Elon Musk Is a Genius... and an Idiot

Elon Musk, the guy who started Tesla and SpaceX, is a genius. He built the world's most reliable and cheapest system of getting cargo and people into space. He built a company that produces electric cars that have fantastic range and acceleration, and look cool too. He's on the leading of edge of battery technology.

Elon Musk is also an idiot. When some kids got stuck in a cave underwater and he proposed a hare-brained scheme to rescue them, he had a tantrum and a Twitter meltdown that landed him in court.

Musk doesn't think he should pay any taxes, despite the fact that both his businesses would never have existed without massive, MASSIVE government subsidies. Tesla would never have gotten off the ground without the $7,500 federal tax credit per vehicle sold. SpaceX would never have gained any traction without critical funding from NASA.

Tesla is full of idiots. His factories are full of dickheads who constantly spout racist insults. The people who write the software that runs the cars commit serial idiocies: they thought it was just fine to let drivers play games while driving down the highway and to run stop signs. There have been a dozen more Tesla recalls in the last year alone.

Perhaps the most idiotic idea that Musk is pushing is that he can build a city on Mars sometime in the near future. Ars Technica has a good video by Dr. Paul Sutter about the problems with going to Mars. Because that publication is aimed at tech nerds like me, it doesn't come right out and say that it is a flat-out pipe dream. But if you actually watch the whole thing, it becomes blazingly obvious that it will take centuries, and more likely millennia, for humanity to colonize Mars.

There are huge problems with colonizing Mars. 

A round trip to Mars with Musk's Starship will entail a year in weightlessness, and a year on Mars, which has only a third of Earth's gravity. Microgravity causes a multitude of physical problems: bone density loss, decreased vision, cardiovascular problems, decreased blood plasma volume, fluid shifts to the brain, muscle atrophy, etc. It's not clear that the low gravity on Mars would have the same effects, but bed rest studies indicate that the human body inexorably deteriorates without the full force of Earth's gravity.

Air pressure on Mars is less than 1% of Earth's, and it's all carbon dioxide. Oxygen would have to be made in situ. The Sabatier reaction can be used to convert CO2 into methane and water, but it requires a source of hydrogen and lots of energy. There is also oxygen locked in the soil, which is silicon dioxide (sand) and ferric oxide (rust). Every breath of air you take will have to be manufactured from scratch.

Sunlight is half the intensity as it is at Earth, which means the efficiency of photosynthesis and solar cell power generation is halved.

There is no liquid water. There's water ice at the poles and buried underground, which means it'll have to be mined. There are no canals on Mars for us to swim in.

The Martian soil is a fine dust. There are regularly global dust storms, which will play hell with power generation from solar panels.

Oh, and that Martian soil is toxic. It contains calcium perchlorate, which kills both humans and plants. And, of course, that fine dust will get into everything and cause diseases like silicosis and black lung.

The average temperature on Mar is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can get as low as -220 in the winter. The atmosphere literally freezes out at the poles -- the polar ice caps are made of dry ice.

Then there's the radiation. Mars has no significant atmosphere and no magnetic field. Earth has both, and it's what protects life from cosmic rays and solar radiation. On Mars, as in space, you can close your eyes and watch cosmic rays go right through your brain. Radiation of this intensity will cause birth defects, cancer and destruction of DNA. 

That means that Martian settlers will have to live underground, shielded from radiation, and limit excursions on the surface to avoid radiation exposure and to avoid tracking all that toxic soil into the habitat. How many people who listen to Elon's siren song realize that they and their Martian children would live out their lives in dark caves for centuries, if not millennia?

Finally, Mars is a long way from Earth, and it will be necessary to ship millions of tons of food, oxygen, hydrogen, water, fuel, equipment and people. That means, literally, millions of launches from Earth's surface. That will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Who's paying for that?

Now, in the long term, can we terraform Mars? The Martian soil has oxygen locked in it, as well as the ice below the surface. But even if all that was released, it would only increase the air pressure two or three times, still less than 1% of Earth's air pressure, a small fraction of what's required for humans and plants to survive.

