You can lead an electorate to the electronic vehicle charging station, but you can’t make them plug in. That’s the lesson President Biden is learning as American consumers reject the “green” future the administration has been trying to mandate through the EPA’s proposed emissions standards and billions in EV subsidies and tax credits. The American people, however, just aren’t buying the climate change is “even more frightening than a nuclear war” line Biden is selling.
The recent spate of articles about attempts by different countries to land vehicles on the Moon make it clear that a new space race is on. Just last month, Russia launched its first mission there in forty-seven years. And although the automated Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed at the last minute, India’s heavily-instrumented Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully just four days later. NASA itself aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 with its Artemis program. Remarkably, more than eighty countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have thus far established some kind of presence in space.
In the prologue to his biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson evokes the Hero’s Journey in its most pop-culture incarnation: It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the Star Wars hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force? Isaacson’s assumption is that Luke Skywalker is the hero of the original film A New Hope. His preamble is titled “Muse of Fire,” a reference to the most famous prologue in literature, the opening lines of Henry V. In Shakespeare’s play, the poet, recognizing the gargantuan feat before him, asks the Muse for help: O, for a muse of fire that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!
Lauren Boebert first gained notoriety back in 2019 as the pint-sized, gun-toting citizen who confronted Beto O’Rourke over his “hell yes” pledge to take our AR-15s and AK-47s. Since then, of course, Boebert has been elected twice to the US House of Representatives, where her behavior — “clashing with Capitol Police after setting off metal detectors,” feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor — habitually makes headlines. Yesterday, news broke that Boebert and a companion had been escorted out of a musical adaptation of Beetlejuice in Denver for “vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Elon Musk responded to calls for supporting the Ukrainian cause by donating thousands of Starlink satellite units to the country. In essence, the move provided free internet to areas where the commodity was inaccessible via a satellite internet constellation built by Musk’s SpaceX. Yet now for CNN and the New York Times, Musk’s heroism has faded away. According to an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new biography Elon Musk, the entrepreneur ordered Starlink’s services near the Crimean coast be switched off last year, disrupting a Ukrainian sneak attack on Russian warships, thus avoiding what Musk labels a “mini-Pearl Harbor.” “How am I in this war? Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars.
Donald Trump is in the process of setting up the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, a fund to help pay off legal bills for him and his co-defendants in the four indictments he is facing, according to a report in the Messenger. Up until this point, the former president’s legal fees had been paid by his Save America super PAC. “Save America wasn’t really designed as a legal defense fund, so as the legal landscape evolved, so did this effort,” a Trump official told the site’s Marc Caputo. So who can expect to be covered? Rudy Giuliani, presumably, who is named as a co-conspirator in Fani Willis’s Georgia case, and was the beneficiary of a Trump-hosted legal fundraiser at Bedminster last night. Giuliani’s fellow election attorney Jenna Ellis?
Get a sample of your bodily fluids ready: Elon Musk is coming for them. X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, announced in its updated privacy policies that it will begin collecting users' biometric data next month. “Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the policy says. The catch — you don't have a choice. According to X users, they have already been prompted to accept pop-ups for the policy that wouldn't close unless they hit "got it." But the new policy, which goes into effect on September 29, won't be the first time X has gathered biometric data.
Elon Musk, the owner of X — once known as Twitter, may she rest in peace — is making Americans an offer that they must refuse. When he purchased the social media platform last year for a whopping $44 billion, he led us to believe he was doing it in order to save free speech, an ideal in regard to which he said was an absolutist. Today, what he is actually offering instead is a censorship regime slightly more friendly to the right than his predecessor. It’s a recipe for disaster. Back during the bad old Twitter days of Jack Dorsey, most of us had a fairly consistent idea of how the site should moderate its content.
It may not come as a great surprise to readers that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will not, in fact, be having a cage fight with one another. Ever since Musk had posted on Twitter (now known as X) in June that he was interested in battling the Meta tycoon, only for Zuckerberg to reply “send me locations,” the saga has turned from a typically absurd piece of Muskian humor to a story that has oscillated between what has seemed like a serious piece of corporate warfare and utter silliness. There was never any serious doubt that Musk would have come off a poor second to Zuckerberg had the fight taken place.
Social media was always a weird place — and it's only gotten wackier. When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which used to be Facebook, announced it was starting Threads, a rival to X, which used to be Twitter (catch all that?), X owner Elon Musk “took a dig about the world becoming ‘exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,’” the AP reminds us, “but then one Twitter user jokingly warned Musk of Zuckerberg’s jiu-jitsu training.” Musk responded, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” Since then, Musk and Zuck have continued to poke one another (remember when “poking” someone on Facebook was a thing?) with infantile barbs that show them to be the tech nerds they really are. Cockburn is enjoying the taunting tweets (if they’re still called that?
It may be hard to trust many of the storylines pushed by the media, but Cockburn must admit that looking to new Twitter — now X — isn't likely to solve any problems either. The owner of that troubled platform, Elon Musk, illustrated Monday exactly why. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO, who has over 150 million followers, replied to a series of tweets asserting that white genocide is on the verge of erupting in South Africa. One response came to Benny Johnson, who posted a video of Julius Malema, the firebrand head of South Africa’s far-left Economic Freedom Fighters Party, singing the apartheid-era anthem “Dubul’ ibhunu,” or “Shoot the Boer” at a political rally.
