Elon Musk's CNBC Interview Makes Marjorie Taylor Greene Sound Thoughtful
This interview was brought to you by Dunning and Kruger.
Breaking news: Elon Musk is one creepy ass fucker, and his brain seems to our non-medically trained eye like it's atrophying. He continues to hurtle down that path he's been on of late, the one that's had him this week expounding on this one Jewish guy he really hates, who reminds him of Magneto, and who "hates humanity." (When the Anti-Defamation League criticized his comments about George Soros, Musk tweeted that the ADL should "drop the A.")
Then there was this disturbing interview Musk did with CNBC last night, where he angrily denied that the white supremacist Allen, Texas, mass shooter was a white supremacist. Why? Because we guess for some reason Musk really feels the need to fight for that lie.
Watch this weird fuckin' thing. Notice how mad he gets when he says "It's bullshit." Note how easily this thin-skinned baby gets upset at the lightest pushback. And let us tell you, the pushback from the CNBC interviewer was light.
\u201cMusk doubles down on his claims that there's no evidence the Allen, Texas mall shooter had white supremacist beliefs, and that @bellingcat "does psy-ops" professionally.\u201d— nikki mccann ram\u00edrez (@nikki mccann ram\u00edrez) 1684278032
Talking about the man who blew children's heads off in the mall in Texas, Elon said conspiracy theory words that make Marjorie Taylor Greene's Jewish Space Lasers sound coherent. He said the shooting was "incorrectly ascribed" as a "white supremacist action." (It is undisputed that the dude was a white supremacist Nazi. He had Nazi tattoos.)
Elon said the evidence was "some obscure Russian website that nobody's ever heard of, that had no followers." Elon -- who owns a social media website -- should theoretically be smart enough to talk about a large Russian social media network that's kind of like MySpace without sounding like your great grandmother asking if you can help her change the Google, but here we are. (For easy explanations of where the killer's profile was found, click here, on the internet.)
Smirking like he had solved a very confusing case, he said that Bellingcat, the site that tracked down the shooter's social media, specializes in "psy-ops." (That is not quite correct. Also the New York Times found the profile first.)
Hims is a very pissy boy! Look how mad!
“I’m saying I thought that ascribing it to white supremacy was bullshit. And that the information for that came from an obscure Russian website and was somehow magically found by Bellingcat, which is a company that does psyops.”
Apartheid Karen so mad!
The CNBC reporter said "right" a couple times, which sounded like he was affirming that Bellingcat is "psyops." But then he clarified that it was just because had no fucking idea what Elon was talking about. (It is good to do research before you do interviews, #journalismtip.) That's when Elon got mad and said it was BULLSHIT, man, it was BULLSHIT!
So angry.
We guess it is between Elon and his god why he is so obsessed with defending the Allen shooter from charges of white supremacy, but we bet that god is white.
Later in the same interview, the CNBC interviewer tried to ask why and how Elon decides to spill his (dumbfucking moron) opinions on the internet. He referenced the comments about George Soros, which Elon said he stands by.
Elon of course responded, "freedom of speech."
The interviewer said he didn't think Elon is an anti-Semite. Elon said he's a "pro-Semite,' if anything."
But the question he was winding up to was "Do your tweets hurt the company?" (Tesla, not Twitter. This was after Tesla's annual meeting.) Or could they hurt advertising on Twitter? Could incoming CEO Linda Yaccarino ever come to him and say "You gotta stop, man?"
And Elon got the stupidest fucking look on his face for 13 entire seconds, and then shared an inane quote from The Princess Bride about how much he doesn't care, which in this context, came off pretty much as I HATE YOU, YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!
"I'll say what I want to say. If the consequence of that is losing money, so be it."
Twitter is a private company, so we guess Elon is free to run it into the ground. But doesn't that quote right there fly in the face of Elon's fiduciary duty to the shareholders of Tesla, which is publicly traded?
\u201c"i\u2019ll say what i want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.\u201d \n\n- powerful elon musk statement on china, i mean on shitposting on twitter\n\n\u201d— ian bremmer (@ian bremmer) 1684321672
Some weird fuckin' shit, man.
AFTER THAT, Elon had this exchange with the interviewer, again about the Allen shooter:
FABER: There’s no proof, by the way, that he was not [a white supremacist]
MUSK: I would say that there’s no proof that he is.
FABER; And that’s a debate you want to get into on Twitter?
MUSK: Yes. Because we should not be ascribing things to white supremacy if it is false.
Yep, between Elon and his god.
