There Is No Conspiracy

Once again, fellow Trump haters, please stop with the 2024 election conspiracies.

Many Democrats and associated progressives an socialists are convinced that Donald Trump and Elon Musk cheated in the 2024 presidential election and insist that Kamala Harris is the rightful winner.  Musk, we are told, used his Starlink company to switch enough votes in all seven swing states to elect Trump.  The evidence, we are informed, is that Trump came right out and said it and that Musk said that he will go to jail for what he did for Trump if the Democrats regain control of Congress in November.  

Okay, Trump's comments can be easily discounted, because he's nothing but braggadocio.  No one takes seriously what he says.  As for Musk, he was likely referring to everything he's done for Trump since January 2025, not anything he might have done for him in October 2024.

But the biggest argument against this conspiracy theories is largely circumstantial.  I know of no voting machines that can be hacked by Starlink or by any other tech service.

So why do these theories persist?  Because these people cannot believe that people who stayed home on November 5, 2024 were not part of the problem (polls show that had those people voted, they would have been a bigger problem, Trump would have won by a larger margin).  Or because they can't believe that Harris was unpopular enough to lose every swing state.  Or maybe because these people simply cannot believe that 77 million of their fellow Americans cannot be so vile as to vote for Donald Trump.

They are.

So, please, folks, next time you want to say that Trump cheated to win . . . don't.  Please, don't. 

One Big Beautiful Feud

Remember when I said that Elon Musk wasn't really leaving the Trump regime, that he would still be around in some honorary form? I said that last week. I was wrong. What a difference a week makes. 

A very public argument between Trump and Musk erupted over the budget bill - the asininely titled "One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (note redundancy) with back-and-forth social-media bleats.   Musk, who spoke to CBS reporter David Pogue on "CBS Sunday Morning" - hardly a hard-hitting news program - said that Trump's budget proposals had too much spending and needed to be drastically cut.

Trump responded by saying that Musk, who, last time I checked, still owns Tesla, was upset because the "big beautiful bill" eliminated electric-vehicle tax breaks and added on his Truth Social platform that Musk "just went CRAZY!"

Musk used his personal account on his own platform X to declare that Trump would not have defeated Kamala Harris without his money and proportional efforts (sorry, Harris supporters, that's not enough to give her a reason for a comeback, Democrats do not let failed nominees have comebacks); Trump meanwhile,  threatened to cut Musk’s government contracts, and he ironically made a very valid point; even then-President Joe Biden hadn't tried to cut Musk's government contracts.  As for Musk, he claimed that Trump is indeed in the infamous Jeffrey Epstein files,  and then he reposted a comment on X calling for Trump’s impeachment. "Yes," Musk replied to the original commenter. 

And I thought that Musk was still in solid with Trump.  When I make a mistake, it's a big, beautiful one.😂

I think our new pope just performed his first miracle.  He hadn't even been in the shoes of the fisherman for three weeks, and chaos is already ensuing in the Trump regime.  Whatever the cause of the Trump-Musk split, this is far more entertaining and eye-opening that than split between President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 must have been, because Taft and Roosevelt had been close friends, and the two eventually reconciled.  Trump and Musk had a friendship born out of convenience, mutual self-aggrandizement, and an irrational fear of an America headed by a black woman with a Jewish husband.  Their enormous egos are cancelling each other out and will hopefully make it that much harder for either of them to turn the United States into Der Amerikanisches Reich.

So let's sit back and enjoy the show that is the Trump-Musk feud. 

Just when I tried to stop eating so much popcorn . . .. 😂

Musk Is Gone. Not.

Elon Musk served his long-awaited last day as a special government employee.  He gave a press conference from the White House explaining how he made changes to how government works and is accountable, and Trump praised him as having a great impact on government, a greater impact than anyone before in America history.

Alas, this is true.  Musk may be stepping down as director of the "Department" of Government Efficiency, but he will still most likely pull strings from the outside, and the "agency" he and Trump founded is more or less still in place, and it has all that personal data on every American it mined in the interim.  He is still a threat, and he is still a danger.  And with Tesla on the rocks, he has plenty of time to continue his assault on America as a private citizen.

As for Musk's black eye . . . apparently, he got into a row with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that got violent, but that's probably a rumor more than anything else.  Classic-rock fans may remember when the Doors appeared on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and guitarist Robby Krieger, having worn sunglasses for their performance in the first half of the show, turned out to have a black eye when he went sunglasses-free for the Doors' performance in the second half.  The story was that Jim Morrison punched Krieger in the eye during rehearsals at CBS Television City for the Smothers Brothers' show, but in fact, Krieger got his black eye from a car crash he'd recently been in.  So I don't really think Bessent punched Musk any more than I believed Jim Morrison punched Robby Krieger.  But however Musk got his black eye, he deserved it.

Musk joked that he hadn't been to France, but the French aren't the only ones who would want a crack at Musk.  Pretty much all eight billion-odd people on the planet are suspects in this assault case.  Especially Tesla owners and former admirers.

Cyberflop

In 2017, when Trump began his first (but, alas, not only) term as President, I was still in the afterglow of having driven a Tesla Model S at a special event sponsored by the brand.  It was at that time that the shark that Tesla would eventually jump started swimming around the company, as Elon Musk began undermining what had been the biggest success story in American auto manufacturing for a new company since Walter Chrysler founded the company that bore his name.  

In 2017, Musk unveiled the second generation of the Tesla Roadster,  and he started taking orders for the car immediately, with a thousand people paying $250,000 for a new car.  That totals to $250 million, a quarter of a billion bucks, that Musk pocketed.  To this day, no one who paid for a Mark 2 Roadster has received a car; it's never been produced.  Instead, Musk focused on entering the truck market with a newfangled pickup that was styled to look like a television remote - the Cybertruck.  What?  A truck designed to resemble a futuristic vehicle in a Hollywood movie?  Why not freshen up or redesign the cars in the rest of the lineup? Nah, too boring.

