Вуду-наука

[tijd]

По итогам промежуточных выборов в Конгресс можно заметить, что самолет Байдена до конца не взлетел, но и не разбился. Сохранение большинства в Сенате, который утверждает назначения на должности в администрации президента, гарантирует продолжение курса администрации, даже если он будет находится под атакой со стороны республиканского большинства в Палате представителей.



От самолетов пора переходить к ракетам.

The Pentagon is preparing to send the Patriot missile system to Ukraine, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday, a move that would provide the government in Kyiv with the most advanced air defense weapon in the American arsenal as Russia carries out an unrelenting assault on the country’s electrical grid.
The plan is not yet approved by President Biden or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, but it could be soon, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail sensitive internal deliberations. It would fulfill one of Ukraine’s biggest and most frequent requests of Washington, and follows weeks of Russian bombardment that has plunged much of the country into cold and darkness as winter takes hold.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/13/patriot-missile-defense-ukraine/



Физик Роберт Парк, умерший в 2020, в качестве хобби занимался разоблачением шарлатанства и суеверия, в том числе принимающего псевдонаучные формы. В популярной книжке "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud" (2000) Парк издевается в частности над холодным ядерный синтезом (cold fusion), вдохновленным мечтой о неисчерпаемом источнике энергии. Другим объектом издевательства предстает Марсианское общество, созданное инженером Робертом Зубриным и вдохновленное мечтой о колонизации Марса.

Some idea of how difficult it would be to sustain an extraterrestrial colony on Mars was provided by Biosphere 2, a three-acre, sealed-off mini-world built in the Arizona desert (Biosphere 1 was taken to be Earth itself). The gleaming glass-and-steel enclosure rising above the Arizona desert was bankrolled by Texas billionaire Edward P. Bass, the New Age heir to the Bass oil fortune. Bass had fallen under the spell of a group that believed Earth was about to be consumed by civil unrest, whereupon the group members would escape to Mars.
Hailed by some in the media as a bold scientific experiment, four men and four women dressed in Star Trek-style uniforms waved to the cameras and marched into the human terrarium on September 26, 1991. The airtight door was sealed behind them. They vowed to remain for two years, recycling water, air, and waste and growing their own food, to prove that a human colony could survive on another planet.
Within weeks, they were gasping for air, crops had failed, and the crystal clear “ocean” had turned to slime. It would later be revealed that air and food had to be smuggled in, and scrubbers were used to reduce the dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide. Even so, the already trim biospherians emerged two years later an average of twenty-five pounds lighter. This elaborate sealed-off environment, far grander than anything that could conceivably be transported to Mars, had been unable to sustain eight humans.
Zubrin is undaunted by such failures. His vision goes far beyond life under a dome. He plans for the day when humans will melt the polar caps of Mars, which consist largely of frozen CO2. This will create a greenhouse effect. Mars will once again be warm and wet. Plants will thrive in the CO2 atmosphere, freeing oxygen. An atmosphere of breathable air will develop, and the colonists can put aside their space suits. Zubrin speaks of creating an Earthlike atmosphere on Mars, even though at present hundreds of scientists, using the latest techniques, are struggling to understand the forces that determine Earth’s atmosphere. But for Zubrin, these are details. All we need to make it happen is the will.




The society has about 4,000 members and is somewhat like a model rocket club without the rockets. Zubrin is an evangelical crusader who believes that it is mankind's destiny to land a human on Mars within 10 years, with or without government funding. Following that, he expects waves of explorers to colonize and terraform the Red Planet within a few generations.
To some, the Zubrin plan is downright visionary; to others, it's the work of a crank. "Frankly, I think this is going nowhere," says physicist Robert Park, director of the Washington, DC, office of the American Physical Society and author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, a book that criticizes Zubrin's scheme as simplistic and unworkable. "These Mars Society guys are fooling themselves about their plan and trying to fool others. I can't imagine why they think people would be willing to pay taxes to support a colony that returns nothing. Pick the worst place you can think of on Earth, and it's a Garden of Eden compared with Mars."
Park says Zubrin threatened legal action over passages in his book. He agreed to several changes, including the removal of a sentence that described Zubrin as "messianic."
https://www.wired.com/2001/07/mars-2/



Через Марсианское общество к безумной миссии в свое время присоединился Илон Маск, с мешком денег от первого пузыря доткомов. В 2001 он принял участие с пленарным докладом в заседании общества в Стэнфорде.

