Politics Thread!

[gilesgoat]

Water wars worry me. And I expect to see them escalating around the globe in the not-distant-enough future.

.. TOLD YOU .. first it's going to be "Blade Runner" ( we are nearly there ) .. then it's going to be "Mad Max" ... finally IF anything is still alive it's going to be "Dune" .. worms probably coming after mutating via radiations after the bombing ... the thing is we won't have interstellar travel so we'll be stuck in this crap ..

[Harlequin]

Massive boost expected in popcorn selling sector as world's richest man and President of the United States declare war on each other. Money versus power with rabid cultish fanbases of millions on each side.

[KlaxonCow]

And they're not pulling their punches either, by the looks of things:



I mean, except for the most devoted MAGA supporters, everyone and their donkey had already guessed this, as there's plenty of pictures of Trump palling up to Epstein and Trump, eager to release the files on JFK and others, would shut the hell up every time anyone demanded that the Epstein files also be made public.

But, still, the richest man in the world just openly and officially, in a libellous way, accused the President of the United States of being "Pedo guy" friends with a human sex trafficker.

(Because, come on, Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump has openly admitted to hosting the "Miss World" contest, simply because it grants him access to the changing rooms, paid off a porn star with hush money and that he wanted to have sex with his own daughter. If this deranged pervert weren't in the Epstein files, then that would be the more shocking revelation, honestly.)

Trump sparked this by threatening to drop all of SpaceX's government contracts:



Let the popcorn commence.

[zip accident]

But Elon wants to go to Mars as a "backup plan" for the human race.

I've come to a radical conclusion about Elon Musk and Mars: he wants to own it, whole and entire. It's a long way away, and at this time difficult to get to, so nobody else is going there yet. There are dozens of potential claims to the Moon, and the chance of anyone taking hold of it and making it exclusively theirs are nil. With Mars, it's barely possible that one exclusive base could control the whole thing (wandering exploratory robots excepted). There cannot at this time be a "the president must be born here" rule (which prevents Musk ever being potus), because nobody has been born there yet.

It's a wild theory, and it really doesn't make sense, but I like it.

[F-ZeroOne]

Elon is claiming that, in response to Trumps threats to cancel his contracts, SpaceX will start decommissioning its DragonX capsules - "Immediately". Possibly this may be the same "Immediately!" Grand Moff Tarkin used when ordering Princess Leia to be executed [1] but if you thought the last set of astronauts were up there for a long time...

[1] The editing in "Episode IV" makes this request and Leia still being alive a little bit later a bit odd, but the its better sequenced in the novelisation.

[Harlequin]

Damn. It would appear that Musk-Rat blinked first and sooner than I would have enjoyed.

[tufty]

Musk is as dumb as a bag of rocks. He appears to have believed he was actually being brought in to cut government waste, and not simply being used as a wrecking ball for government and society. That's really fucking stupid. It's difficult to believe the people /winning/ in the game of US politics are actually this fucking stupid.

As for Mars - Elon can't even get starshit to orbit. It was supposed to be on Mars already. He's spent billions of other people's money making big fireworks.

[zip accident]

Musk is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

He may well make a lot of mistakes, but he wouldn't be where he is if his mental capacity was below average.

As for Mars - Elon can't even get starshit to orbit. It was supposed to be on Mars already. He's spent billions of other people's money making big fireworks.

I dunno, it's a stupid target, the moon would make a lot more sense to me, but he wants it. Why he wants it is a puzzle, the theory I suggested is one possibility, I'd like to hear any others.

[PFVA]

If I understand it correctly they are planning to mine there. Mars, moon, or asteroids depending where they are able to do it.
China is on the way too. Now when they will be able to do it successfully and how it is another story. It may take a while.

As for all the fuss between Musk and Trump:

[tufty]

Musk is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

He may well make a lot of mistakes, but he wouldn't be where he is if his mental capacity was below average.
I'm not saying his mental capacity is below average (or wasn't, at least - with the quantity of drugs he's taking these days he's fried half his brain). I'm saying he's dumb.