Musk promised miracles with this vehicle.  The stainless-steel panels would be easier to maintain.  They would be bulletproof.  It would be priced at the same level as and have a bigger payload than conventional pickup trucks.  And the braking system would channel energy used to bring the truck to a stop back into the electric motor in order to make the brakes last as long as the vehicle itself!

Uh, yeah.  The Cybertruck has panels that get dirty easily and are hard to clean, bullets can still have hideous pockmarks on the panels, it costs about a hundred grand, the payload is smaller than an F-150, and Musk's ballyhooed regenerative braking system is an implausible idea that must've come out of one of those sci-fi books he loves.  

I'm tempted to say that Tesla has become the automotive equivalent of one of those real-estate companies that sell worthless properties to land speculators for enormous sums - "You didn't buy any property there, did you?  I swear there was a lake!" - but that's not entirely true, because unlike the second-generation Roadster, the Cybertruck actually got produced.  But not very well.  Not only are its stainless-steel panels worthless, they don't fit properly onto the truck, and their edges are so sharp, you could peel a potato with them.  The single windshield wiper is so pliable, it's limper than an overcooked ramen noodle, and the slope of the windshield is so low-slung that rain water cascades up it.

Also, the Cybertruck is so big and bulky that one can easily hit a pedestrian if you don't look carefully enough, and if the cameras aren't working (a typical problem with the Cybertruck), you could run over someone and not even realize it until after its too late.  For that reason, the European Union has banned the sale of the Cybertruck in its member states for its failure to conform to EU pedestrian impact standards - standards the American automobile regulatory system does not have, thanks to a lax regulatory culture in Washington and the demand for monster wagons on light-truck chasses.  And when it comes to providing safety for those outside the vehicle as well as those inside, the Chevrolet Suburban and the Ford Expedition aren't exactly all that much better.  And all of those SUVs and pickup trucks posing threats to smaller vehicles are the reason we don't have cars like the Volkswagen Polo and Renault Twingo offered for sale in These States. 

Did I happen to mention the Cybertruck's loose-fitting plastic gas-pedal cover?

Road testers at auto magazine and on auto-news YouTube sites have known about the Cybertruck's defects for months, but the Cybertruck's flaws are only coming to the fore now among the general public thanks to Tesla's current woes and Musk's megalomaniacal  desire to dismantle American government. Tesla has become the auto industry's most discredited brand; the Cybertruck has become the auto industry's most discredited Tesla.

Tesla at this point is probably beyond saving, but Musk will remain unscathed because he'll still have his billons as well as his profits from Starlink and SpaceX (which has numerous government contacts.  Butt the Cybertruck should prove that, far from being another Walter Chrysler, Elon Musk is turning out to be another Malcolm Bricklin. 

Having failed to start his own car company, Malcolm Bricklin decided to sell us the Yugo instead. 

Promises, Promises, Promises . . .

Not too long ago I said that Tesla enthusiasts and owners who wanted to save the brand from Elon Musk should try to buy enough stock to make Musk a minority stockholder.  Uhh, yeah . . . there's just one thing wrong with that strategy - Elon Musk already is a minority stockholder.

How does the Musko Man stay at the top at Tesla?  How does he remain CEO of the company?  Well, you know how he's always talking about how features on Tesla cars like self-driving technology are coming soon?  And then it doesn't happen?  That's Musk's game.  He's been promising that these wonderful and fantastic features will be available for Teslas next year for over half a decade.  Because he keeps promising how these features will soon be available, as early as next year, he leaves the board of directors no choice but to stick with him.  Except that, like Paul McCartney's mythical grandfather in A Hard Day's Night, he'll cost you a number of breaches of promises.  

But maybe it won't be Musk's decimation of the federal government or his unfulfilled promises that do him in.  Maybe the thing that does him in will be one of his own products - a product he's actually delivered. 

I am, of course, talking about the Cybertruck, Tesla's first (and likely only) truck model, which receives over-the-air tech updates and looks like a TV remote with wheels.  As with most Tesla products these days, the Cybertruck breaks down a lot, but now it has a newly documented problem, which has led to a recall of 46,000 vehicles produced.  Apparently the problem is that an exterior trim panel can, in the company's own words, "delaminate and detach from the vehicle," which increases the risk of a crash and create a road hazard. 

In other words,  these trucks literally fall apart on the road.

I'm old enough to remember when Tesla quality was celebrated - right about the same time Trump began his first presidential campaign.  Quality has long since fallen by the wayside since then, and the Cybertruck is fast becoming an amalgam of Tesla's manufacturing flaws - all rolled up into one literally and figuratively ugly travesty.

Donald Trump, Car Salesman

I understand there was an auto show at the White House.

Donald Trump probably wanted to be an automaker.  Why not?  Henry Ford.  David Dunbar Buick.  Walter Chrysler.  Arthur and Louis Chevrolet.  John and Horace Dodge.  They all achieved something Trump still hasn't - they turned their surnames into reputable brands.

Geez, even John DeLorean was more successful at that.

Trump has never made cars - if he had, he would have made Malcolm Bricklin look like Alfred P. Sloan - but thanks to his buddy Elon Musk, a real automaker, he got to sell them.

The trouble is, featuring the entire Tesla lineup at the White House and presenting an infomercial for the press was ethically dubious at best, illegal at worst.

And to remove all doubt that he wasn't just showing them off, Trump even had a list of the prices of the vehicles in Tesla's lineup in his hand - and made sure a camera caught it.

Better that Trump wasn't at a real auto show, though, because he'd be checking out the spokesmodels and grabbing them by their (*SHUT YO' MOUTH!*) in minutes.

One thing, though - after promoting fossil fuels as the linchpin in our energy supply and getting donations from Big Oil, why is Trump suddenly so simpatico with electric cars?  (Not that he could drive a Tesla - like that other evil New Yorker Robert Moses, Trump never drove a car in his life.)