Musk started by crashing the Mars Society, an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet. They were holding a fund-raiser in mid-2001, a $500-per-plate event at the house of one of the well-off Mars Society members. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting. “He gave us a check for $5,000,” Zubrin said. “That made everyone take notice.” Zubrin invited Musk for coffee ahead of the dinner and told him about the research center the society had built in the Arctic to mimic the tough conditions of Mars and the experiments they had been running for something called the Translife Mission, in which there would be a capsule orbiting earth carrying a crew of mice. It would spin to give them one-third gravity-the same as Mars-and they would live there and make babies.
When it was time for dinner, Zubrin placed Musk at the VIP table next to himself, the director and space buff James Cameron, and Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist for NASA. Musk loved it. “He was much more intense than some of the other millionaires,” Zubrin said. “He didn’t know a lot about space, but he had a scientific mind. He wanted to know exactly what was being planned in regards to Mars and what the significance would be.” Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated an additional $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-elon-musk-spacex/

Musk’s interest in doing space missions has led him to bring together a group of individuals - a group Musk said would be part of a “Life to Mars Foundation” (http://www.lifetomars.com/) that he was in the process of forming.
While Zubrin had made repeated references to his desire for he Mars Society to participate in this mission (presumably with Musk’s financial support), Musk was curiously silent in that regard. Only when asked after his formal presentation by an audience member whether the Mars Society would have a role, did Musk address the issue - or even mention the Mars Society.
Musk shied away from saying “yes” to overt Mars Society participation preferring, instead, to say that there might be a role for the Mars Society - or other organizations (his website lists Mars Society, Planetary Society, X Prize Foundation, Babakin Space Center, and BioServe.)
Musk noted that “being inclusive” is preferable in such endeavors so long as this does not create a situation where too many participants begins to hinder the performance of the mission itself. As Musk completed his presentation he invited people to send him thoughts and ideas at elon@muskfoundation.com.
As Musk ended his presentation, two things became rather clear. First, the non-governmental exploration of space is no longer just a fantasy. Second, when you have the ability to marshal the financial resources such as Musk can do, you can pick your team members as you wish - and create a new organization if the existing ones don’t meet your needs.
The notion of people deciding to ignore their government’s lack of interest in sending humans to Mars and exploring deep space now has an outlet for action.
https://spaceref.com/uncategorized/millionaires-and-billionaires-the-secret-to-sending-humans-to-mars/



Интересно упоминание "Babakin Space Center" (Научно-испытательного центра имени Г.Н. Бабакина, подразделения НПО имени С.А. Лавочкина), с которым Маск пытался наладить связи. В дальнейшем российских марсистов ждали некоторые перетыряски. Центр Бабакина был ликвидирован, его здание в Химках ныне стоит заброшенным. Замдиректора НПО Лавочника, генерал-лейтенант ФСБ Сергей Солодовников, был арестован в мае 2014 за хищения в крупных размерах и посажен в 2021 на 16 лет.

