Tag: Elon Musk

One Shining Moment

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Today I put up a link to that video of SpaceX’s booster rocket returning to the launching pad like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  It was beyond amazing.  It was preposterous.  How could the control system of this rocket have it fall out of the sky like a stone, then brake and maneuver under power and stop in mid-air exactly at the docking station and be caught by a mechanical hand as if it were a ballpoint pen.  It’s beyond technology it’s some kind of black magic.

Well, it did me good to see something positive online for the first time in years.  Sure, it doesn’t really impact my life in any way that can be measured.  I don’t even own any stock in SpaceX.  And I don’t really think that going to Mars has any benefits for humans that could be identified in the next hundred years.  But what I am seeing is men using their intelligence to do things and make things that have never been done or made before.  And every time this happens the side effects from such an endeavor always produce benefits that no one had even considered.  Computers are the side effects that accrued from trying to crack codes during WWII and building missiles and rockets.  We needed machines that could do the ballistic calculations faster than humans could.  If Musk manages to convince the US government to send a mission to Mars, I don’t doubt that the fallout from that project will be more useful than the information we get from going to Mars.

Humanity is a misbegotten collection of mostly psychotic apes.  Every time I look online, I see examples of brutality, depravity and stupidity that should cure anyone of having hope for this world.  But something like this gives me that rush of excitement and reminds me of what seemed possible back in the days when I was young.  Instead of the drab, hopeless world that the Al Gores and Greta Thunbergs try to convince kids to despair about; where we eke out a miserable existence under pathetic wind turbines and solar panels, we could have a world where the world’s energy needs could be completely provided by any number of powerful technologies.  Instead of the phony equity of fake scientists selected by racial and sexual quotas we could go back to a meritocracy where the best would be rewarded by the chance to achieve real breakthroughs in all the STEM applications.

Watching that rocket land on a dime in mid-air was like a shot of adrenaline.  These things can still be done and they should be done.  Hell, I would rather the US government had given SpaceX every penny of the 200+ billion dollars that they threw at the senseless and barbaric Ukraine war that we ginned up.  If we had, we’d probably already be on Mars.

Okay, I know this was all just pure emotion.  I let myself get caught up in that “Right Stuff” rah-rah feeling.  It reminded me of the sense of wonder I felt reading all those science fiction stories that Heinlein wrote back in the stone age.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with present day America.  The land of illegal alien cannibals that we pay billions of dollars to invade our country.  But for one shining moment it felt good.

This is the Validation of Science Fiction in Its Best and Truest Form

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This truly is magic.  Even the booster rocket is precisely controlled by the remarkable technology of Musk’s SpaceX.  This is science fiction come to life.

Science fiction was looking at the world and imagining how humans could use science to push the boundaries of what we could know and do.  This is the fruition of that imagining.  Jules Verne and H G Wells and Robert Heinlein and all the other visionaries led up to this.  And Elon Musk is the one who decided to make it happen.

Well done.

With Caterwauling Like This Musk Must be Doing Something Right

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When your fired election trust and safety team leader starts bandying about terms like hate speech and misinformation it must mean that the government gatekeepers are squealing like stuck pigs.

And then there’s the sanctimony about what amounts to censoring the news.

“But free speech, the product of X that upholds democracy, is not a technology company or a physical thing. Speech is evolving, complicated, and sticky. It requires tradeoffs, flexibility, and tough decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by an autocratic CEO with absolutist ideologies.”

“Tradeoffs, flexibility and tough decisions.”  What a pile of crap. She means hurting your enemies and helping your friends.  Another way of saying this is “some animals are more equal than others.”

Elon Musk’s immoral, dangerous, failing experiment in free speech

Imagine If This is Really True

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Imagine if there really were lawyers willing to sue employers for discrimination based on political views.  That might make a dent in the woke corporate crap currently going on.

Repent, the End is Nigh!

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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.  So if he tells me Twitter is doomed then it must be!

His proof:

“How long can this Twitter last? It must be a matter of months away from total collapse. Of course, I’ve been saying that for a year now, and I have no special insight into its financial matters. Now, however, things seem to be in a death spiral that is more than financial. It’s technical. While Musk tried his best to distract critics by blaming artificial intelligence companies allegedly scraping Twitter, a glitch in Twitter itself meant its computers were demanding data from its servers in an infinite loop. So Twitter was killing itself. It seems to be a mercy killing.”