Trump pulled this stunt at the White House to help his benefactor Musk at a time when Tesla sales and stock prices are plummeting in response to Musk's job slashing in the federal government at a time when he should be slashing prices on his cars.  And who's going to buy these cars as a result of Trump's shameless promotion? Certainly not the average American, who's likely unemployed or about to be and likely couldn't afford a Tesla even with what passes for gainful employment these days. 

Even Tesla owners are jumping ship.  Onetime Tesla owners like Sheryl Crow are selling their cars as a way of getting back at Musk, and Crow donated the money she made off selling her car to National Public Radio.  Those keeping their cars are actually buying badges of other car brands and putting them on their Teslas (well, sure, how about a Volkswagen emblem on a Tesla sedan, seeing as the ID.7 isn't coming to These States after all!).

Only one thing wrong - you can't rebrand a Cybertruck.

Let me get something straight.  I love Teslas.  I always have.   True, the brand may have suffered a drop in quality and reliability since the its heady days in the mid-2010s, when Trump began his first presidential campaign.   I test-drove one, though, and I loved it.  And so you can understand why I'm upset to see what Musk is doing to his own company.  Tesla is too good a car to go the way of the DeLorean, which went down in a cocaine-trafficking setup.  The company must be saved.  And there are two things that must be done in order to save it.  First, Tesla's board of directors must fire Elon Musk.

The second thing?  Discontinue the Cybertruck.

The Donald Trump Show

So what was Donald Trump's speech to Congress last night like?  Well, I didn't see the whole thing, but I saw the lowlights.  He bashed the Democrats for their approach to the economy, he compared himself to George Washington, he talked about how his beautiful tariffs will lead to prosperity, and he once again advocated annexation of Greenland.  In short, it was like a typical Trump rally speech.

Quite frankly, the idiotic references to the economy were the most memorable lines from the speech.  Of course - Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress and pledge to make the world safe for democracy; Franklin Roosevelt spoke to Congress in "the unusual posture" of sitting to lay out his post-World War II vision after the Yalta summit; John F. Kennedy announced to Congress that he was challenging the nation to put a man on the moon and have him returned safely to Earth; Trump complained about egg prices and blamed it on Biden.  Of course.  

it was a Trump rally speech because the event actually was a Trump rally. Democrats were a captive audience to MAGA Republicans' applause, struggling to found ways to protest, from wearing colors symbolizing resistance to Trump or for standing with Ukraine, which worked in the context of decorum in the House chamber but seemed awkward to some pundits.  The most effective protest came from Representative Al Green (D-TX), who yelled out that Trump had no mandate to cut Medicaid and was summarily removed from the chamber while Republicans mockingly chanted "USA! USA!" at Green as he was being led out.  (As far back as 1996, a British journalist covering the Atlanta Olympics compared the chant of the initials of the United States' official name to chants of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" in Germany in the 1930s.  The comparison seemed all the more apt last night.)

There was one bright side to what happened to Representative Green; only he was removed from the chamber, and not the entire congressional Democratic caucus.  If that had happened, the Democrats wouldn't have just been taken out of the House chamber, they would have been . . . taken out . . . permanently.  Fortunately, dissent against Der Amerikanischer Führer is not yet a capital crime.

The most effective counterpoint to Trump came not during the speech but after it, when one of the newest Democrats in the Senate, Elissa Slotkin (above), who proved to be a steely, strong tigress behind her dimpled-little-sister exterior.  Senator Slotkin gave a brief yet pointed response for the Democratic Party in her takedown of Elon Musk's reckless evisceration of the federal bureaucracy and Trump's plan to decimate the middle class as well as her forceful objection to Trump's caving to Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.  Senator Slotkin said she was glad Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980s and not Donald Trump, otherwise the United States would have lost the Cold War.

Aside from late-middle-age progressives who spent the eighties in college demonstrating against Reagan's Central America policy and nuclear arms buildup, most people should find favor in Senator Slotkin's remarks.  A former CIA operative and U.S. House member,  Slotkin proved to be an effective messenger for the Democrats.  It also helped that she is a national-security expert and also the junior senator from Michigan, a state that has produced so many legendary businessmen in the auto industry - the Chevrolet brothers, the Dodge brothers, David Dunbar Buick, Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler - whose surnames became trusted brands, something the current White House occupant has tried to make of his own surname . . . in vain.

In a party struggling for leaders and leadership, Elissa Slotkin appears to have provided just that.  She's probably the second most effective speaker the Democrats have.  Only Tim Ryan is better, but, of course, he's a hasbeen (for now).

Other Democrats gave effective responses to Trump's the media, like when party chair Ken Martin said that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys could go to hell, or when Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump a nightmare she was hoping to wake up from, or when Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts called upon Trump to resign.  But not everyone saw individual Democrats taking to reporters.  They all did see Trump's speech.  However, I wouldn't say now that the Democrats aren't fighting back at all or aren't fighting back enough, as Chris Cuomo suggested . . . though the less said about Chris Cuomo, the better.  In fact, Chris's attempt at an even-handed view of Trump and his disgraced brother Andrew's decision to run for mayor of New York City signify the most spectacular drop in credibility and prestige by any political dynasty in American history (the falls of the Kennedys and the Bushes were more gradual).

One other thing.  As late as 2022, whenever you saw President Biden address Congress, you'd see two women - one black, the other Italian, both from California - sitting behind him in their respective capacities as Vice President and Speaker of the House.  Now, Trump is back, and the two people sitting behind him are both white males of Anglo-Saxon origin from the nation's midsection.

Not so inspiring . . . unless you're a red-state MAGA-maniac.

Five Things I Hate About Elon Musk

1. Musk demanded that federal employees send him a list of five things they did on the job last week to prove their worth to the government or be fired.

2. Musk demanded that federal employees send him a list of five things they did on the job last week to prove their worth to the government or be fired.