Химкинский городской суд Московской области вынес решение в отношении бывшего генерал-лейтенанта ФСБ Сергея Солодовникова и ещё пяти его сообщников, обвиняемым по ст. 210 УК РФ «Участие в преступном сообществе» и ч. 4 ст. 159 УК РФ «Мошенничество в особо крупном размере». Солодовников получил самый большой срок из группы - 16 лет колонии строго режима. Остальные фигуранты: Виталий Вернигор, Владимир Анисимов, Игорь Корбут, Анатолий Шишкин и Пётр Грешилов - от 15,8 до 15,9 года колонии.
Дело длилось с 2014 года. Тогда же Солодовников был задержан. По версии следствия, после ухода из органов он стал заместителем гендиректора в исследовательском инновационном предприятии «МАИ-ЛАСТАР», выполняющем заказы для НПО имени Лавочкина. Среди них, к примеру, числились программа освоения Марса, производство спутников для финской метеорологической компании и т. д. Однако на деле никаких разработок не велось, а выделенные в размере 185 млн рублей средства группа просто похитила.
https://news.ru/criminal/eks-generala-fsb-prigovorili-k-16-godam-kolonii/

С сентября 2022 НПО Лавочкина находится под американскими санкциями.

Joint Stock Company Research and Production Association Named After S. A. Lavochkina produces space-related items for Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Joint Stock Company Research and Production Association Named After S. A. Lavochkina has also been involved in the development of missile defense and space-defense projects for the Russian Federation. As additional information, Joint Stock Company Research and Production Association Named After S. A. Lavochkina has supported Russian government space systems that the Russian military uses to perpetrate its war against Ukraine.
https://www.state.gov/targeting-russias-senior-officials-defense-industrial-base-and-human-rights-abusers/



В 1990ых Международная Космическая Станция создавалась администрацией Клинтона специально для того, чтобы чем-то занять голодных российских ученых и удержать их от соблазна продавать технологии баллистических ракет другим странам вроде Ирана.

The International Space Station project gave Russia incentive to adhere to nuclear non- proliferation by providing other technological advancement aspirations and allowed Russian scientists and engineers the opportunity to develop projects and earn income outside of the military and intelligence apparatus. This incentive was made explicitly clear in the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000, in which Section 6 bans U.S. payments to Russia in connection with the ISS unless the President of the United States determines that Russia is taking steps to prevent the proliferation of weapons to Iran. Collaborating also stabilized the struggling Russian economy, as the United States provided monetary support. Highly visible U.S.-Russian cooperation in human space flight was intended to be emblematic of a changed U.S.-Russian relationship overall.
https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/exhibits/show/space4diplomacy/space4diplomacy-partnering

В 2000ых под мудрым руководством Россия "встала с колен", и многое поменялось.



Ключевую роль в марсианских замыслах Маска сыграл любимый конгрессмен Путина и во всех бочках затычка Дейна Рорабейкер.

В 2002 Маск создает компанию SpaceX. В 2004 Рорабайкер на посту главы подкомиссии по космосу (Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the House Science Committee) пробивает  закон Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, который открывает дорогу для приватизации космической отрасли и получения SpaceX правительственных контрактов https://www.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/house-bill/5382

Приватизация имеет смысл в случае создания конкурентного рынка. Но по идеологии бывшего партнера и вдохновителя Маска Питера Тиля настоящие предприниматели призваны избегать конкуренции и осваивать ниши на рынке, которое можно монополизировать. Частная космическая компания способна переманивать толковых инженеров из государственного сектора (НАСА) и в то же время избегать государственного надзора над режимом секретности вокруг ракетных технологий.



Рорабейкер в 2018 накануне своего вылета из Конгресса:

"SpaceX and these other companies, when they do something under a government contract they are actually saving the government money. They have an idea of how to keep costs low because it effects their profit margin, which isn’t the case of government employees and NASA. <...>
There is no profit to be made in deep space exploration. Finding new planets, going out there beyond, and maybe even pushing the exploration of things like Mars, although Elon Musk seems to want to go to Mars in a big way."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/29/dana-rohrabacher-space-pioneer-673442

За четыре года до этого рука мыла руку: Маск помогал Рорабейкеру с переизбранием в Конгресс, а Рорабайкер Маску - с правительственными контрактами.

