want to know about it check with SSA and watch Ed Weir. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNErxX_y3Do
I was a "lucky" beneficiary of that change as it wiped out the WEP and GPO penalties. Now I'm getting the benefits I'm entitled to from working nearly 30 years before my 16 years teaching in public school. It's a whopping $400 increase up to $600/month - minus MediCare.
Yes - same here. Now they are wanting to reduce the earlier (pre-2024) payments from SSA - but they were already reduced because of the pension offset. They are just wrong. I really hope it doesn't affect my current payments; it's finally enough to live on.
SCAM Alert. SSA fraud is a criminal act.
Thank you, Bryan.
Jan--GET A LAWYER!!!!!!!!!
Yes, GET representation ASAP.
SSA does have a Office Inspector General (OIG). But, I would ask my attorney to handle any direct contact with SSA.
Sometimes your local Congressional Rep's Staffers are quite capable of taking first steps. (Staff are not prosecutors. ) But, any communications with your licensed attorney are confidential as a matter of law & the Attorneys' "Work Product" is also protected.
I once worked for SSA. They pay no attention to Congress to except send a form letter.
Yes. I was strategizing looking for assistance to help confirm, identify the particular MO ... then others certainly NOT the client --- nail the Perps.
Glad you have reps, mine are as useless as the Schitt they are piling up
My rep is Lauren Boebert, so no help for me.
See the reference to Ed Weir, above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNErxX_y3Do
Watch for SCAMS
I hope that your representative does well by you. I have concerns about getting one of those notices.
Item one: Some of us have been “extremely concerned” about the theft of our private data since Musk’s DOGE thugs stormed the SS administration in March.
Item two: AI is clearly a bad idea on so many levels. Using computers to help solve problems such as climate disruption is fine. But this ain’t that.
Item three: Aside from the venality and cruelty, Musk is clearly insane. The obsession with Mars and a dying sun that won’t happen for another 4 billion years is enough to make that statement. He is willing to throw our living Earth under the metaphorical bus to get there. Then there is the repopulation fantasy and the gobbedly gook about being a 3000 year old alien. I don’t think he was joking. I think he is delusional. And rich enough to do untold damage.
Annabel you succinctly encapsulate my reactions to this much needed elucidation of the machinations and madness at ‘play’ here. Thank you, and thank HCR.
And Cheeto is the Mad Hatter..
No argument here, the insane are running the asylum
And the GOP Congress still sits on its hands and looks the other way. May Karma come after them like the bitch she can be.
Funded by the oligarchs.
If elmo had to take a drug test (as do many govt employees on their way to that level of authority and responsibility) he’d outright fail and not be hired. Money buys influence. I don’t know anything about ketamine, but. We know by his own admission he is full of it.
He certainly seems to be grossly exceeding the useful dosage, which to me needs to be monitored by appropriately qualified observers and may require limitations in when, where, and how much can be used. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7994242/
I try to take the minimum of any prescribed drugs, such as using only 2 hydrocodone (of the 20 prescribed), tablets after triple hernia surgery. I quit accepting Vicodin prescriptions after dental work, preferring to accept the pain rather than the distorted thinking I experienced after just one dose. I had dosed off after an early dental appointment and was awakened by a loud noise outside, dreaming it was the pesky terrorists that drove through the neighborhood every 4th day at noon, shooting wildly at anything and every thing. I felt annoyed, thinking I'd have to get my gun and find my ammo to at least shoot back at them (like I had done in Vietnam when we had a little bit of harassing gun fire coming in at a combat engineering camp). As my head slowly cleared, I began to realize I don't have any ammo, nor any guns and there were certainly no terrorists driving through the neighborhood every 4 days.
Vicodin gives me headaches worse than migraines. I discovered with my recent knee replacement surgery that hydromorphone (dilaudid) is the worst drug ever for messing with my brain. I had to refill one pain med because I could NOT take the hydromorphone, but I have about half of that refill left.
Ask for Toradol/keterolac. It’s a massive anti-inflammatory without all the crazy side effects. I have both pills and injections and found it works better than Oxy, morphine or any of the other myriad migraine rescue medications. It does wonders when my arthritis acts up and I can barely walk. Doctors don’t normally prescribe it and I’ll never understand why. It can be hard on the kidneys.
I used to take a lot of Ibuprofen but quit totally as they are trying to find out how much kidney damage I accumulated from the only suspected cause, Ibuprofen.
My kidney damage was caused by the lithotripsy they did for kidney stones. I’m sure of it. Since it doesn’t take as much Toradol to clear up my pain I figure I’m better off than constantly taking ibuprofen and Tylenol is useless.