3. Musk demanded that federal employees send him a list of five things they did on the job last week to prove their worth to the government or be fired.

4. Musk demanded that federal employees send him a list of five things they did on the job last week to prove their worth to the government or be fired.

5.  He's just a mother-truckin' creep.

You thought my fifth thing was going to be, "Musk demanded that federal employees send him a list of five things they did on the job last week to prove their worth to the government or be fired," didn't you?

As soon as this news came out, some of us Trump-hating Musk haters and Musk-hating Trump haters decided to send nonsensical lists of the five things we did on the job.

Here's the list I sent from my regular e-mail address:

1. I ate a Crisco sandwich. 

2. I had sex with a lady clown at the circus.  (Field work. 😉) 

3. I practiced my karate chops while jumping in midair. 

4. I wore an Indian headdress to keep my wigwam. 

5. I called a vegetable by name because the vegetable dreamed of responding to me. 

That last thing refers to a Frank Zappa song.

Now here's the list I sent from my alternate e-mail address:

1. I squirted whipped cream on my desktop and let the office rats eat it. 

2. I scratched my feet for five hours. 

3. I sent rubber ducks to a contractor with the note,  "Take them these here rubber ducks, we just ain't gonna pay yo' bill!" 

4. I ran around the office in a chicken costume yelling "SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK!" 

5. I carved a likeness of Elon Musk out of soap, ate it, and crapped it out in the toilet. (Sorry, I forgot to flush!)

I need a fix 'cause I'm going down . . ..

As it turns out, most government agency and department heads are telling their employees not to respond to Musk, that it's totally unnecessary, and that it also might go against rules and regulations.  National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard told her employees not to comply to avoid the leaking of government secrets.

Dude, you know you've lost your credibility when even Tulsi Gabbard is trying to preserve her integrity.

Not so much Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who told his employees to comply.  I guess he figure that if they do, he'll find out what they do . . . because as someone with no experience in transportation issues, he has no idea himself.

DOGE IS A DOG!

Why, why, why, why, why, why do so many people I admire ultimately turn out to be frauds, posers, or just plain horrible people in general?  Gary Hart, Marion Jones, Hillary Clinton, Eric Clapton, Bill Cosby,  James Howard Kunstler, Facebook "friends" I never meet in person - the list is endless.  Sooner or later, of course, those people you admire appear to jump the shark, and little do you know they'd been on the wrong side of the shark all the time.  And Elon Musk is the latest such person to join my list - for being a fraud (he didn't found Tesla), a poser (his "inventions" are even more useless than Beatles pal Magic Alex's prototypical products at Apple Electronics), and a horrible person (he's a Nazi).

It turns out he's worse than even all that.  As the director of the fictional Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE?), Musk is going on a rampage through the federal government, shutting down the United States Agency for International Development and locking out it staff after accusing the agency of fraud, taking over the U.S. Treasury and putting kids fresh out of high school in charge of the computers, and getting data on the finances and bank accounts of every American taxpayer.  Having direct and illegal access to our personal data, Musk can now use it to destroy someone who, oh, I don't know, speaks out against him or Trump.  Up to now, he's only been able to delete X users who do so.  Now he can comb through BlueSky and go after anyone there who's opposed to him (i.e., everyone there).  Kash Patel won't need to use his power as FBI director to stifle opposition against the government because Musk can do it himself.

With the Treasury under his thumb, Musk can deny Social Security payments and Medicare assistance to anyone at whim - either because they've written a critical letter to the editor about him, because they've used their social media platforms (or blogs) to spread the truth about him, because they were active in the movement against apartheid in his native South Africa (Steven Van Zandt, take note!), or maybe because you bought a Lucid instead of a Tesla.  He may already be looking for congressional Democrats to harass and persecute to drive them out of office (paving the way for turning Congress into a Supreme Soviet-style rubber-stamp legislature).  Plus several more horror scenarios I can't fathom right now.  With all of the power Musk gave himself by bullying his way into crucial agencies, no one is safe.

All I can do is to keep tell you what's going on.  And while I won't qualify for Social Security for awhile, I too, as a blogger critical of Musk, have reason to fear him.  And it's not because I ever said anything bad about his cars.  That's what makes this so disgusting.  I admired Musk for everything he did for electric vehicles.  Now I look at Musk and, well, I can't believe I actually liked this guy!  But, in pretending to engineer the cars he makes and in pretending to be developing pneumatic trains to get people to stop talking about high-speed rail and buy more of his cars, all while profiting from his government contracts with SpaceX (another reason he took over the Treasury), Musk has been giving America two faces for the price of one.

The Unholy Trinity

Jeff Bezos found a niche market in online retailing when he started Amazon to make it easier for people wishing to buy certain books to go to his site and he would send the book to a customer in a few days, as opposed to the long wait one might encounter in ordering a particular title at Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore.   Then he began offering records and videos for sale, followed by everything else.  Today you can get anything you want or need at Amazon if your local store doesn't have what you're looking for - and usually doesn't.  He used his riches to buy the esteemed Washington Post to put the paper on a sound footing.  People who found that obscure classic novel their library systems don't have, that album from a British classic-rock band that never made it in America, or that compact Windows 11 laptop that the local Best Buy can't be bothered to stock owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff Bezos.

Elon Musk invested in a startup electric-car company in California called Tesla and got to work expanding its offerings from a single roadster to sedans and crossovers.  In doing so, he not only popularized electric vehicles as the effects of climate change caused in part by internal-combustion-engine vehicles became more apparent, he made Tesla the first successful American automaker to be started since Walter Chrysler founded his namesake company (now part of the Franco-Italian conglomerate Stellantis) in 1925 and gave the Big Three its first domestic competition since American Motors bit the dust in 1987.  Musk reopened the old GM-Toyota factory in Fremont, California to make his cars, giving people in the area jobs.  Teslas became legendary for their stellar performance - yours truly can attest to this, having test-driven one in 2015.  He went on to produce space rockets at his company SpaceX, reigniting intertest in space exploration, even as Tesla inspired GM, Ford, and, after the diesel-emissions scandal, Volkswagen to enter the EV market, as well as encouraging new EV startups like Lucid and Rivian.  People with Teslas owe a debt of gratitude to Elon Musk.