Or maybe he’s just a typical Lefty that doesn’t want to pay eight bucks to get back his blue check mark on Twitter.  Waaa!  Waaa!  Waaa!

A Topical Quote for This Fourth of July

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I agree with this.  One of the few pleasant surprises of the last decade is Musk’s purchase of Twitter.  And as for the Orwell quote, the fraud is now well exposed.

 

Elon Musk Throttles the Throttlers

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The US inteligence agencies monitor hundreds of millions of tweets every day (a process known as scraping) to know who their enemies are and to use their friends at Google to throttle these voices on the internet.

Now Elon Musk has turned the tables on these mega-users.  He’s put the following limits on reading tweets:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

Now notice, these bots reading Twitter probably aren’t even verified accounts paying Elon his eight bucks a month.

So they can only read 600 posts a day.  And if they open new shell accounts those accounts can only read 300.

The feds are going to have fit.

Good!

 

 

Tucker’s First Twitter Commentary

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Tucker’s first opinion piece on Twitter dropped today.  It started out talking about the media pretending that Russia blew up their own dam in Ukraine just like they pretended that Russia blew up the NordStream pipeline.  Then he used this as a jumping off point to show how the media feeds the American public the talking points that the regime wants promulgated and ignores anything that isn’t sanctioned.  As a case in point he mentioned the recent UFO story.  And to drive the point home he compared it to the way information was handled in the Soviet Union.

It was a nice coherent ten minute piece.  It goes without saying there isn’t an opinion piece on any of the cable or broadcast news shows that I would listen to for ten minutes because it would be too painful.

Well done Tucker.  Keep it coming.  And well done Elon.  Without you there would be no place this could be seen.

What’s Next for Tucker Carlson?

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Well, now there’s no reason to watch Fox News anymore.  It should be interesting to see how Carlson decides to go forward from here.  I’m assuming he’s not hurting for money.  He should probably start a channel on Rumble and put up a paywall.  He’s one of the more interesting people in broadcasting.  People will pay to get his content.

The other possibility is he goes into politics.  That I see as more problematic.  Politics is a very dirty game.  If you don’t need to use it to make lots of dirty money it won’t be an interesting career.

I think Carlson could form some kind of relationship with the likes of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Salena Zito, Sharyl Attkisson and a few other real journalists to produce a media outlet that would provide the kind of reporting and opinion that can’t be found anywhere else in the media.  They would have believability.  That’s something that is so sorely lacking everywhere else.

If done right and without all the overhead that comes with a Fox News or a CNN, Carlson and a few reporters could break away from the dying landscape of network and cable news shows that no one needs or wants anymore.  News and analysis.  With the internet and a few resources like Rumble and maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter who needs studios and boardrooms?

Come to think of it, Carlson interviewed Musk last week.  Maybe those two could strike up a deal where Tucker’s content was available exclusively on Twitter with some of it behind a paywall.  It could make both of them a lot of money.  And it could serve as a model for the future.  I’ve heard that Musk wants to add a “substack” option to Twitter.  Having someone like Tucker Carlson as his first big “channel” might be just the thing he needs to steer talent to his platform.

So anyway, Tucker’s “firing” could be a very opportune moment to start seeing a new journalism.  Without the bloat of the dinosaur media, a cadre of people who want to tell interesting stories that have some resemblance to objective reality could provide a service that people would be willing to pay for.  I, even I, would pay a little bit for that.

Now it’s also certain that all the usual suspects on the Left will be gunning for Tucker Carlson.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a target for the Justice Department’s attack dogs.  Their hatred for him probably rivals how they feel about Donald Trump.  After all he’s another traitor to his class.  They’ve already once gone after his family at home.  He had to move away from Washington to protect them.  This is not a trivial threat.  Hopefully he’s made enough money to be able to afford professional security services.  But no one is safe from the abuse that the FBI can bring to bear.  We’ll have to see whether these problems crop up for him.

Well, these are interesting times.  Tucker Carlson has been the only truthful voice in mainstream news commentary.  I hope that he will be able to find a way to continue shining a light on the criminal activities of the Washington regime.  There isn’t any other voice out there that has both his reach and credibility.  Hopefully someone like Musk who has the reach and also the money to set up a platform for him will come along and take advantage of this interesting opportunity.