Mars used to have a lot of water -- we can see ancient riverbeds on the surface. But because it has no magnetic field, the solar wind blew it all away. And the same thing will happen again if we try to terraform it.

Novelists like Greg Benford have proposed terraforming Mars by landing icy comets on it. It's easy -- just go to the Oort cloud, wrangle up a few hundred or thousand comets and crash them into the surface of Mars. Now, I doubt anyone would want to be living on Mars during this period. I mean, debris from the impacts would be raining down constantly. 

Now, comets in the Oort cloud have orbital periods in the range of 200+ years. Which means it would take on the order of 100 to 200 years for each comet to reach Mars after it was nudged out of its orbit. Clearly, the process of terraforming would take centuries, and Mars would be uninhabitable for the entire process.

And how do we nudge a comet that masses trillions of tons? Elon's little Starship won't even begin to cut it. Halley's Comet masses 220 trillion tons. Clearly, we would need to mount fusion engines on the comet, and use the water ice of the comet itself to fuel the engines. That technology will not be here for a very long time. And... who would pay for it?

Do I think people should go to Mars? Of course. But let's be realistic. We will not have any significant presence on Mars any time soon; probably not in Elon Musk's lifetime. We may be able to get a scientific mission there, or an Elon stunt landing. But a permanent presence is not in the cards for centuries. And if Musk did get some suckers to go there in the near future, they'll all be dead from cancer, COPD or black lung within 10 years. 

If his Tesla employees are an example of the quality of the people that will go, they'll kill themselves in a hundred different idiotic ways on Mars, because there is zero room for error in that environment. Martian colonists cannot be disruptive, chaotic innovators -- they have to toe every line there is, otherwise they're all dead.

So it's utterly preposterous when Musk talks about about building a city on Mars, as if it would happen in his lifetime. This isn't a visionary talking, this is an idiot and a con man.

We should go to Mars. But it ain't a replacement for Earth. As I've said before, there is no Planet B. There's only Earth.

Socialism Worked. Here's The Evidence.

Arrest Them For Insurrection

The 14th Amendment, Section 3 SEC. 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” 

Mitch McConnell called January 6, 2021 a “failed insurrection.

” 

That means that Trump, Greene, Hawley, Gosar, Boebert, Gohmert and Gaetz should be removed from Congress according to the Constitution.

The Key Factor In The 2022 Election That Barely Anyone Is Talking About

Let's take a look at some photos, shall we?

Exhibit A

This image shows that vaccination rates among counties that went for Trump are quite low with deaths quite high.

Exhibit B

This image shows that most unvaccinated people are Republicans.

Exhibit C

 

This image shows that Republicans are willfully ignorant about COVID-19.

Exhibit D

This image shows that more conservatives are dying from COVID-19 than liberals.

We are approaching 900,000 deaths from COVID-19. Far more than half of them are Republican voters. It could be as high as two-thirds. If a county went for Trump in 2020 and barely squeaked it out, Republicans will likely lose that county and seats in the house because too many people died. It's just simple math.

Conventional wisdom says that the GOP will win big in 2022. They still might. But if they lost voters to COVID-19 in key districts, they may not win big. In fact, it's possible that nothing much will change in the House. And with the Senate having more than two times the number of Republican senators seeking re-election, it's going to be hard for them to take the upper chamber back. 

All because of adolescent spite towards the "liberal elites." Talk about the land of self-defeat!

Confirmation Of January 6th Violent Insurrection Plot

 From a recent piece in the Times...

“Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself,” said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.”

Well, first of all, people were armed with guns there. But I do appreciate Mr. Orr confirming what sane people have been saying all along. 

We know what you are up to, folks. We will stop you by any means necessary. 

I also ROTFALMFAO when I read this part… 

“Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.”

Hmm...abortion OK now? 

Vaccines

 

The Root Cause Of The Decay Of The United States

Conservative ideology is the general cause of the decay we are experiencing in this country. It’s rooted in emotion, adolescent spite, fragile egos, and childish competition. 