If you're Tesla (TSLA)-owner Elon Musk, you load your newest, coolest gadget -- a space capsule designed to take seven astronauts into orbit -- on a flat-bed truck in California and drive it (slowly) over 10 days to Washington D.C. Park it a few blocks from the Capitol. Then invite Congress to climb in.
"Great job, Elon!" yelled Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, poking his head out of the Dragon V2 space capsule, which Musk hopes will one day ferry U.S. astronauts and scientists into outer space.
Musk's California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. depends on federal contracts, like most aerospace and defense companies.
The company has already landed a few federal contracts, including one to launch robotic, unmanned cargo vehicles into space. But Elon Musk wants more.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/companies/musk-spacex-washington/index.html



Роберт Зубрин, мессия марсизма и потомок еврейских иммигрантов из России, множество раз приезжал в путинскую Россию с призывами к сотрудничеству в осуществлении его мечты.

Но, в отличие от других деятелей, Зубрин - не поклонник Путина и его войны https://www.nationalreview.com/author/robert-zubrin/

@elonmusk this is not a joke. You have every right to tweet whatever you like, but sabotaging the defence of a country under attack by an enemy of the United States is another matter altogether. If you keep this up you will destroy both #SpaceX and yourself. Stop and think. https://t.co/Azmsfj2m4D pic.twitter.com/T4Lml1bIwW
- Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) October 14, 2022

Подобно " вуду экономике", "вуду наука" марсизма опирается на определенную матрицу сознания - романтику колонизации новых территорий и создания на них утопического чистого общества. Продолжается миф о мужественном ковбое, осваивающем пространство и свободном от правительственных оков. Из дебатов 1990ых о "спасении западной цивилизации" Зубрин вынес идею о том, что стержнем этой цивилизации служит идея расширения жизненного пространства (Lebensraum) и завоевания территорий. Отсюда Марс.

"Western humanist civilization as we know and value it today was born in expansion, grew in expansion and can only exist in a dynamic expanding state. While some form of human society might persist in a non-expanding world, that society will not feature freedom, creativity, individuality, or progress, and placing no value on those aspects of humanity that differentiate us from animals, it will place no value on human rights or human life as well. Such a dismal future might seem an outrageous prediction, except for the fact that for nearly all of its history most of humanity has been forced to endure such static modes of social organization, and the experience has not been a happy one. Free societies are the exception in human history - they have only existed during the four centuries of frontier expansion of the West. That history is now over. The frontier opened by the voyage of Christopher Columbus is now closed. If the era of western humanist society is not to be seen by future historians as some kind of transitory golden age, a brief shining moment in an otherwise endless chronicle of human misery, then a new frontier must be opened. Mars beckons."
https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-frontier-by-robert-zubrin/



Если вслед за Зубриным отказаться от мальтузианства ограниченных ресурсов, возникает мечта о грядущем светлом будущем, в котором ничем неограниченное человечество расселяется по галактикам и планетам. Эта мечта сочетается с "лонгтермизмом", течением в моральной философии, которое, отталкиваясь от утилитаризма (представления о морали, как максимизации всеобщего благополучия), призывает думать не о сиюминутных мелочах, а о прекрасном будущем триллионов людей в грядущих поколениях. Этим многое можно оправдывать - подобно тому, как будущим коммунистическим счастьем оправдывали свои действия большевики. За ниточку "эффективного альтруизма" к лонгтермизму пришли разные техномиллиардеры, включая Илона Маска. Именно через это дело Маск попал под влияние Игоря Курганова и пытался передать тому управление своей благотворительностью.

Лицом лонгтермизма выпало стать криптомиллиардеру Сэмюэлу Бэнкман-Фриду, который в итоге попался на мошенничестве и обанкротился.