I ended up using a free medication deactivation packet provided by a local drugstore in California for the 19 of 20 prescribed hydrocodone tablets I didn't use. Though that is not so clear in the link, see https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-650.pdf
More specific info to what I used is at https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2023-10-31/ct-is-giving-away-thousands-of-pouches-to-safely-deactivate-drugs-the-hope-is-to-prevent-overdoses
"...The goal is to give people a convenient way to dispose of unused or expired opioids, or other prescription drugs, so they’re not misused and do not pollute the environment.
Kelly Juleson-Scopino demonstrated how to pour expired liquid medication into one of the disposal pouches. The pouches can also destroy unwanted pills, most illicit drugs, vape fluids, and opioids including fentanyl..."
Oregon has a "drug take back" program; pharmacies and police agencies collect unused prescription meds and illegal drugs (should you find some inconveniently in your possession) in an anonymous, locked drop box. Keeps stuff out of the landfill and sewer systems.
Students and 2 friends did describe finding illegal drugs hidden in their personal areas, suspected to have been hidden by roommates, or frequent visitors that didn't want them found in their own personal areas. They seemed to usually just flush them down the toilet, not wanting to get anyone in trouble, but at least once doing it front of the person suspected of hiding them (without accusing the person of hiding them.
I tend to suggest they get help before it becomes necessary for me to get help for them. So far it seems several have gotten the help they needed, though two left the school voluntarily, before eventually getting the help they needed.
I tend to trust recovered former addicts more than people who haven't found out the hard way, what adverse affects from drugs can be. They are often the best anti-drug advocates (speaking from experience I don't need or want).
Dodged the bullet on those, thankfully
It’s a massive con to gather investment A) money, B) attention, and a misguided notion that Musk has a serious interest in anything other than A & B.
Absolutely agree. He is clinically insane. Psychotic and delusional and because people have bought his bullshit that he’s a “genius” he keeps getting away his lunacy. FFS— he’s so stupid that he doesn’t even know that if/when Earth is incinerated in billions of years Mars will be too? This is the same man who thinks babies will have bigger brains if women have C-sections. He’s an idiot who is only good at conning people.
He is as warped as chump. I recommend that people read changes to Terms of Service and such because I’ll bet that they add stuff absolving them of responsibility if they use our information like I think they will. Or keep lawyers on retainer.
AI can be a useful tool for some aspects of scientific research, but it cannot create knowledge. It can at best help refine existing knowledge and make analogies. But it cannot create hallucinate and get things wrong. Whatever AI touches must be carefully examined to see if it corrupts the ground truth or extends it in a useful way. It will be a long time before computers can be trusted to do real research.
In the meantime DOGE is killing the goose that has laid the golden eggs, because government funded research is the foundation upon which US businesses were built, NIH and NSF funded labs have made discoveries that more than paid for the investments the government made. Without continuing these grant programs, labs will shut down in the USA and move to other nations that are not run by fantasist fascists. Australia, Europe, and China are already recruiting our best and brightest to go work in labs they are funding. Discoveries that could have been made in the USA and turned into products by US companies will instead be made overseas and monetized by our less foolishly led global competitors.
Annabel, I absolutely put the fascination with AI in my "in what world is this a good idea?" department. I cannot comprehend any way that it makes sense.
Me either and my husband and I are both software engineers.
Yes, we are worrying about the sun destroying the earth in 5 billion years as we rush along to destroy the earth in 10pm years. What morons they are.
“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”????? I guess the FAA is really important for space travel. Geez, this guy is the Lex Luthor of our time! Send him to Mars right now!
Send the whole lot, immediately with a 1000 dollars in pocket change. I would be fine with diverting the necessary funds to that …and so poetic given the proposal offered immigrants to repatriate.
👍 Elon should be on the maiden trip.
I've long had the idea that he should pilot the next Tesla roadster to be shot into space... pack it with as much oxygen as it will hold and send him on his way into the cosmos.
Sounds like the perfect rosd trip to me! :-D
I think this is the scariest one yet.
The BS about Earth being eaten by the Sun so we gotta move to Mars is kinda like moving to a point 2 blocks away during the Palisades fire.
If you're not terrified of this, there's something really wrong with you.
'Musk continued: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”' Guess what, Elon? Humanity IS forever destined to be confined to Earth. You fricken idiot!
I do hope that Ray Bradbury's short sci-fi novel The Martian Chronicles comes true. You may recall that in the novel, the Martians kill all the astronauts who are on the first few space missions.
This consolidation of data and the anticipated dastardly abuse has me scared shitless. And no one will give a f*ck to help those damaged by the criminal abuse they weilded. The total recklessness of this Administration is beyond the pale.