OPEN THREAD.
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I would like a BlueSky invite.
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Rural America Gonna Get Woke Clean Energy Dollars. Thanks A Lot, Joe Biden!
Rural utilities won't even have to teach CRT, so it's quite the deal.
The Biden administration is rolling out another part of its effort to speed up America's transition to renewable energy, announcing Tuesday that $11 billion in grants and loans are now available to rural areas to ditch old inefficient fossil fuel plants and replace them with affordable clean energy.
The aid comes in the form of two Department of Agriculture programs: The "Empowering Rural America" or “New ERA” program will provide $9.7 billion in grants for rural electric cooperatives to "deploy renewable energy systems, zero-emission and carbon capture systems," and the "Powering Affordable Clean Energy" (PACE) loan program that will provide another billion dollars in partly forgivable loans to a range of rural and tribal energy entities to "help finance large-scale solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydropower projects and energy storage in support of renewable energy systems."
The administration has been very diligent in pointing out that this is the biggest federal investment in rural energy infrastructure since Franklin D. Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Act in 1936, although the announcements have also been fairly careful not to put the words "green" and "New Deal" anywhere near each other.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a press release,
The Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to cleaner energy provides rural communities with an affordable and reliable power grid, while supporting thousands of new jobs and helping lower energy costs in the future. These investments will also combat climate change and significantly reduce air and water pollution that put children’s health at risk.
The funding for the two programs comes from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and is just one of a series of interconnected strategies to finally get the USA off the fossil fuel teat and transition to a clean energy economy. The two programs start accepting letters of interest in June and July, and once the grants start going out to help build clean energy projects, count on a whole bunch of press releases from Republican members of Congress who'll brag about how they're helping their communities, even though they voted against the infrastructure bill.
The New ERA program for rural electric cooperatives, Vilsack told reporters on a press call,
will help rural electric cooperatives reach parity with private utility companies who have already begun significant investment in clean energy. [...]
"We have a climate crisis that requires all of America to participate in reducing emissions to get to the net-zero future," Vilsack said.
Rural electric co-ops, which currently serve about 42 million Americans, get about 22 percent of their power from renewable sources, so the new funding should help boost that. At a White House event announcing the new programs, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), who chairs the Senate Ag Committee, said the clean energy funding is
"an important piece of how we commit to rural America."
"This is really about saying to people in rural America, we want you to stay there, we want your kids to come home there, and to have a quality of life there," she said.
In the Ag Department news release, the administration notes that the PACE loan program is in keeping with Biden's "Justice40" initiative, which is aimed at making sure 40 percent of the help from climate spending goes to "disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution."
That's been a running theme in Biden's climate policy, because disadvantaged communities have historically been hit the hardest by fossil fuel pollution, and continue to be disproportionately harmed by the effects of climate change. While we're at it, let's give props yet again to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who made environmental justice a central part of his 2020 climate plan, which Biden adopted and has stuck with from the start of his administration.
Also too, this is a good place to remind you all that the Wonkette Book Club is back, and for this Friday, we're going to read the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 climate novel The Ministry for the Future. You can read more about the book club right here. If the UN ever does establish an agency similar to the novel's imagined ministry, we'd want Jay Inslee running it, please.
[USDA / Reuters / NBC News / Photo (cropped): Jason Jacobs, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Elon Musk Has Some Thoughts About This One Jew
Just another very normal evening for the world's richest shitposter.
Billionaire shitposter and waste of perfectly good atoms Elon Musk has a clear moral outlook, which is that Elon Musk is the smartest person who ever lived and therefore just about the most important person on Planet Earth. Ergo, anything that's good for Elon Musk is good for the world, while anything that's bad for Elon Musk is bad for the world. So it stands to reason that Musk would be awfully peeved after news broke that billionaire investor George Soros sold off all of his stock in Tesla, the electric car company Musk owns and occasionally gives thought to when he's not trying to make everyone on Twitter love him.
The most likely explanation for Soros's decision is that he'd bought lots of Tesla shares when the stock price was in freefall last year, and saw an opportunity to take some profits when the company's stock rebounded in the first quarter of this year. (Good call, too, since Tesla shares have fallen 11 percent in the last month.) The most likely explanation to Musk, apparently, is that Soros is a comic book supervillain.