Mark Zuckerberg started a Web site where Harvard students could connect with each other online when they couldn't do so in person.  Eventually, the network spread to other colleges and universities, and then the rest of the world.  Facebook then became a method for relatives and longtime friends separated by moves to different cities and towns to connect with each other again after years apart, and it allowed people to make new friends online that they wouldn't have otherwise made.  People who reconnected with their high school buddies or college chums, Cousin Jim, Uncle Fred and Aunt Julie and people who connected with new friends - including those of us who established connections with fashion models of the 1980s that we had severe crushes on back in high school - owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet, these three men are the worst people on the planet after Donald Trump.

The products and services Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg provided to the world earned them fortunes measured in billions of dollars, but instead of using their billions to make the world in general and America in particular a better place, they've used it to stifle competition, crush small businesses, and impose their underhanded business practices on the people of the world against their will so they, unsatisfied with the billions they've made, can make billions and billions of dollars more.  Bezos has put countless booksellers out of business, and if you're still old-school and listen to CDs without even considering streaming, Amazon is practically the only place to go for them.  Musk, the Henry Ford of the twenty-first century (not a compliment; Henry Ford was a horrible person too!), bought Twitter and renamed it X, which was not a sound business decision and left people scratching their heads until it became apparent that Musk bought it to have a platform to broadcast his racist, plutocratic and conspiratorial views and attracted like-minded people to join in on the bashing and slashing.  Zuckerberg built a social-media empire, Meta, by buying platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to ensure that people have fewer real choices in social-media sites, and he has encouraged users to hurl insults and bitter diatribes against each other to keep them on his site long enough to keep his business going and growing at the expense of civility.  And the algorithms he uses ensure that you could be hooked on scrolling through Facebook or his other platforms until you lose track of time and never consider once the negative impact of all of that nasty back-and-forth with people you hardly even know.

This trio's tech-related business activities and their influence in media in general have led them to make Donald Trump their best friend.  Bezos wants to expand Amazon, but with reporters at his paper giving Trump agita with their investigative stories about him, he can't have them continuing their exposés or let the editorial desk endorse any of his political opponents, else Trump will raise postal rates on the sorts of packages Amazon sends out from its fulfillment centers.  Now Bezos can rest easy by stifling his reporters at the Washington Post without Trump having to do it for him.  Musk, whose money helped elect Trump to another term, now has the upper hand in the EV market with Trump having ended the EV mandate, and he's secured his lucrative government contracts.  And by eliminating fact-checking at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg is allowing pro-Trump propaganda and conspiracy theories.  And by rigging the algorithms on Meta platforms, Zuckerberg has insured that no one who knows the truth can call out factually erroneous posts . . . because people who care about the truth will never see them.

I can only close with the famous quote from Matthew 12:26: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?"    

We'll Never Have Paris

With Trump set to return to the White House two weeks from Monday,  the United States will likely be out of the Paris Agreement again two weeks from Tuesday.  And this time, to quote former future President Kamala Harris, we're not going back.

A few years ago, President Biden's then-climate envoy John Kerry said that Biden's successor - likely assuming at the time that it wouldn't be Biden's predecessor - would not be able to pull the U.S. out of the climate agreement because it would be bad for American business.  There's money to be made in alternative energy sources and in green-energy-generated electricity, Kerry said, and not even a die-hard Trumpist would want to get in the way of profits for companies dedicated to these new business opportunities, especially when the Chinese are hoping to dominate the green-energy field. 

Anyone who thinks that any of that is going to satisfy Trump must also think that Steve Bannon - who also hates the Paris Agreement - is going to take a bath.  Trump has already received a ton of cash from the fossil-fuel industry, and companies that invest in green energy might very well be asking from trouble with an administration that sees them as a threat to to Big Oil's and Big Coal's hegemony over the energy sector.   Besides, I'm certain that companies investing in electric-vehicle chargers and solar panels have investments in other sectors to fall back on, and they wouldn't want to see those ventures get threatened, would they?

I want to make it clear that my take on why Trump would want to quit the Paris Agreement again is based mostly on conjecture and speculation.  But given Trump's - and the conservative movement's - historically cozy relationships with the fossil-fuel industry, it does make a ton of sense. 

I suppose it's possible that we stay in the climate accord nominally, at least to save face internationally, if only to avoid the appearance of going back and forth on it, which is what I imagine incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio would tell Trump.  But Rex Tillerson made the argument to Trump that it was important to stay in and abide by the Paris Agreement when he was Secretary of State, and he was an oilman - and we know how that turned out.  Also, I'd cite all of the other international agreements the United States has deliberately refused to be party to on the basis of preserving "national sovereignty," but I don't have enough bandwidth for that.

And don't expect Elon Musk (above) to make the case for the Paris accord, either, even though he's Trump's biggest benefactor and best buddy.  He's too busy trying to convince Trump to cancel tax credits for electric-vehicle purchases.  Now why would the owner of the world's largest EV maker advocate for that?

There are quite a few reasons, actually.  The most obvious reason is the plethora of EV startups such as Lucid and Rivian, that are just as scrappy and hungry as Tesla once was and benefit from such tax breaks.  Musk doesn't want the competition.  Also, there's Tesla's long-accrued brand equity.  Tesla has such a strong reputation with a growing sense of history and heritage that people would still buy a Tesla even without the tax credit.  Also, Lucid and Rivian don't have as big an amount of cash reserves to get through periodic slumps in the auto market.  As the world's richest man by a wide margin, Musk can lose tons of money on every vehicle he produces and still have gobs of dough left over.