SAMUEL BANKMAN-FRIED, 30, of Stanford, California, is charged with two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. He is also charged with conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and commit campaign finance violations, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five years.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/united-states-attorney-announces-charges-against-ftx-founder-samuel-bankman-fried



In 2012, while MacAskill was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivering his earning-to-give spiel, he heard of a promising M.I.T. undergraduate named Sam Bankman-Fried and invited him to lunch. Bankman-Fried’s parents are scholars at Stanford Law School, and he had been raised as a card-carrying consequentialist. He had recently become vegan and was in the market for a righteous path. MacAskill pitched him on earning to give. Bankman-Fried approached an animal-welfare group and asked its members whether they had more use for his volunteer time or for his money, and they strongly preferred the money. The next year, Bankman-Fried invited MacAskill to stay at his coed nerd frat, where everyone slept in the attic to preserve the living area for video and board games.
In 2014, Bankman-Fried graduated with a degree in physics, and went to work at Jane Street. He says that he donated about half his salary, giving some to animal-welfare organizations and the rest to E.A. movement-building initiatives. In 2017, he started Alameda Research, a crypto-trading firm that sought to exploit an arbitrage opportunity wherein bitcoin, for various reasons, traded higher on Japanese exchanges. The scheme was elaborate, and required that his employees spend a lot of time in bank branches, but he made a ten-per-cent profit on every trade. One crypto impresario told me, “We all knew that was possible in theory, but S.B.F. was the one who actually went and did it.”
In 2019, Bankman-Fried founded a user-friendly crypto exchange called FTX. One of the exchange’s most profitable products is not yet legal in the United States; he shopped for more congenial jurisdictions and set up in the Bahamas. By the time Bankman-Fried was twenty-nine, Forbes estimated his net worth at about twenty-six billion dollars, making him the twenty-fifth-richest American.
<...>
Last week, Elon Musk tweeted, of MacAskill’s new book, “This is a close match for my philosophy.” (For a brief period, Musk reportedly assigned responsibility for the charitable distribution of nearly six billion dollars to Igor Kurganov, a former professional poker player and a onetime housemate of MacAskill’s; in MacAskill’s book, Kurganov is thanked for “unfettered prances round the garden.”) <...>
Bankman-Fried has made an all-in commitment to longtermism. In May, I spoke with him over video chat, and he seemed almost willfully distracted: he didn’t bother to hide the fact that he was doing things on several monitors at once. (As a child, his brother has said, Bankman-Fried was so bored by the pace of regular board games that it became his custom to play multiple games at once, ideally with speed timers.) He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes-global health and poverty-to be more emotionally driven. He was happy for some money to continue to flow to those priorities, but they were not his own. “The majority of donations should go to places with a longtermist mind-set,” he said, although he added that some intercessions coded as short term have important long-term implications. He paused to pay attention for a moment. “I want to be careful about being too dictatorial about it, or too prescriptive about how other people should feel. But I did feel like the longtermist argument was very compelling. I couldn’t refute it. It was clearly the right thing.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism



Mr. Musk was increasingly relying on a new adviser, a 34-year-old, Russian-born ex-professional gambler named Igor Kurganov. Mr. Kurganov spent some of the pandemic sleeping in Mr. Musk’s home, where they chatted late into the night about how the world’s richest person might use his fortune to help shape the planet through a giving strategy known as “effective altruism.”
Mr. Kurganov had no experience in finance or security but was suddenly a central figure in both areas for Mr. Musk. He had moved from London to Texas and replaced some of Mr. Musk’s protection detail with new hires of his own. Not long after, the Tesla CEO told Mr. Birchall that he was so taken by the younger man’s ideas that he wanted to leave him in charge of his charitable giving, disbursing funds from Mr. Musk’s vast private fortune, currently around $230 billion, as he saw fit.
“Elon,” Mr. Birchall told his boss, according to three people briefed afterward. “You can’t.” <...>
To Mr. Birchall, that was an untenable situation. He was legally head of the foundation, and as he saw it, Mr. Kurganov was a newcomer who suddenly had immense influence on what to do with Mr. Musk’s money, he told people.
Mr. Birchall also learned that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had begun making preliminary inquiries into Mr. Kurganov as part of his job to watch for foreign interference in U.S. companies, people familiar with the matter say. The FBI agent was concerned that a newcomer had so quickly been welcomed into Mr. Musk’s inner circle, the people say.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-fortune-fight-jared-birchall-igor-kurganov-11657308426

