Elon Musk, What's up with that dude?

AD1184

AD1184

Celestial
From the British satirical and current affairs magazine Private Eye (print, no web link):
"IF YOU were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill," Tweeted Elon Musk on 6 August, again seeking to underline his iron-clad commitment to protecting freedom of speech, whatever the cost.

It turns out this protection doesn't extend to those being unfairly treated by their government. On 10 July, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a retired teacher, was sentenced to death by the Saudi authorities for retweeting posts by others that criticised the Saudi regime. At the time of writing, Musk remains curiously silent about this particularly egregious crime against free expression. Only a crazed conspiracist could link this silence to the fact that Saudi Arabia's King Holding Company is Twitter's second largest investor.
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pigfarmer

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
AD1184 said:
I found this:

en.wikipedia.org

McDermitt Caldera - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org



Thacker Pass Lithium Mine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org



mynews4.com

9th Circuit denies emergency bid to halt Nevada lithium mine at Thacker Pass

RENO, Nev. (AP) — A federal appeals court refused Wednesday to block construction of the largest lithium mine in the U.S. while it considers claims by Nevada co
mynews4.com mynews4.com
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Why doesn't any of this surprise me ? The cure for cancer could be found in some material and if there were a spotted owl nesting near it someone would be in court to prevent the stupid bird's repose from being disturbed.
 
nivek

nivek

As Above So Below
AD1184 said:
Musk is a twelve-year-old in a man's body.
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Indeed, one of so many in positions of power and/or money, it's astonishing...

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nivek

nivek

As Above So Below
Biden administration is going after Elon Musk...

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Elon Musk is probed by DOJ over Tesla perks, including using company resources on secret home project, that he received since 2017​

The Justice Department is probing perks that Elon Musk received from Tesla dating to 2017, further than previously understood, as part of a criminal investigation.

The Tesla resources may have been used on secret plans to build a glass mansion for the CEO is one of the claims the DOJ is investigating.

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has also sought information about transactions between Tesla and other entities connected to Musk, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The broadened timeline and scope of the probe suggest federal prosecutors have a broader interest in Musk and the electric car company than was previously known.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has also opened a civil investigation into the construction project and is seeking similar information from the company, officials said.

(More on the link)

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nivek

nivek

As Above So Below

Devastating risks of transitioning to 'green' energy: Mining for electric-powering minerals has left 23 million people exposed to toxic waste, 500,000km of rivers polluted and 16 million acres of farmland ruined​

Tens of millions of people — more than live in the entire state of Florida — are now exposed to toxic water runoff from metal mining, a new study has found.

The report lays bare the devastating impacts that can follow a reckless transition to 'green' energy, compounding the ecological damage wrought by over 150 years of drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

The researchers found that 23 million people worldwide, well as 5.72 million in livestock, over 16 million acres of irrigated farmland and over 297,800 miles worth of rivers have been contaminated by mining's toxic byproducts seeping into the water.

This metal mining includes many so-called 'rare earth elements' essential to the manufacture of high-tech electronics, solar cells, wind turbines and all the batteries needed to store sustainable 'green' energy (and power electric cars and iPhones).

While the new study focuses on environmental impacts, global metals mining has recently faced shocking lawsuits against major tech firms, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla, over child slavery in the Congo, where 70 percent of the industry's cobalt is sourced.

(More on the link)

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nivek

nivek

As Above So Below
Here's a 3D map to show where all of the Starlink satellites are located that can be rotated and zoomed in or out, you can also click on each satellite for information:

Starlink satellites

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nivek

nivek

As Above So Below

Elon Musk announces he will head to Eagle Pass 'later this week' to find out for himself the situation amid Biden's shambolic handling as 11K enter every day​

Elon Musk has announced he will go to Eagle Pass, Texas, later this week to observe the situation at the US-Mexico border, where thousands are crossing every day amid an asylum seeker crisis.

The small border town has been overwhelmed with migrants in recent days, with more than 7,500 flooding into the tiny town of 28,000 people in just two days.