I was going to say that Musk wants to have EV tax credits discontinued to discourage EV offerings from legacy automakers like Ford and Volkswagen, but that's hardly an issue.  EV sales tanked in 2024 across the board, and Ford even halted production of its F-150 Lightning (above), with the big pickup failing to change the image of EVs as being for latte liberals who live in Montclair, New Jersey or Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Meanwhile, Fisker went bankrupt, and the Vietnamese EV company VinFast has delayed the opening of its North Carolina factory until 2028.  Tesla also saw its sales fall in 2024, but remember, this would hardly affect Elon Musk's bottom line.  (One exception to the EV sales slide is Hyundai's Ioniq cars, which, like Teslas, are cars people actually want.   Hyundai likely hopes that consumers will still want them without the tax credit. And as a brand with a 39-year history in the United States, Hyundai probably has more brand equity than Tesla.)

Some states will continue to pursue environmentally friendly policies such as solar-generated or wind-generated power, and they'll likely strengthen regulations for sustainable construction of houses and buildings.   But at the federal level . . . war's over, the polluters won.  Even if a Democrat somehow gets elected President in 2028 - highly questionable at this point, especially given the possibility of Trump being the only candidate allowed next time - it will look really silly if we re-enter the Paris Agreement a second time, and given American inconsistency on the issue, the rest of the world probably won't want us back.  Not that they're doing any better - the number of countries that made significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 can be counted on zero fingers.

If I were still on MySpace, I'd be telling people that I don't want kids.  Because I don't.  Not with the way this planet is going.    

Tiger Dad

Former presidential candidate and shifty entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chair of the mythical Department of Government Efficiency with noted robber baron Elon Musk, has, along with Musk, advocated for more H1B visas for foreign workers to take jobs in the tech sector.  Many if not most of these workers would be South Asian like Ramaswamy himself.

This created a serious rift in MAGA between the tech right and the alternate right over American identity and American values.  Ramaswamy specifically said that foreign workers are needed to work in the tech sector because native-born Americans are not smart enough, which is what one must expect when we have a culture that values the prom queen over the "mathlete" and the jock over the valedictorian.  Ramaswamy could have stopped there, but he said that the culture also lauds intellectually impoverished TV sitcom characters over their brainier counterparts in shows like "Boy Meets World," "Saved by the Bell," and "Family Matters."  He also suggested that parents should get their children to stop watching such sitcoms and spend more time hitting the books.

I don't know enough about those sitcoms to comment on that observation - I rarely if ever watched them - but on the former point, I would have to say that Ramaswamy is absolutely right.  High schools are supposed to prepare teenagers for adulthood and also help them succeed to the best of their intellectual ability, yet the students with the best brains and the most serious commitment to their studies are often ostracized and even ridiculed for their intellectual fortitude.  High school culture values the most popular kids, the athletes over the mathletes - and this is just a microcosm of the general popular culture in America overall, where intellectuals are rejected in favor of "folksy" or "populist" figures.  How far back do you want to go?  The presidential election of 1828 was framed by supporters of Andrew Jackson as a contest between President John Quincy Adams, who could write, and Andrew Jackson, who could fight.  We all know who won.  (If you don't, you're part of the problem.)

Obviously, the alternate-right wing of MAGA doesn't like Ramaswamy's characterization of their nation and themselves as morons, and they feel betrayed by Ramaswamy's (and Musk's) support for increased immigration from places like India.  The alternate right, after all, wants to keep America white and keep brown people out (although South Asians are actually members of the Caucasian race, George Carlin once having called them dark brown white people).  The ensuing fight between the two factions had splintered MAGA and set the stage for a period of inaction come 2025, and liberals are enjoying the show, sitting back and eating popcorn as they watch.

Don't get too giddy over this internal MAGA feud, fellow anti-MAGA people.  They're still basically united on making America a nation of toxically masculine virtues that persecutes anyone who has a problem with that.

And as proof that Ramaswamy is right about American intelligence . . . who won the presidential election last month? 

The Missing Starlink?

Now that the Electoral College has voted, all that's left is to confirm Donald Trump's 312-226 vote victory over Kamala Harris, all that's left is for the Republican Congress, in the presence of Vice President Harris, by a ceremonial count of the votes.  

And yet, many Harris fans claim, still, that Trump stole the election, because they refuse to believe that a majority of people could not be so vile as to vote for someone so horrible (although Trump won a 49 percent plurality of an electorate representing 35 percent of all Americans of voting age).  They suspect that surrogate president Elon Musk rigged the vote with his Internet system Starlink, siphoning votes for Harris and changing some Harris votes to Trump votes, and maybe even using technology to  suppress the vote in precincts of color. 

All this proves is what I said before . . . mainly, that progressives can be just as stupid as MAGA conservatives.   There is literally no municipality, county, or parish (in deference to Louisiana) where the voting booths and the tabulation machines have connections to the World Wide Web.  In short, there's no way Starlink could rig the system.  And the system is so decentralized.  Musk certainly helped Trump by promoting him on X after he bought it, but he didn't rig the vote.  And when progressives claim that the election was stolen through vote rigging and suggest some sort of conspiracy, they're proving that they're no smarter than MAGA people are.    

And to those of you who are promoting false conspiracy theories about how MAGA stole the election by rigging the ballot count . . . just stop.  Just . . . stop.

President Musk?

Trump has managed to violate the Constitution by running for government office as a proven insurrectionist, so it makes sense that he would do it again by allowing a foreign-born citizen to serve as President.

Elon Musk, who bought Trump for over $200 million and violated the Thirteenth Amendment by owning someone, has stepped in and is calling the shots with Congress.  As soon as Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bipartisan stopgap bill to und the government, Musk, the richest man in the world and a major government contractor, denounced the bill as wasteful and demanded that the bill be scrapped.  Trump, acting as his chief of staff, agreed.  The bill camethisclose to going down completely and causing a government shutdown right in the middle of the holidays.  But Democrats stepped in and rescued the bill when it became apparent that letting the GOP twist in the wind wasn't worth the pain that would inflict the country as a result of a shutdown.