It is completely illogical and often employs the tactic of gaslighting. It’s as if you see your neighbor fixing their wooden house with a blow torch and gasoline. You kindly inform them of how this solution will result in disaster. They roll their eyes, become petulant, accuse you of being closed-minded because you won’t consider “their side,” and foam at the mouth about how people like you are the reason why our country is falling apart and descending into fascism. 

We must employ a strategy that defeats this mindset. That’s why the Democratic Party must fire all their communication and PR gurus and hire developmental psychologists who specialize in treating toxic adolescent behavior. All messages should be a blunt force that eradicates the utter nonsense of conservative ideology and brings us to a place based in logic, facts, and functional solutions that have proven track records and accept reality.

For Dr. King's day...

I highly recommend checking out Myron Medcalf's piece up on the Strib's page. Here is a taste...

The man who died on that balcony in Memphis was a human being beset by doubts and concerns about the future of the civil rights movement. The man who died on that balcony was changing and beginning to embrace a universal Poor People's Campaign — he recruited poor whites, too — that cited capitalism and the hoarding of resources as a threat to all. The man who died on that balcony, if you believe the accounts of those close to him, had wrestled with depression and seemed to know he would die soon. As King pursued equality, America nearly broke him.

Two Months in America

For the last couple of months I've been collecting links to stories about guns. I don't go out of my way to find them, these are just stories that happened to find their way into my RSS feed.

From yesterday

Burglar shoots, kills St. Paul resident's dog, steals AR-15 rifle, bars of silver: Guns are supposed to protect him from this sort of thing. Why wasn't this rifle locked up in a safe? Idiotic gun owners are arming thieves. Now a cop might die trying to arrest the burglar because some idiot armed him with a military grade weapon.

Ohio Officer Shoots Through Fence, Killing a Man Who Was Firing a Gun: Is everyone who owns a gun an idiot? Shooting bullets into the air is idiotic -- they come down and hit things. Guns are deadly weapons, not toys. And isn't discharging a weapon in city limits illegal in most jurisdictions? And the cop was just as idiotic, shooting someone without a clear view. The moron firing the gun could have had his kids with him.

An 18-year-old is charged in Mall of America shooting: The shooter claims the other guy threatened him, so he shot the guy and the bullet went through him, bounced off a railing and hit an innocent bystander in the leg. This is the thing that gun nuts just don't get: you're gonna miss your target half the time, or there's gonna be a through-and-through, and some innocent schmuck is gonna get hit.

Two days ago

St. Paul man said 'I just beat him to the draw' and shot tenant from adjoining duplex unit, murder charges say: A guy went to a neighbor's door to threaten him with a gun, and then got shot. Do these guys think this is the Wild West? Nobody wins in a shoot-out. When people say they need a gun "for protection" what they really mean is that they want to intimidate and threaten people with it.

A week ago

California Man on Deadly Mission to White House Is Arrested, Officials Say: The guy was caught in Iowa with an AR15 and body armor on his way to shoot Joe Biden. You gotta ask: do guns make people crazy, or do crazy people buy guns?

Eight days ago 

Twin Cities woman pleads guilty to 'straw purchase' of nearly 100 guns for black-market buyers: This is why there are so many guns on the street, and why cops are so trigger happy whenever they stop a car. Seriously, there should be a limit on the number of guns people buy. Anyone buying 62 guns in a month is clearly selling them on the black market.

Two weeks ago

Stray Police Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store: Cops shot a man beating a woman to death and accidentally hit a girl behind a wall. Moral of the story: bullets hit the wrong target ALL THE TIME. This is one of the few gun-death stories that can legitimately called a tragedy. Most other gun deaths are sadly predictable and due to outright stupidity.

Jury finds Potter guilty of manslaughter in Daunte Wright killing: the above story shows why the jury verdict was correct. Potter was being totally reckless: she could have shot her partner or the passenger in the car, or some other innocent bystander, because BULLETS HIT THE WRONG TARGET ALL THE TIME.

A month ago

Canadian rapper sentenced to 6 years in prison for gun-running in Minnesota: the guy had bought 67 guns in Florida and was caught going 100 miles on hour while doing drugs. Again, why was he able to buy 67 guns without the FBI taking notice? Florida, Georgia, Alabama and other southern states are arming criminals in New York, Canada, Mexico and across the world.

