Brain Dancing Delights
Ketamine day, when we give over to the music
Links are at the end.
We consciously uncoupled the brain from the gears for a while yesterday, and we’d do it again today if we could.
Elon Musk has been consuming way more of our attention than we would wish, but his awfulness is accelerating. This past Saturday he attacked Twitter’s former trust and safety chief with a now-familiar pedophilia smear, resulting in a torrent of death threats and other threats of harm from Musk cultists, which forced Yoel Roth and his family to flee their home.1
Shortly after taking over Twitter, self-proclaimed “chief twit” Elon Musk tried to reassure anxious advertisers that the social-media platform “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” A month and a half later, the billionaire is continuing to personally demonstrate how it is becoming exactly that.
On Saturday, Musk falsely implied in tweets that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth — who is gay — has advocated for child sexualization. Roth and his family have since been forced from their home following a torrent of threats and harassment, the Washington Post reported Monday.
Musk also claimed with no evidence that someone chased and blocked a car carrying one of his children, and then climbed up on the hood. He then posted a video of a young man he claimed was the perpetrator, including the license plate on the guy’s car.2
No one has yet discovered a police report of the incident, but Musk’s trolls are out in force tracking down the plate and, if they identify the guy, no doubt threatening his life too. In the same Twitter thread, Musk threatened legal action against a college student who tracked flights of Musk’s private jet using publicly available information, something that would certainly be considered an exercise of free speech by a free speech absolutist such as Musk claims to be.
In other Musk news, the world’s smartest man sold off nearly $4 billion worth of Twitter shares at about half what they were worth at the beginning of the year, presumably to help shore up Twitter’s — i.e., his — finances.3
And speaking of finances, Twitter is no longer paying many of the company’s bills, with the almost-richest man in the world directing the company to quit paying rent, quit paying vendors, avoid paying out vested stock sales, and renege on promised severance payments, tactics which the New York Times describes as “looking to cut more costs,” which, fuck them.4
To review: Musk is a thieving, vicious, petty, delusional, vengeful, immature, and evidently not-quite-bright coward who is more likely than not to get someone killed in the relatively near future.
Here’s why NASA’s Artemis I mission is so rare, and so remarkable
Eric Berger at Ars Technica is one of the most enthusiasiastic and at once sober chroniclers of space programs here and around the world, and he is delighted by the success of NASA’s Artemis I mission to the moon and back. He has been critical of the program’s progress and missteps but all is more or less forgiven now, and he sees little but black skies, starlight and moon dust ahead.5
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has declared a regional drought emergency
[W]ater restrictions earlier this year covered about 7 million residents. The new one will cover the entire service area, about 19 million people.
About half of the MWD’s imported water comes from the State Water Project and half from the Colorado River — both of which have become “extraordinarily stressed by prolonged drought exacerbated by climate change,” the agency said.
The Colorado River has fallen to such historic lows that Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the nation’s two largest reservoirs — could reach “dead pool,” or the point at which water no longer passes downstream from a dam. California and six other states that rely on the river have been under pressure from the federal government to drastically reduce their use.6
To review: great chunks of the Southwest home to tens of millions of people and a whole bunch of agriculture are running out of water, with multiple states fighting over the muddied remnants of a river that managed to carve a two-mile-deep gash in the landscape, while governments at every level are determinedly not doing what needs done to fight climate change.
BUGATTI CENTODIECI
Instead of buying Twitter, Elon Musk should have given five of these (of the 10 to be built) to his five oldest kids or the next five women he wants to impregnate, and saved us all a lot of misery.7
Preston School Of Industry, a Pavement spinoff, with “Monsoon;” and Charles Atlas, “Worsted Weight.”
And that, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.
Musk seems to be emulating the Donald right down to not paying anyone.