Click to view

"Шахматная мысль, превратившая уездный город в столицу земного шара, превратится в прикладную науку и изобретет способы междупланетного сообщения. Из Васюков полетят сигналы на Марс, Юпитер и Нептун. Сообщение с Венерой сделается таким же легким, как переезд из Рыбинска в Ярославль. А там, как знать, может быть, лет через восемь в Васюках состоится первый в истории мироздания междупланетный шахматный турнир!"
http://gatchina3000.ru/literatura/koreiko_a_i/12-chairs_37.htm

Является ли сам Маск шарлатаном, а его компании - пузырем вроде FTX? Ответа мы пока не знаем. Разумеется, ракеты и электромобили - более конкретные вещи, чем криптовалюта, но ценность этих продуктов на рынке немного преувеличена. Рост пирамиды МММ (Маск, Марс, Маразм) однажды был вынужден прекратиться.



Tesla, which underpins Musk’s standing as the world’s richest person, has seen its market value drop 26% since Oct. 28, when the CEO of both the world’s leading electric vehicle company and private aerospace giant SpaceX, completed his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion. It’s down about 58% this year. By comparison, GM is up 1% since Oct. 28 and Ford has gained about 6%, though both automakers’ shares are down by about a third this year.
Twitter isn’t the sole source of the recent weakness in Tesla shares. The carmaker is particularly reliant on China for much of its profitability, and as equity analyst Jeffrey Osborne wrote in a recent research note, “weakening macro data in China is leading to concerns on Tesla,” which has been lowering prices there to boost local demand.
Investors are taking notice of these weaknesses. For example, hedge funds “seem to be shifting to a negative bias on (Tesla) stock,” Osborne said, citing conversations with finance officials. They are “increasingly concerned about a loss of focus for CEO Elon Musk with his Twitter acquisition,” he said.
Musk has set an audacious goal for Tesla to boost its sales to 20 million vehicles annually by 2030. It looks like a stretch for a company that has yet to sell 2 million a year - and is double the annual volume of global giants like Toyota and Volkswagen. Undoubtedly, Tesla’s sales will keep growing, though its inability to offer an affordable electric vehicle, priced from about $30,000, is a limiting factor. Currently, the average Tesla retails for $67,800 in the U.S., according to Kelley Blue Book.
Curiously, U.S. consumer interest in buying Teslas also dipped in 2022’s third quarter, based on traffic to Kelley Blue Book, the brand’s first such decline. “Shopper interest in Tesla plummeted quarter over quarter,” according to the auto retailing site. “Tesla fell to sixth from fifth in the rankings of most-shopped luxury brands, with 12% of all luxury shoppers considering a Tesla - down 3 percentage points from Q2 2022 and notably the largest quarter-over-quarter loss for any luxury brand.”
That decline in consumer interest could be an anomaly and improve in the year’s remaining months. But it may reflect the reality that companies including General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, Lucid and many more are bringing compelling new electric vehicles to the market that compete directly with Tesla-and in some cases offer features or pricing that are more compelling.
It’s also reasonable to suspect that as Musk’s public image grows less positive due to his handling of Twitter, as well as his willingness to express partisan political views, holds real risk for the Tesla brand, since he has made himself synonymous with it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/11/23/elon-musk-tesla-stock-twitter/

You can read all of Linette Lopez amazing investigative work on Tesla, which Elon Musk does not want you to read:

(Note: I have a subscription to Business Insider and its well worth it) https://t.co/3IlZpZoeIu
- Gabe Hoffman (@GabeHoff) December 16, 2022

Публичное самодурство нового хозяина Твиттера заставляет обратить внимание на его самодурстве во главе Теслы и SpaceX, которые раньше мало замечали из-за желания верить в сказку про Новые Васюки.