A 13-year-old boy made and trafficked ‘ghost guns,’ authorities say, and then killed his sister with one: The kid was selling an illegal gun to some thugs who ripped him off, so he whipped out another one and fired at them, killing his sister instead. So, A) Why can kids buy gun kits over the internet? Purchase of gun parts should be treated the same as any gun purchases, with the requisite background checks and never over the internet or by mail order. And B), BULLETS HIT THE WRONG TARGET ALL THE TIME.

Brooklyn Park police say 13-year-old fatally shot boy, 5, while making a video to post on social media: where the hell are the parents? And let's also blame social media for this one: people do so many stupid things to show off on social media. Chalk this death up to Facebook, or Tik Tok, or Instagram, or whatever useless internet time sink this little kid died for.

Discharge of Felon’s Gun Prompts Panic at Atlanta Airport: Are people who own guns just stupid? Over 450 idiotic gun owners have tried to bring their guns onto planes this year at Atlanta Hartsfield alone. And why wasn't this felon on the no-fly list? As well as every other idiot who has assaulted airline personnel because they didn't want to wear a mask during the most virulent and deadly pandemic in a century?

These stories don't even begin to scratch the surface. There have been hundreds of stories about people being carjacked or mugged at gunpoint, all of which has been made possible by gun nuts gutting the gun laws that the NRA itself lobbied for a century ago.

What they show is that people -- including cops -- show horrible judgment in times of stress, underestimate the firepower and randomness of gunfire, and drastically overestimate their own competence with firearms. They think of guns as toys and something that they have total control over, even though countless people are shot accidentally while handling guns in totally mundane circumstances.

Guns are not safe. They are not "defensive." They are deadly weapons whose sole purpose is to kill, and are more likely to hurt their owners or their owners' families than anyone else. You make one mistake and someone you care about dies.

The vast majority of people are simply not emotionally or technically competent to be trusted with firearms.

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, conservatives attacked our nation’s Capitol. This was the first attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. And it has been fantasized about by the right since around 1994 when our second civil war began. They've been foaming at the mouth to attack the "elites" in the "deep state" and they finally did. 

The attack was an act of insurrection meant to stop the electoral process. It was based on a lie about a stolen election that is still believed by two-thirds of Republicans today. But that’s not the worst part. 

The real danger now is the massive underreaction by most of the general public. We’ve seen this before in Italy, Germany snd the Soviet Union in the early 20th century. It led directly to fascism. 

The eye-rolling and yawning by the right regarding what happened one year ago is the best example of hypocrisy I have ever seen. To remember the lather they worked themselves up into regarding Benghazi and compare it to how they view the January 6th insurrection. They claim to love this country? Really?  They claim to be against authoritarianism? Really? Because they seem to be just fine with it if their side is directly bringing about the end of our republic. 

That’s the path we are on now, folks unless we act to aggressively stop Trump and his supporters before they rewrite the laws of our republic. They are traitors and need to be held accountable for what they did a year ago and what they are still doing.

What do I mean by stop? Well, first let's identify the top enemies of our republic. These are the people that were directly involved in this attack.

Donald Trump. Louie Gohmert. Josh Hawley. Paul Gosar. Majorie Taylor Greene. Jim Jordan. Lauren Boebert. 

Trump and these six others need to be barred/removed from public office and led directly to prison for sedition. They advocated and engaged in an act to overthrow the government of the United States. 

The only thing these folks understand is force. It's time for the rest of us to show them that we are done with their insanity. It's time to lock them up. 

Yes or No Questions

From a recent post by Jon Pavlovitz...

I’d love to talk with Mr. Schmeck and the rest of the #LGB crowd and find out what exactly Joe Biden has done to them to inspire such expletive-laden rage. 

How has he specifically harmed them? 

What precisely are the injuries they have sustained at his hands to merit this unprecedented public disgust? 

Has he denied or downplayed the existence of a pandemic and willfully killed hundreds of thousands of people? 

