Tag: Elon Musk

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Sam and Martha-Ann Talk It Over

“The liberal media is after my ass once again, Martha. They can’t even understand the simple explanations I gave to the Wall Street Journal. These assholes have it ass-backwards; they are braying like jackasses in the wilderness and the fog of democrat donkey-land. Lord, if I didn’t have my faith to sustain me. . . .”

“Listen to me: you and Clarence have been playing fast and loose with Roberts and the media. Putting the blame for the flags on me I can accept. But then saying you wanted them taken down but couldn’t because of my ‘property rights’. . . sweet Jesus, Sam, what were you thinking? Yes, I bought the Virginia house with inherited money, but you are half-owner because we were dumb enough to get married. I’ve kept a private life since you got appointed to the Court. I’ve also kept the family together, as you know.

“But you looked like a complete jerk for trying to throw me under the bus.”

“My dear, I was merely trying to explain that the law gives me no power to impinge on your—my spouse’s―behavior, and that of course limits my power to apologize. I recognize that your feelings may have been hurt, but we shall stand together on this, I hope. The main issue was my total rejection of the argument to recuse myself, fully in accordance with the Court’s adopted code of ethics. Justice Roberts will stand by me, I’m sure.”

“You’ve been talking like Elon Musk, like nobody can touch you. How about a little humility for a change? I’ve seen how angry you get at home.”

“I’m angry because the world is turning against all my values. Roberts and my conservative colleagues will stand by me. The Court’s ethics code has no enforcement mechanism, and besides it says that justices are obligated not to recuse themselves. Raskin’s proposal about the due process clause will never fly with this Court. The furor about the gifts and my ties to the wealthy is just more political assassination, as I noted in my first paragraph.

“And Biden will do nothing. Even the partisan Politico knows this: ‘He has essentially stood idly by while the court has upended key aspects of American life—from abortion to affirmative action—and angered huge swaths of the country, likely contributing to the widespread national discontent that threatens his reelection.’”

“We must stick by our Christian values, Sam. I’ll never regret flying the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag and I know we both believe in its moral code. Onward Christian soldiers. Now that Trump has been crucified in that corrupt New York court, I will join with you in the battle.”

Update: For the realities behind these events, please read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/opinion/columnists/supreme-court-alito-flag.html

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The Clown Prince of Money

What’s with that bomber jacket? Everything about this man (well, almost everything) is appalling. The most recent example is the now-infamous interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Since the internet is now full of foul language, who can be shocked? What’s shocking is the childish way Elon thinks. When his advertisers fled from “X” he responded like they were bullying him (shades of his youth), blackmailing him. Sounds to me like a schoolyard incident with a schoolyard response.

Jonathan Chait called him out on this:

In general, blackmail is a crime where the criminal demands payment from the victim. It does not involve the criminal refusing to give money to the victim for a service they don’t want. . . . Specifically, declining to spend advertising money on a platform because the owner not only permits crazy and offensive comments to proliferate on it but also personally contributes his own crazy and offensive comments to the site, is not only not blackmail, it’s not even in the same universe as blackmail.

We put up with Elon’s conspiracies and Asperger-ish behavior for two reasons. One, he’s the world’s richest man, reason enough for some to ratify his charisma; and two, the U.S. government has sold out to him with its total dependence on contracts with his firms Space-X and Starlink. So we are all now in bed with a madman.

Tesla Cybertruck

The truck’s many flaws are recounted here, and they may be sufficient to kill it. But the competition isn’t really from Ford or GM or Ram. Its aim is to attract the people who bought Hummers, the truck of poseurs and polluters. Will there be enough of these to buy something that looks like it was “assembled in a dude’s basement”? Others think it looks “very sexy.”

Elon, as we know, is a risk-taker. And maybe the Intelligencer had it right: “Making expensive niche products for people with too much money tends to be a really great business, and Musk has made himself the richest person in the world by being exceptionally good at that.”