"At the core of every Musk company is a big, world-changing promise - they sell the idea that their products and services are saving humanity from some intractable problem, whether it's climate crisis or traffic. But Musk's promises track more with religion - he has been sent to save us from our earthly sins of waste and pollution - than with science. Think about it a bit and the idea that a luxury sports car can save us from global warming or that the answer for the Earth's toxification is to move everyone to Mars falls apart, but that isn't the point. The goal of all this mythmaking is to turn investors, employees, and customers into evangelists.
This is how Musk manages to keep employees on the hook despite the miserable conditions: They are made to feel as if they are saving the world. You can see how this won't work the same way at Twitter. <...>
For Musk, having a mission is key, because having a mission attracts money. It allows him to rope in governments, which are more than willing to outsource their intractable problems. Despite his complaints about government subsidies, Musk's companies are dependent on them. A Los Angeles Times review in 2015 revealed that he had taken over $4 billion in government funding at that point. And since then, Tesla has received billions in government-created regulatory credits from combustion-engine-car companies, over $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to build out more factories in Nevada and New York, billions in contracts for SpaceX, and even payroll benefits from the pandemic stimulus bill. Even his more far-flung ideas have soaked up government cash. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-based solution to urban traffic, has been trying to collect government subsidies all over the country (and in Canada) despite only building a single tunnel in Las Vegas.
Selling the dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that more-established automakers were poised to catch up to its technology. Any journalist or investor who questioned Musk or his mission then - just like now - was subject to bullying and harrassment. The evangelists, the faithful, made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world (for now) based on how Musk said it would change the future. Call me cynical, but I don't see that happening for Twitter."
https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-business-playbook-boss-visionary-jerk-spacex-tesla-twitter-2022-12

За высказывание своего мнения и за журналистские репортажи о бизнесах Маска автор это текста забанен в Твиттере.

Siri, show me a tweet that didn't age well.
- Carl Feher (@CJ_Feher) February 24, 2022

Другим забаненным журналистам Маск вернул их аккаунты, но указал на их место - подобно ранним играм Путина с кремлевским пулом https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_15,_2022_Twitter_suspensions

In his first days running Twitter, Musk said that he would convene a content moderation council before making major changes to the company’s speech policies or reinstating banned users. Weeks later, he began reinstating banned users en masse, including neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and rolled back the company’s policy against covid-19 misinformation without any apparent process. He reinstated Trump after holding an unscientific live poll of his own followers, a process that seemed designed mostly to gin up attention.
He never did convene a content moderation council, and on Monday he abruptly dissolved the company’s external Trust and Safety Council, which predated his takeover.
On Nov. 6, Musk tweeted that his commitment to “free speech” extended even to not banning a two-year-old account that tracked the movements of his private jet, using publicly available flight data. But on Wednesday, Musk suspended that account without notice, then permanently banned it, along with the personal account of its 20-year-old author, whom he threatened to sue. Only after the initial suspension did he announce a new policy prohibiting Twitter users from tweeting the “live location” of other users without their consent - a policy that could have wide-ranging consequences if enforced.
Twitter’s move on Thursday to suspend the accounts of several journalists, including The Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, took the company’s crackdown to a new level.
Last month, after a number of users changed their display names to “Elon Musk” to mock him, Musk announced that anyone impersonating another user without a “parody” label would be permanently banned.
And while the Twitter files strained to stitch together a case that the company’s previous leaders harbored a liberal bias, Musk has proudly allied himself with the right since taking over Twitter, even publicly encouraging Twitter users to vote Republican in the U.S. midterm elections.
Musk’s own casual disdain for any form of consistency or accountability in his own approach to content moderation belies the notion that the Twitter files were a genuine exercise in transparency. In the context of his leadership, they come across as a mixture of vindictive score-settling, a made-for-social-media reality show, and an attempt to distract from scrutiny of the personal digital fiefdom that Musk’s Twitter has quickly become.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/16/twitter-files-musk-free-speech-hypocrisy/



На роль разоблачителя тайного заговора, которому он передал внутреннюю документацию купленной им компании, Маск выбрал Мэта Тайбби, короля путиноскептиков.