Last night, with no context at all, Musk tweeted, "Soros reminds me of Magneto," a reference to the mutant Marvel nemesis of the Wolverine-Men. Because Twitter's algorithm has been janked to goose the Great Thinker's tweets, the tweet has been viewed well over 28 million times as I write this, and probably that'll be well over 35 million by the time I write another couple paragraphs. Update: Just after this post went up, it was already into long-tail territory, and still only at 30 million views. Never trust Wonkette!
That's not just comic-book nerdery of course, because George Soros is the go-to bad guy for whatever bug is up rightwingers' asses, with the HE'S A JEW!!!! part right out loud or comfortably left in the background, because antisemitic hate is kind of a given with references to how George Soros controls American and world politics somehow. At this point there might be two or three rightwingers out there who don't know that "Soros" is a stand-in for "The Jews control everything," but there's no way in the multiverse that Elon Goddamn Musk is unaware of that.
Brian Krassenstein, a guy on Twitter, pointed out to Musk that part of what makes Magneto an interesting supervillain is his backstory:
Fun fact: Magneto's experiences during the Holocaust as a survivor shaped his perspective as well as his depth and empathy. Soros, also a Holocaust survivor, get's attacked nonstop for his good intentions which some Americans think are bad merely because they disagree with this political affiliations.
To expand that for non-geeks, Magneto's experiences as a Jewish Holocaust survivor who saw his community wiped out convinced him that humans intended to commit genocide against superpowered mutant persons, and needed to be stopped by any means necessary. (Yes, that's an oversimplification, we know he can also be seen as an antihero and also has helped the X-Files Mans on occasion.) We'd also add that part of the rightwing hate focused on Soros is straight out of Russian propaganda, because he supported the democratic movement in Ukraine that ousted Putin's buddy Viktor Yanukovych. He's also regularly the target of smears from Hungary's Viktor Orban.
Musk, who apparently lacks the knack for subtlety that even comic superhero stories can manage, replied that no, Soros may actually be worse than the fictional Magneto:
You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.
So yeah, that's certainly how evil cartoon supervillains behave: They literally hate humanity and want to destroy civilization, because they're just plain evil, and you're a fool if you believe they have good intentions. We don't actually know of any real human beings who sought to end the world or destroy all civilization (even modern avatars of evil like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot had definable political objectives other than "I hate humanity"). But sure, George Soros seeks to ruin everything, if you're a fucking antisemitic idiot who believes in conspiracy stories, which are also generally less plausible than many comic book plots.
There were a few souls who asked Musk just what the hell he was slobbering about this time, like former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who doesn't believe in nonmetaphorical ghosts:
\u201c@elonmusk @krassenstein What data support this hypothesis? In the post communist world Soros has invested heavily in supporting civil society, the very people trying rebuild humanity after decades of communist inhumanity. (I\u2019m not an expert on his activities in other places.)\u201d— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1684202551
What data support this hypothesis? In the post communist world Soros has invested heavily in supporting civil society, the very people trying rebuild humanity after decades of communist inhumanity. (I’m not an expert on his activities in other places.)
And then the Fox News addicts were all up in the replies with the news of how Soros has funded all the crime by sometimes supporting the campaigns of reformist district attorneys. Why? Because he loves criminals, as any supervillain does, duh. And the usual Musk-humping dipshits showed up to explain that anyone questioning Musk is clearly under the influence of George Soros's mind control, another prominent feature of superhero narratives.
Also too, for further context, some smartass went and pointed out that it's pretty weird that Musk is so frightened of the supposed world-changing influence of a guy who, sure, is a billionaire, but whose net worth ($6.7 billion) is a fraction not only of Musk's net worth ($176.9 billion, depending on what he's tweeting), but also a fraction of the $44 billion Musk paid to buy Twitter:
\u201cThe first guy is saying the second guy is too powerful\u201d— Thor Benson (@Thor Benson) 1684206585
Also also Musk last night went even more full on racist than usual, tweeting his approval of posts claiming that Black people are inexplicably violent and shouldn't be allowed to star in streaming series, the end.
[Forbes / Daily Beast / The Street]
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EPA Gonna Punch That Climate Emergency Right In The Snoot!
Stop it, Joe Manchin, we will pull this yacht over right now!
The Biden administration rolled out yet another piece of its climate plan today, as the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new regulations to limit the greenhouse gases emitted by electric power plants fueled by coal and methane (so-called "natural" gas). As the New York Times puts it in an admirably simple and accurate sentence,
The nation’s 3,400 coal- and gas-fired power plants currently generate about 25 percent of greenhouse gases produced by the United States, pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
Instead of mandating any particular technology, the rules set caps on rates of carbon dioxide pollution that plants can release, leaving it up to energy producers to find ways to meet the goal of eliminating CO2 emissions by 2040. If industry can find ways to capture all CO2 from smokestacks — technology that doesn't exist yet — then great. But it's more likely that utilities would have to switch to green energy, or for gas plants, to burning green hydrogen (the kind produced without fossil fuels), which emits no carbon.