Well, the problem is that he’s got to find new buyers in a market that’s declining. EV trucks are getting more expensive and fewer people seem to want them. We hope this trend will change, but the costly and flamboyant Cybertruck isn’t likely to do it.

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A Surfeit of Excess

You must have noticed that so many public figures are guilty of excesses of the grossest kind. Moderation is out, self-indulgence is in. Hate and acrimony have become the coin of the realm. No wonder antisemitism is on the rise.

The top newsmakers are all masters of excess, as they parade their unique versions of cultural debauchery: Putin’s historically induced fantasies of conquest verge on madness; Musk raises egotism to new heights; Greene glories in her own idiocy; Santos gives new meaning to the concept of truth; Bankman-Fried tries to outdo Bernie Madoff. Trump, to be sure, is godfather to them all.

For sheer cultural excess, the scourge of guns in America outdoes them all.

About a year ago in a sort of whimsical piece I took to praising Oscar Wilde and his notion that “nothing succeeds like excess.” Maybe I should have thought twice about endorsing this idea. The common American culture has become excessively debauched in so many ways, and not only by the far right.

Liberal identity politics has sometimes assumed that people from red states are culturally and politically backward—and so it offers a kind of “cultural imperialism” to help these benighted souls. This is a sort of culture shock, often just another form of chauvinism like American exceptionalism. American life is full of such examples, as in the half-century it took to finally give women the right to vote. Racism is an extreme form of cultural chauvinism.

In my Oscar Wilde piece, I took on the truism that nothing succeeds like success, the notion that Oscar parodied. Another way of saying this is that “North Americans commonly believe that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the value that wealth is good and important.” Mm-hmm, and do we really believe that the wealthy deserve all their privileges?

The values of our society, which used to represent ideal conditions or accepted truths, seem to have lost their power. The norms that enforce them, like expecting fairness in a transaction, are consistently breached. How are we supposed to judge the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Or the immigration debate, which has been clouded over with years of ranting on both sides?

My rant here is not going to change anything. To expect us to return to Aristotle’s golden mean—avoiding extremes, the measure of virtue—is a fool’s errand. Most people don’t know who Aristotle is.

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American Morons

Frank Rich: The Casualties of a ‘Wartime Presidency’

Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections

Cuomo blasts McConnell’s ‘dumb, vicious’ and ‘ugly’ opposition to ‘blue state’ coronavirus bailouts

Before we get into our homegrown examples, consider that the British aren’t exempt. When asked for his response to America’s decline as a global power, Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University, replied: “I feel a desperate sadness.” Oh dear, Tim, let me apply a damp towel to your forehead.

Or perhaps you need an injection of bleach, recommended Thursday by El Cheeto as a possible cure for Covid—which of course could kill you. Every day the snake-oil salesman seems to lay out a new cure or remedy in his medicine shows. “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” Deborah Birx, the president’s chief medical toady, sat on her hands for this one. Fauci was not in the room.

These incoherent gibberings are probably known to most of you. Here are a couple of classics. In late February he said, “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.” And on March 13: “Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility [for the pandemic] at all, because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time. It wasn’t meant for this kind of an event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about.”

This week McConnell really endeared himself to the governors when he recommended the states go bankrupt if they couldn’t pay their bills. His office said there will be no “blue-state bailouts.” What a kindly old gent Mitch is. Governor Cuomo responded: “15,000 people died in New York, but they were predominantly Democrats so why should we help them?”

The morons are not only in Washington. The great wizard Elon Musk pronounced in March, “The coronavirus panic is dumb.” And now Frank Rich tells us that

in Oklahoma, there’s Carol Hefner, a co-chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, who told the Times that because her state gets “a lot of wind” and is topographically flat, it is “in a much better position than many of the other states to go ahead and open back up.” Surely the Flat Earth Society has never had a better spokesperson.

The best explanation for opening up came from the mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman (please, no relation) who said it’s time to open the casinos: “Assume everybody is a carrier. And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

Finally, Brian Kemp, the loony governor of Georgia, whose recipe for reopening the state you should hear firsthand. Even Trump got unnerved by that.