I highly recommend reading the full Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center study Heather mentions…
https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/efficiency-%E2%88%92-or-empire-how-elon-musks-hostile-takeover-could-end-government-as-we-know-it/
Thanks for signaling this article Steve. The author, as she ends her terrifying scenario, warns the reader that America must respond quickly to these threats if there is to be any hope of the continuation of democracy. I cannot see that happening. If 75% of the citizens of our country were reading Dr. Richardson's articles each day, I think we'd have a chance. But that will never be the case, sadly.
You’re welcome. And yes, time is of the essence. DOGE is moving fast to beat any effort that might develop to stop it. The forces of darkness have often been more creative than the forces of light. One exception was the Sustainable America plan authorized by President Clinton. First published in 1996 by the Presidents Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), it was a plan for cultural transformation put together by a team led by then EPA head Carol Browner with active involvement by Al Gore. The tragedy of this project is it never got any publicity… No coverage by the New York Times for example… And then Al Gore never mentioned it during his 2000 campaign because he was afraid the Republicans would label him as a tree hugger. This plan and all the relevant documents are still online and available to inspire those of us who (like me) seek to create an awareness of how much better the future can be if we come together as one.
https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/PCSD/Publications/index.html
I don’t want anything controlled by billionaires! I never gave Elon Musk, President Trump, Big Balls,etc my permission for any of my personal data to be looked at, and never ever to be collected at all. No one needs my information. Collecting personal data without my consent and permission on what’s being collected, is a hard no. The government has some information about me on the necessary documents, other than that, no other information is needed. My adult daughters don’t have permission or access. They won’t until I give them my information.
Doge is not really saving any money
I want to write more, but I can’t keep my eyes open.
Good Night 💤
While I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, Vicki, I would like to interject a thought about rejecting “billionaires.” I believe we should always be cautious about over-generalizing. Not ALL billionaires are awful, bad, corrupt, and/or sleazy people. I know Bernie Sanders continually slams “Billionaires,” but several years ago his “line” used to be “millionaires and billionaires,” but once HE discovered that HE was a millionaire, the “millionaire” part got dropped. And, yes, I know that there is a HUGE difference (dollarwise) between the two entities, I’m willing to go out on a limb to say that some billionaires can be considered as worthy of our trust. I have recently been listening to the speeches of IL Gov. JB Pritzker. Yes, according to Forbes magazine, he is worth $3.7 billion (2025), but, from what I’ve been able to uncover, he has made great strides in improving the IL budget deficit by passing BALANCED budgets for several years and while doing that he has not “borrowed” money from state employee retirement funds. (That has been a problem in IL for over 60 years and has been perpetuated by Republican and Democratic administrations.) Not only has Pritzker been fiscally responsible, I look forward to seeing/hearing him speak to the larger public, especially on such “powerful” MAGAphones as FOX News.
Yes, the state pension funds (police, fire, teachers, etc.) are still struggling, but a problem that took 60 years to create ain’t gonna be solved in 1 year.
So, overgeneralization is probably something to be avoided, especially since it might come back to bite us in “the end.”
Thank you. I don’t usually over generalize in lumping people into a category because of their race, religion, etc. I understand all billionaires and others who have wealth are not all alike. JB Pritzker is doing great things. As are others.
Yup, I hope I didn’t come across too sternly or like a grump! We need to stick together, and I’d urge Bernie to erase “Billionaires” from his speeches. We need rich, poor, middle class Americans to educate Trump and his MAGA Millions!! Hey, Donald - “due process” - like when you have been on trial numerous times…
Good thing I was ablebto keep my eyes open till I finished reading your comment Vicki. Now, after writing this reply I'm the one going back to bed...💤💤💤💤
will you post where it has the most impact? social media.
One tiny problem with Musk’s plan is that if our sun burns earth it will burn Mars too. Hmmmm. Guess he’s not so smart after all.
Insane and delusional. Full Stop.
As the Sun goes that way, it’s not simply inner planets. It’s the end of the solar system. I doubt anyone wants to stick around for that, as if one could.
To be perfectly honest, I look bad enough at 80.
God alone knows what I'd look like at 5 billion. . .
In my next life I’m gonna be tall…
You're a Scot - you're supposed to be small. Billy Connolly was only called "The Big Yin" because he loomed over the rest at 6ft.
As my Glaswegian husband used to say "God doesn't make diamonds the size of bricks. . ."
I'm 75 and I buried a walker and a couple of silver dollars to remind future generations that....oh never mind.