Musk is in a position to get whatever he wants in negotiations over the budget simply by telling Trump his demands and using his social-media platform to browbeat congressional Republicans.  He can also direct foreign policy by using his influence for his own personal gain not just with Trump but with other foreign leaders - why else would he have sat in on a telephone conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky?  

This is why the Founders put all of those restrictions in the Constitution - the emoluments clause, the prohibition on foreign-born citizens in the Presidency, the check and balance on the executive branch by giving power to the legislative branch - and it's also why the location of the national capital was based on the approximate center of population (as it existed in 1787) and was placed as far away from business interests as possible.  Technology and the westward centering of the population made Washington, D.C.'s location irrelevant, but Musk, through flattering Trump while flattering his own wallet, has managed to render the constitutional guardrails against his (Trump's) use of power ineffective as well.

Musk and Trump lost this round on the budget, but the outsize influence Musk exhibited means that more chaos is to come.     

Musk Rat, Part Two

 Elon Musk is a turd.

And I'm glad I quit X.

Musk decided to involve himself in a tête-à-tête between a Jewish X user and an X account owner operating under the name "The Artist Formerly Known as Eric," whom I'll call Eric from now on, in which the Jewish user demanded that Eric tell him to stop saying Hitler was right to his face just what he thinks of Jews.  Eric came right out and said to his face (well, as far as you can tell something to anyone's face on social media) that Jews are responsible for bringing in racial and ethnic populations from the Third World to de-Europeanize America.  (The joke's on Eric; thanks to are pathetic public transportation, our decrepit public schools, our lax gun laws, and our commercialization of the arts, we're already de-Europeanized!) Eric also thought it was comical that the brown people allegedly brought in to replace whites would turn on the Jews after arriving here, although there's no evidence that recent immigrants harbor any anti-Semitism.  Musk then butted in, telling Eric, "You are absolutely correct, sir."     

Musk is possibly the richest man in the world, and he's distinguished himself for getting behind Tesla, which has subsequently produced some of the most innovative cars in the United States; he made Tesla the first successful American automaker to challenge the Big Three since the heyday of American Motors.  His SpaceX company has pushed space exploration even farther into the heavens.  But thanks to Musk's descent into the hell of anti-Semitism, none of that matters anymore.  He's endorsed the ridiculous "Jewish replacement theory" and encouraged more bigotry and hatred against the Jewish people at a time when American Jews are being held directly and unfairly responsible for the atrocities being committed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza. 

(Full disclosure: While I do not condone the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and support Israel's right to exist, I support calls for a cease-fire.  And I must reiterate that I also support the Free Palestine movement, because, as an American of Irish origin and as a Roman Catholic, I believe that I and my people should support Palestinian statehood because of Ulster.  Ask someone other than an Irishman what the Occupied Territories are, and that person will say "The West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights."  Ask an Irishman what the Occupied Territories are, and that person will say, "Counties Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh.")

Now Musk's tolerance for neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda has gone so far beyond the pale that the progressive media-watchdog group Media Matters has taken a more probing look at the issue, analyzing the content on on X and coming to some damning conclusions.  Musk has responded by suing Media Matters in federal court in Texas, where his company is based, for what he calls gross distortions of the content on his social media platform and for suggesting that such content is "what typical X users experience on the platform," which it increasingly is.  As if to pile on, unconvicted criminal Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation of Media Matters, calling it a "radical left-wing organization" that "would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square."

If Musk gets his way and allows more hate speech on his platform at the expense of speech he personally doesn't like, that could have that very effect.

But Musk has to do deal with something else - advertisers fleeing X in droves to get as far from his platform's anti-Semitic tropes as possible.

I'm so glad I'm not on the platform formerly known as Twitter anymore.  I'd like to thank Tia Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and all of the other X users for driving me off the platform after I publicly told Mitchell that she looked better without cornrowed hair.

Though, as her appearance on MSNBC yesterday afternoon indicates, she realized that I was right and changed her look when she decided that I was doing her a favor.

You're welcome, Tia. 😛

X Marks the Spot

It is now officially over.  I am no longer connected to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. 

I deactivated my account on "X" in early September after being harassed for committing the unspeakable crime of criticizing a black woman's cornrowed hair, but it accidentally got reactivated briefly in mid-September when my mother signed into it thinking it was her account - after logging into my settings on our desktop thinking she was logging into her settings.  Once I deactivated it a second time, I waited patiently for every tweet I ever posted, every reply I ever tweeted to someone, and every nasty tweet I got in reply to the tweet that ended my time on the platform to be completely annihilated from the ether.  Now I'm totally free.

I just saw a PBS documentary on X owner Elon Musk, who renamed Twitter after X because it's his "favorite letter"  (does he think Silicon Valley is on Sesame Street?).  The documentary noted that, once Musk let all forms of speech to proliferate on X as part of his plan to allow anyone to say anything (so long as it doesn't affect him or his bottom line), racist and sexist tweets shot up dramatically.  I continued to use the platform to post links to this blog and also to write or reply to tweets and occasionally post pictures, thinking that my posts other than my blog links were too innocuous for anyone to bother with or care about and had nothing to so with racism and sexism.

How ironic, therefore, that it was my own idea of what constituted a racially or genderly appropriate tweet that ended up getting me into trouble.  Though I was never banned for telling a black woman that she looked better without cornrows, the relentless abuse and scorn I got as a result was enough to make me defect from X with my tail between my legs. 

Musk Rat

Elon Musk has pole-vaulted over the shark.

Not content with being the first person to found an automobile company in America to compete  successfully with Detroit's Big Three since the heyday of American Motors, the billionaire entrepreneur, no the owner of Twitter, has banned reporters' accounts in retaliation for providing "assassination coordinates" against his person.