Elon Musk joined the war against fun this week. After changing Twitter's iconic blue bird to a boring X, the eccentric billionaire bandwagoned on joyless conservative hate for the Barbie movie’s "feminist" messages. Cockburn wants to know: would it kill just one middle-aged man to admit that he liked the movie? “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word 'patriarchy,' you will pass out before the movie ends,” Musk tweeted Monday, in a rip-off of someone else's joke. He was responding to a "Barbenheimer" meme mocking his decision to rebrand Twitter’s logo from colorful and playful to somber and gray, much like the difference between Barbie and Oppenheimer. Twitter users quickly accepted Musk’s challenge with confidence.
Hunter Biden will appear at a Wilmington court on Wednesday to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay taxes. These charges are the result of the prolonged investigation that has been the subject of serious claims of political interference from two IRS whistleblowers. Along with a pretrial agreement relating to a felony gun charge, the misdemeanors make up what many in Washington see to be a sweetheart deal for the president’s son. Assuming Hunter’s lawyer can concentrate between bong rips, and Hunter himself manages to tear himself away from Nobu Malibu and make it to court on time, it should be a fairly routine appearance.
My niece was seven or eight years old when she called to invite me to a school event. “It’s Mother-and-Daughter Day at my school!” she exclaimed, adding that I had to be there because she and her twin sister wanted to show me their classroom and meet their friends. I thanked her for including me but added that I’m not her mommy; I’m her auntie. “But you’re like a mommy,” my niece said, with a tilt in her voice as if I didn’t understand what was immensely obvious to her. “Auntie! You have to come,” she pleaded. I was there with bells on. I’m fortunate that my nephew and nieces have always lived nearby, and that my sister-in-law and brother have generously embraced my participation in their children’s lives whenever possible.
By the time you read this, tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may have beaten the living daylights out of each other. Earlier in the summer, Musk tweeted that he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO responded on Instagram Stories, “send me location.” “Vegas octagon,” suggested Musk, referring to the arena where UFC fights are held. Cue an avalanche of hype, some of it serious, much of it tongue-in-cheek, about the possibility of this plutocrat showdown. The Spectator takes no house view on whether the jiu-jitsu-loving Zuckerberg or the barrel-chested Musk should be viewed as the favorite. But we will admit finding this approach to dispute resolution refreshingly old-school — dueling for the new Silicon Valley aristocracy.
Have you had a bad week? Well, take some consolation from the fact that it probably wasn’t as bad as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Khan’s attempt to scupper Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of gaming company Activision. The case is the latest in a series of high-profile defeats for the progressive wunderkind and face of so-called hipster antitrust. On Thursday morning, Elon Musk’s Twitter asked a judge to override an FTC order relating to its data practices and accused Khan’s agency of misconduct and bias towards it. Later that day, Khan appeared in front of the House Oversight Committee, where she received a no-holds-barred grilling from Republican chair Jim Jordan.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg formally challenged each other to a cage fight on June 21. Out with free-market capitalism, in with post-liberal tech feudalism, and accompanying duels! However entertaining, this whole debacle was spectacularly stupid, for two core reasons. The first is that the jiu-jitsu trained Zuck would clearly obliterate the rather portly, older Musk. The second is that this came as a response to a Twitter post on their real fight, with $44 billion on the line, between Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s clone competitor of it, Threads, which launched last night. It had 2 million users within two hours; 10 million with seven hours; and this is without any mainland Europeans, as the EU continues to be led by the moronic.
It’s not just women’s high school and college sports that need to be protected from biological men, apparently. The DC intramural softball circuit has become another battleground for “trans rights.” Cockburn has learned that Democratic and progressive co-ed teams are skirting league rules regarding how many women must play in each game by filling their spots with trans women — i.e. those born as males. The Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, fielded an over-six-foot trans woman in a recent game against a conservative media outlet. Some players on the team said that it didn’t matter much because the person was not very good at softball, while others got the impression that he/she was intentionally playing poorly to avoid criticism.
What’s your poison? All of the greatest minds have one. Freud loved cocaine, Charles Dickens dabbled with opium, Steve Jobs once claimed that LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in life.” It turns out that Elon Musk’s drug of choice is ketamine, a controlled substance usually reserved for tranquilizing horses. Elon Musk “microdoses” the substance, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it,” the report says.
There's rich and there's rich. There's a number beyond which stuff starts to get boring. I'm not sure what it is, but it's the point at which you run out of restaurants to frequent and clubs to join and clothes to buy and you start thinking bigger. You start thinking about going to space and colonizing Mars — and exploring the dark depths of the deep blue sea. It is the reason that Elon Musk sold his seven homes and chucked out most of his possessions and torments his staff by sleeping at work. It is also part of the reason that five men are now sadly believed to have died while aboard a missing submarine after a "catastrophic implosion." If we didn’t love to hate the rich, this would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy.