And while the EPA doesn't say it, we're happy to: The faster the US and the world adopt solar and wind electricity, the cheaper that electricity will be per megawatt hour. According to an Oxford University study published in September, a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar could save the world $12 trillion by 2050, which would help offset other costs of the transition like grid upgrades and developing reliable storage/backup/distribution of clean energy. Going slow, on the other hand, will cost more and result in greater climate caused damage.
The EPA press release says the regulations will
avoid up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide (CO2) through 2042, which is equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles, roughly half the cars in the United States. Through 2042, EPA estimates the net climate and health benefits of the standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion.
The EPA emphasizes the public health benefits of not burning all that stuff, which doesn't just contribute to global warming but releases nasties like particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides into the air Americans breathe, especially in communities nearest to power plants, which tend to be home to poor and minority people because America. In addition to helping to keep the planet more habitable for large mammals like gazelles and the NCAA Final Four champion men's and women's teams, the proposed standards would mean huge health gains. In 2030 alone, the EPA says, cleaner air resulting from the new standards would prevent
• approximately 1,300 premature deaths;
• more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits;
• more than 300,000 cases of asthma attacks;
• 38,000 school absence days; [and]
• 66,000 lost workdays.
Under the new rules, virtually all coal and methane gas plants would be required to either reduce or capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2038, or shut down. Currently, roughly a quarter of American coal plants are already scheduled to be retired by 2029, per the US Energy Information Agency.
Needless to say, industry groups and Republican state officials are at this very moment working on the first drafts of legal challenges to the policy, written as is traditional with the congealed blood of seals and dolphins killed by oil spills. The Times reports that West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) is already declaring the EPA plan DOA in the courts, whining that "It is not going to be upheld, and it just seems designed to scare more coal-fired power plants into retirement — the goal of the Biden administration." Stupid not-wanting-climate-catastrophe Biden!
Sen. Joe Manchin ("D"-West Virginia), whose family fortune is built on selling some of the filthiest coal available — a mining waste slurry called "gob" coal that's particularly carbon intensive — also threatened today that he will oppose any new Biden appointees to the EPA unless the plan is dropped. Manchin griped that the administration is
"determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal- and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability."
Also, fuck the future, the man has money at stake, and he hasn't spent a career lining his own nest with filthy feathers from crows with black lung disease just to watch it all go away because people in the tropical regions think they "deserve" to live.
So yeah, kids, this is going to be a fight between the wealthy bastards who want to keep pumping the atmosphere full of planet-heating pollutants, and the first president ever whose administration is actually taking the action needed to get close to meeting the US's commitments to decarbonization by midcentury, which all nations need to do in order to hold warming to non-catastrophic levels.
Previously:
When you combine the anticipated greenhouse gas reductions from the EPA's recent vehicle emissions standards, its methane reduction standards, and the power plant emissions standards announced today, the Times reports, the total emissions that would be eliminated would be around 15 billion tons of CO2 by 2055, or
roughly the amount of pollution generated by the entire United States economy over three years. Several analyses have projected that the Inflation Reduction Act will cut emissions by at least another billion tons by 2030.
That could put the nation on track to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge that the United States would cut its greenhouse gases in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by 2050, although analysts point out that more policies will need to be enacted to reach the latter target.
And that, children, puts the world within what I'll call realistic hoping distance of actually meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting warming since the start of the industrial age to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). It would require all countries doing the same as or better than the Biden plan is close to accomplishing, so yeah, that's freaking difficult. But doable, genuinely doable, according to the climate boffins. The Times again:
“Each of these several regulations from the E.P.A. are contributing to the whole picture that is necessary to steer this ocean liner away from the worst climate disaster,” said Dallas Burtraw, an economist with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on energy and environmental policy.
Also I just remembered that we were going to do some kind of Wonkette Book Club on Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 climate novel The Ministry for the Future (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link), so I guess I'd better actually make a plan and write it up for tomorrow, damn my eyes.
Let's choose hope. But back it up with action.
OPEN THREAD.
[EPA / NYT / Oxford University / AP / NBC News / Photo: American Wind Energy Association, used by permission]
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