Во время предвыборной кампании 2020 Тайбби вместе с партнершей по подкасту "Iseful Idiots" пытался раскрутить собственный "компромат" на Байдена через путинофилку Александру "Тару" Рид. Ныне он с подачи Маска нападает на прессу за то, что они не опубликовали "компроват" в виде лаптопа Хантера Байдена из сомнительных источников.

Дэвид Корн справедливо указывает, что вся эта нить тянется к Рашагейту-2016.

Trump-Russia denialism is at the heart of the right’s latest attempt to cook up another sham scandal to tar President Joe Biden and bolster Trump’s dangerous and fraudulent charge that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This campaign is being enabled by the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, and, worse, it is being exploited by Trump to call for the “termination” of the US Constitution.
On Friday afternoon, Musk made a surprise announcement: Within hours, Twitter would feature a report on how the social media site had handled the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020. It would tell us, Musk promised, what “really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.”
Back then, the New York Post published a supposed bombshell report revealing that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s chief henchman, had come into possession of the contents of a laptop previously owned by Biden’s son and that the computer supposedly contained information proving the unfounded allegation that Biden, as vice president, had pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Hunter and Burisma, an Ukrainian energy company of which the younger Biden was a board member. This posed a challenge for news organizations and social media outlets. The story might be a Watergate-sized scoop that could undo Biden’s presidential campaign. Then again, it might be a disinformation operation being facilitated or carried out by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing outlet. Should the story be amplified? Linked to? Cited? Twitter blocked its users from tweeting a link to the New York Post article and tagged it as “hacked material.” The company suspended the newspaper’s Twitter account for several days. Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s chief for trust and safety, recently stated that Twitter took these steps because it could not verify the story.
Ever since, Trumpers and right-wingers have howled that the suppression of the New York Post story was the result of a diabolical plot to protect Biden, with the culprits being the Deep State, the liberal media, and other usual suspects. Some insist that Trump lost-though he didn’t really lose, right?-because this October Surprise was smothered. And Musk, who has become an ally of the alt-right, seems to have bought into this conspiracism.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/12/what-musk-and-co-want-you-to-forget-about-twitterfiles/

Ирония проекции заключается в том, что в 2016 центральная пресса с подачи ФБР действительно замяла историю, которая могла повлиять на выборы - в печально известной публикации "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia".

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Конспирологическая матрица с идеей тайного всемирного заговора - не менее поглощающая идея, чем Lebensraum. Является ли Илон Маск жертвой или сознательным распространителем, ему предстоит принести в мир большие разрушения. Но триллионы будущих коммунистических марсиан несомненно будут благодарны.

“Follow the white rabbit” is an allusion used by QAnon members to both “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Matrix,” and evokes a fantasy awakening to a world that lies beyond our own. It is a phrase regularly used by QAnon followers and “Q,” their mysterious leader. In the context of Twitter’s reinstatement of previously-banned QAnon accounts, Musk’s white rabbit tweet has breathed fresh life into a QAnon movement looking for a new messiah in a post-Trump moment.
Over the five years since it first burst onto the conspiracy scene, QAnon spread rapidly across the country and to dozens of nations, eventually making its way into mainstream conservative politics. Various polls show that some 15-20% of Americans believe at least some of QAnon’s core premises. That figure is even higher for conservatives and Republicans.
As a reminder, QAnon became an integrated part of the pro-Trump MAGA world through false claims that prominent Democrats were part of a cabal of pedophile elites and were plotting against then-President Donald Trump. But its growth was spurred by the retweeting and sharing of QAnon claims by Trump and QAnon supporter and U.S. House of Representative member Marjorie Taylor Green. So as Trump’s popularity declines, it’s no surprise that so many QAnon adherents are embracing the perception of support from a new celebrity - Twitter owner Musk.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-replacing-trump-qanon-celebrity-du-jour-twitter-rcna61802

"The United States remains in a heightened threat environment. Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland. Domestic actors and foreign terrorist organizations continue to maintain a visible presence online in attempts to motivate supporters to conduct attacks in the Homeland."
https://www.dhs.gov/national-terrorism-advisory-system

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