Let others be the judge. We haven’t yet arrived at that point in time. Yet I imagine you’ll appear absolutely beatific.
For myself, I suspect time is an illusion only useful to us as an imaginary construct due to our limitations.
i suspect Tariffs might be as much smoke screen as anything. Keep us jumping about tariffs while Musk steals our info.
The common thread tying Musk, Trump and the other tech bros together is deep seated greivance.
As they fail, in public, they will get worse. And they are failing.
There are no savings to be found by Doge, just cuts to important, often life saving programs.
There are no better terms of trade at the end of the tariff rainbow, just stagflation.
We are being ruled not by economic considerations but by disturbed psychologies.
And it will get worse.
https://on.ft.com/4jKUzBN
They are bent on destroying everything, and only creating things that benefit them personally.
Sadly, we ain’t seen nothing yet…
I read Trump is selling a massive announcement next week that will be amazing and it doesn’t have to do with tariffs. Right after he goes to the Saudi’s or talks Netanyahu into giving him Gaza. He wants us to be hanging on the edge of our seats until this announcement that I’m sure is something that enriches him further. I’m puzzled why the Saudi’s, with all their money, need him to develop real estate there. How can they even stand to listen to him talk?
If Musk and Trump have my data, I demand to know Trump’s grades in school, his tax records and all of his medical records for the past 10 years. Oh and let’s have Musk’s mental health records too.
And how about Musk's immigration information. He should be deported and his citizenship revoked. There's a spot in El Salvador we could send him to.
State secrets all…
There are no mental health records for Musk. He self medicates and gets his drugs on the black market.
How many of the people who voted for Trump understood that they were really voting for someone who believes in the necessity of colonizing Mars? What are we, the people, prepared to do about this misplaced priority?
Not one MAGA I know has changed their mind. They believe the USA is broken and Trump is fixing it. We read honest intelligent info while the others watch Fox, Newsmax and false info on Meta. HCR info continue to fall on the ears of already believers.
Ignorance is a disease, we get it from not paying attention. It corrupts the mind and stills the imagination. The people who actually brought the current corruption to fruition were "low information voters". MAGAts are very low information folks as well, as they only have one line of false information they will tolerate.
Yeah. Willing victims of TV as an information source.
More like social media such as Facebook and Xitter..
But whose job is it to inform them? If ½ of insta post attacked the issues instead of people we would be slaying trump. Getting tired of see in posts saying MAGA are uneducated or worse
Social Security has the personal data of millions of people, data we Americans entrusted to Social Security so it could fulfill its function of administering Social Security accounts and distributing Social Security checks. Doge has no authority to look at the data, nor does it have any need to. Doge says they require access to the data to combat "waste, fraud, and abuse." But Doge has no evidence of widespread fraud or abuse in the system. Before anyone grants them access to the data, they must first prove that waste and abuse exist. They have not. As far as abuse goes, it is Doge who is abusing us by violating our data privacy to rummage around in it, while the law fumbles about wondering if maybe this is illegal. By the time any ruling is made to enjoin Doge from touching that data, they will have the data and be busy building the data models Musk wants to use against us.
So true. I don’t think we can get our data back.
“ Social Security checks. Doge has no authority to look at the data, nor does it have any need to. “
It’s very probably this: Other people in the rump cabinet, DHS and ethni-phobes like S. Miller, have a keen interest in the SS database to track down recent immigrants who’ve been working and got SSNs and are paying SS deductions and payroll tax deductions into “the system.” That’s all. Nothing to do with any puported goal of doge. Oh yeah, and as someone put it, to “seek out places where there is trust in the American system and destroy it”, which they are doing.
They “must” do nothing. So far…
"Musk has the power of the United States government behind him."
Whatever that might be, it is not anything like a "government of, by, and for the people."
'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' may have been the actual inspiration and source material, possibly gleaned from one of the lost chapters of Emmanuel Goldstein's manifesto(whether he wrote it or actually ever existed was always hard to ascertain). Threatening to the Party's designs and intentions, the mysterious and subversive book within the book that is 'Nineteen Eighty-four'. Adding to the bewilderment, George Orwell was dead within a year of its publication but had mentioned that he meant it to be a warning, not a how-to manual.
Narcissistic authoritarians with no capacity for empathy have through all history seized control of organizations—religions, corporations, universities, and nations and led them to ruin. More than one novel narrates living the event from the view of the victims.
This presidency and its MAGA disciples are doing to the U.S. exactly what was done to the corporations he and his flying monkeys bankrupted while screwing over contractors and employees that he used along the way. When the same narcissist personality leads just two political parties, the ruling authoritarians ultimately support each other rather than the citizen constituents.