The Tesla founder, 52, claimed on X, formerly Twitter, that he had spoken to congressman Tony Gonzales, who has been sounding the alarm about the crisis, and decided to go see the scene for himself.

'I spoke with Rep Tony Gonzales tonight – he confirmed that it is a serious issue,' Musk wrote on Tuesday. 'They are being overwhelmed by unprecedented numbers – just hit an all-time high and still growing! Am going to visit Eagle Pass later this week to see what’s going on for myself.'

In a different post responding to a DailyMail.com video of chaos outside a migrant shelter in Staten Island, Musk said 'this is a severe crisis.'

(More on the link)

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Non smoking gun

Non smoking gun

Honorable
From the biography by Isaacson, his upbringing was a cauldron:

The playground​

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.

When he was twelve, he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a veldskool. “It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”

The second time Elon went to veldskool, he was about to turn sixteen. He had gotten much bigger, bursting up to six feet with a bearlike frame, and had learned some judo. So veldskool wasn’t so bad. “I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again. They might beat the shit out of me, but if I had punched them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t come after me again.”

South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain. For the rest of the evening, the blood on the soles of their sneakers made a sticky sound against the pavement.

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”

His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.

At assembly one morning, a student who was horsing around with a gang of friends bumped into him. Elon pushed him back. Words were exchanged. The boy and his friends hunted Elon down at recess and found him eating a sandwich. They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.

But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it. They say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He sure knew how to make anything terrible.”

When I call Errol, he talks to me for almost three hours and then follows up regularly with calls and texts over the next two years. He is eager to describe and send me photos of the nice things he provided to his kids, at least during the periods when his engineering business was doing well. At one point he drove a Rolls-Royce, built a wilderness lodge with his boys, and got raw emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia, until that business collapsed.

But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have made veldskool quite tame,” he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. “Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.” He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

“Adversity shaped me”​

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, “and I suppose that may explain my particular malady.” In Elon Musk’s case, his father’s impact on his psyche would linger, despite many attempts to banish him, both physically and psychologically. Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as “demon mode.” Unlike his father, he would be caring with his kids, but in other ways, his behavior would hint at a danger that needed to be constantly battled: the specter that, as his mother put it, “he might become his father.” 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?

“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”

During a particularly hellish period of his life in 2008, after the first three launches of his SpaceX rockets exploded and Tesla was about to go bankrupt, he would wake up thrashing and recount to Talulah Riley, who became his second wife, the horrendous things his father had once said. “I’d heard him use those phrases himself,” she says. “It had a profound effect on how he operates.” When he recalled these memories, he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. “I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood,” Riley says. “But he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”
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nivek

nivek

As Above So Below

Fearing an Alien Invasion, Turkish Man Reports Starlink Satellites to Police​

Police in Turkey found themselves responding to a rather odd call from a terrified resident who spotted Starlink satellites in the sky and suspected that they were the start of an alien invasion. The weird incident reportedly occurred in Monday night in the province of Çorum as the internet-providing service from SpaceX passed overhead. A young man identified only as 'MT' caught sight of the string of satellites and, unaware of what they were, assumed that they were extraterrestrial in nature with a sinister intent. Like many an astute UFO witness before him, the man dutifully filmed the eerie scene and then promptly phoned the Turkish equivalent of 911 to express his concerns about the hostile aliens brazenly cruising through the night sky.

When officers arrived at MT's residence, the shaken man showed them his footage of the suspected ET craft and indicated that he had called for help out of fear that they were about to be invaded by aliens. Fortunately, the young man's concerns were quickly put to rest as the cops explained that the objects were simply a string of Starlink satellites and, as such, perfectly harmless. The incident on Monday evening is the latest in what has become a recurring phenomenon wherein, much like UFOs that turn out to be lenticular clouds, bewildered witnesses mistake the SpaceX service for otherworldly visitors only to be disabused of that notion once the truth is revealed.

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