What? Let me explain.  There is a Web site that follows Musk's private airplane in real time.  Musk didn't like being followed around online, so he banned the site's Twitter account.  He then turned against numerous journalists by banning them, including CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, for reporting this information - information that is already available without the help of reporters - when all they did was mention that this site tracking Musk's plane exists.  In other words, Musk was accusing these reporters of being the ones who are making it easy for someone who wants to kill him to find him. 

It got worse.  Musk also banned these reporters from Twitter because he said they "doxxed" him - "doxxing" is the practice of giving out someone's address and telephone number - when these reporters did no such thing.  They did, however, write articles criticizing Musk and some of his business decisions, and so his ban of these reporters was clearly meant to punish them for insulting him - which flies in the face of Musk's promise to make Twitter a haven for all free speech.

But after a Twitter poll taken to gauge users' thoughts n the matter, 59 percent of Twitter users who responded voted for reinstating the reporters, which Musk has done this morning - except for Keith Olbermann, who says he might sue.

I was ready not to post anything on Twitter until reporters were reinstated, and now that Musk has done so, my 24-hour boycott is over,  But if Musk goes even farther, I just might quit Twitter altogether - in which case I'll be down to promoting this blog on LinkedIn and Tribel.  And don't be surprised if I appear on the new social media site Mastodon soon. 

The Twitter Twit

About a week ago, CNN's Michael Smerconish said he was "rooting" for Elon Musk's noble statement of wanting to open Twitter to everyone who wanted to speak on social media and prevent Twitter from becoming a "hellscape."  I confess that I was rooting for Musk, too.  It seems like our hopes are already getting dashed. 

First Musk suggested that Paul Pelosi - now out of the hospital - just might have been involved in a homosexual affair with the guy who tried to beat him to death.  Then he announced that he was firing half of Twitter's staff, sending e-mails via Twitter's in-house electronic mail system to those who are keeping their jobs and sending e-mails to personal e-mail addresses to those losing their jobs.  Those getting fired are suing Musk for giving them less than two weeks notice.

And as if that weren't bad enough, Musk plans to charge more for the "blue checkmark" - a symbol of verification to prove that you are who you say you are - used commonly by politicians and celebrities.

Musk is doing this mainly to make Twitter profitable, something it was before he overpaid for it.  Experts have calculated that Musk blew 75 percent of what he paid for Twitter - which he agreed to buy then tried to back out of - and now he has to make more revenue to cover his rear end.  The only way he can save Twitter now is to destroy it.

I don't know how I'm going to promote the blogs I have that Facebook won't let me post links to when Twitter is gone.

None of this will have a detrimental effect on the crown jewel of Musk's empire, the Tesla car company.  They're still good cars, and people won't stop buying them just because the guy who makes them is a horrible person.  After all, Henry Ford was a reprehensible figure, but Americans kept buying Ford vehicles. 

At least Teslas, unlike most of Ford's vehicles these days, aren't horrible themselves. 

The Stench of Musk

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people wondered if he'd let Donald Trump back on.  Many more wondered why he let Kanye West back on.  I simply wanted to know if and when Musk would make it possible to edit previously posted tweets or when he'd expand the maximum number of characters in tweets by another 140 to 420.

Instead, Musk - long celebrated as the first American automaker to successfully challenge Detroit's Big Three since the heyday of the AMC Pacer - endorsed a bogus homophobic theory surrounding the circumstances of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Speaker of the House's husband.  

In response to a story Hillary Clinton tweeted a link to about the right-wing conspiracy theories Paul Pelosi's attacker spread online, Musk cited a story in the Santa Monica Observer about a possible homsosxual realtionship between Paul Pelosi and the assailant and how the incident at the Pelosi home in San Francisco was a lover's tiff. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk wrote.

There wasn't, and Musk deleted the tweet later on.  He should have done his homework before he tweeted; the Santa Monica Observer is known for fake stories like The Onion is, with one key difference - the Santa Monica Observer is not a satirical publication. A media watchdog group cited the online paper for "the routine publication of false and misleading information and the use of poor sources."

Musk said that he wanted to promote free speech on Twitter when he bought it, and he vowed to keep it from becoming a hellscape, but so far he's been making a hellscape of it himself since he took possession of Twitter.  He's trolled the New York Times by insisting that he did not "tweet out" the Santa Monica Observer link to the Times directly and dismissed The Guardian as a "far left wing propaganda machine."

Oh yeah, hate speech has increased fivefold on Twitter since Musk took it over.

So what can I do about this?  Apart from promising not to buy a Tesla, nothing, really.  I mostly use Twitter to post links to two of my blogs, including this one, and the only other social media site I post links on is LinkedIn.  Facebook still - still - won't let me publish links to my two blogs on the grounds that they're spam, and my attempts to have the ban reversed have amounted to nothing.

Maybe I should play the Powerball lottery and buy Facebook if I win the jackpot.  Then I can reverse the ban on links to my blogs and delete my Twitter account.  Oh yeah, and buy a Lucid.  

It's a thought.

The Smell of Musk

He . . . did it!

Elon Musk succeeded in buying Twitter for $44 billion, and he now plans to take the social media platform private, getting rid of the ability of anyone to buy stock in it.  That means he's the boss, what he says goes, and there will be no shareholders to get rid of him,

Ironically, he wants to open Twitter up to everyone in order to promote free speech.

At best, that means I don't have to worry about links on Twitter to my blogs being denied, as has happened on Facebook.  At worst, Musk could allow all sorts of misinformation to procreate on Twitter without proper vetting and fact-checking,  He could allow the spread of COVID misinformation.  He could allow posts praising ISIS and promoting Putin.  He could let Trump to tweet again and say outrageous things that . . . 

. . . remind us of how much so many people hate him.  You know, Musk's gambit could have a beneficial effect on society!

All kidding aside, it remains to be seen whether Musk realizes that great responsibility comes with all the power he just bought himself.  We will be watching.