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Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with rapidly advancing technology. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top “autists” if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on — and tycoons are eager to cash in on the final frontier. Shane Cashman dives into the new wild west of explorers and entrepreneurs commercializing the great unknown. Lionel Shriver brings us back to earth with a look at the electrical grid and our government’s push for green energy and electric vehicles.

On July 4, our Independence Day, Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction ordering the federal government to immediately cease contact with social media companies, which it had been urging to censor protected free speech. Evidence unearthed in the Missouri v. Biden case, in which we are co-plaintiffs, has revealed a vast federal enterprise dictating to social media companies who and what to censor. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Surgeon General’s office, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House itself were all closely involved.

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.

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.

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.