He started with a lot of money - his family is rich. He formed Zip2 with his brother. That didn't do anything spectacular, it was a dot com gamble that paid off, and got him a few million. Then he formed X.com, it was not a success, he was kicked out as CEO, lucked out with a merger with what became PayPal and managed to get himself back in as CEO there. You will note that he had nothing to do with the creation of PayPal. But he made a shitload of money doing it. He had the idea for SpaceX based on being a total nerd, bullied and lied his way to it working. But it lost him a shitload of money, because without government funding SpaceX is not financially viable. He joined Tesla but was not involved in design until the cybertruck, which has Elon written all over it. Oh, and the big electric lorry thing. He's not been involved in SpaceX's design process until he went back to his obsession of going to Mars with a big fucking rocket. What else has he done? Oh, Hyperloop, that was great. And the Boring Company. And he bought Twitter because he was forced to, then made it unusable.

He's a world class bullshitter, perhaps even more so than Trump. He'll happily go up on stage and tell blatant lies, lies that can get him and his companies into massive trouble. He'll just make shit up on the fly. Yeah, we can strip 3 trillion off the budget, easy. His idea of engineering is "move fast and break things" "throw shit against a wall and hope it sticks", which is not engineering. The stuff that /has/ worked came from the people he works to the bone. The stuff that's actually Elon? Mostly fail.

Elon is Dilbert's PHB. Or the BOFH's "the boss". An at best average guy with a gift for bullshitting who got lucky in the dot com bubble and who's now managed to gaslight himself into thinking everybody else's successes mean he's smart. They don't - he's not and never was.

[F-ZeroOne]

Musk has apparently walked back his threat to "terminate" SpaceX capsule development.

OTOH, Boom tomorrow. Always Boom tomorrow!:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 65327.html

The idea that the US was once a "world leader" in supersonic aircraft would probably come as a surprise to those involved in the development of Concorde (to be completely fair, as far as passenger aircraft goes, yes. At least as far as anyone knows, the US still holds the record for experimental and military aircraft).

[PFVA]

The LA Times has a good article about the legal issues of what is going on in LA
California governor and the Mayor of LA oppose Trump's decision to send the National Guard to stop the protests

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... onal-guard

[zip accident]

The LA Times has a good article about the legal issues of what is going on in LA
California governor and the Mayor of LA oppose Trump's decision to send the National Guard to stop the protests

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... onal-guard

What matters is that the troops obeyed Trump.

[KlaxonCow]

What matters is that the troops obeyed Trump.

Exactly.

The true protection that the American people have from their government is not really the Second Amendment, because what use is a shotgun against drones, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, trained troops in state-of-the-art body armour, tanks and the rest of the vast arsenal of the US military (in a country where their defense budget is larger than the defence budgets of every other nation on Earth COMBINED)?

No, the true protection has always been that even if the Commander-in-Chief orders you to shoot your grandmother or neighbour, to launch a nuclear strike on Boston or whatever, then those troops will flatly refuse to kill civilians - their friends, their families - under anyone's orders.

If the troops obey Trump then we enter extremely dangerous territory. What happens when they start killing civilians? What happens when, in response, armed civilians start killing the National Guard?

Once they start reporting body counts, on both sides, how the hell do you bring such a situation back under control?

Trump might order more National Guard. But what if it spreads to other cities and states? When can he order them to stand down, in the sense that if he orders the National Guard to stand down and the ICE agents are sent back in, this shit will kick off all over again. Will ICE agents have to receive armed military escorts all the time to conduct their work? If the victims of the ICE agents resist arrest and deportation, is this sufficient for the armed military escort to intervene?

This is bad. Very bad.

[tufty]

I thought the national Guard were commanded by state governments, not the executive. Certainly that was what the right were wanking on about when people suggested that Biden activate the national guard. But I'm probably wrong.