Has he ever incited his followers to engage in an act of domestic terrorism to overthrow the government and overturn an election? 

Has be berated reporters, coddled dictators, opposed medical experts, insulted women, or repeatedly misled the American people in nonsensical, rambling press conferences?

I put these yes or no questions to conservative apologists who read my blog daily. Responding with any variation of “NO YOU” supports the core assertions of this article.

The Coming Criminal Referral for Donald J. Trump

Up until this point in time, Trump and his supporters have enjoyed a lot of mollycoddling from Congress and the DOJ. They have thumped their chests and stuck out their chin in adolescent defiance of our country's democratic institutions. And in a very "beer hall putsch" kind of style. 

That time is likely coming to an end for them.

It's been quite pleasant to see the insurrectionists and traitors going to jail for their involvement in the January 6th attempted coup. Some are in jail for years for their criminality. Others will soon follow.

One of them is going to be Donald J. Trump.

I'm thinking 8 years for him. 

And this would be why Liz Cheney keeps repeating the letter of this law in conjunction with Trump. 

Free Speech

 

They Are Hoping To Shoot Someone

 

A Slow Moving Coup

Bill Maher is hoping that his latest editorial scares the shit out of more people. I'm just hoping that it wakes the Democrats up and they start arresting the people that are trying to take over our country. 

We are already in a civil war. We know who the bad guys are. We saw them on January 6th. We see them here. They are attempting to turn our country into an authoritarian regime by accusing the rest of us of doing the same thing. 

This was done quite successfully in Germany in the 1930s. People like Kevin Baker have fully embraced Goebbels-like tactics out of pure fear and hatred. They continually LIE about the left and, quite frankly, anyone who doesn't agree with them. 

They are very dangerous and must be stopped within the law that we are barely holding on to...

Pro Life

Pro life would be 20 Sandy Hook students starting high school this week.

Dedicated To Kevin Baker

 Take a look at this image.

These are American heroes. They are the policemen who put their lives on the line when Trump supporters engaged in a terrorist attack on our nation's capitol. This act of insurrection was based on the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

A big proponent of this lie is my old nemesis, Kevin Baker, who is still acting in sedition to the nation he claims to love. His recent post, "Despair and Utter Hopelessness," is a shining example of just how far CULT Kevin has gone. 

Kevin lives in a world where Twitter posts are the same things as facts. His anger towards any information that contradicts his scientology like beliefs has so overwhelmed any logic that he had left that it's disgusting. 

He and his followers have embraced the role of traitor completely. Listening to the testimony yesterday, I can only imagine Kevin either cheering on the crowds as they called the police traitors and beat them. Or denying it all, saying it's liberal media propaganda, not a big deal, and oh, weren't the BLM protest so much worse? 

We know exactly who you are, Kevin Baker. You are the modern day version of a Nazi. You accuse your perceived enemies of doing the very things you do and demonize them for it. (copyright: Josef Goebbels). You want an authoritarian state where there is only one ideology in power: YOURS. And that's not even the sad part.

The true tragedy in your long post of lies is that the very decay that's eroding our country is caused entirely by folks like you. You adolescently blame everyone else for COVID-19, gun violence, civic unrest, climate issues, and economic disaster. Yet it's YOUR FUCKING IDEOLOGY that's causing all of it. You supported an incompetent buffoon and Russian asset over the most capable person to be president because of adolescent feelings about liberals. 

Half the people dead from COVID-19 would alive right now if Hillary was president. Their blood is on your hands. You refuse any new gun laws that could actually help bring down gun violence. You scoff at any discussion of race or culture. You think climate change is a liberal plot. And even after economic stimulation of aggregate demand staved off another depression, you still stomped your feet at government interference in the economy.

And why?

Because you never grew out of your issues with authority. Every view you have comes from the lens of a 12 year old boy. 

The rest of the country, and there are far more of us than of you people, are sick and tired of your nonsense holding us back. We are going to force you to submit to reality and the harm you are doing to our country. You may think you know what "force" means but you likely don't. 

Every day we see more and more young people getting into "good trouble"..."necessary trouble." Some of them are my former students. Some are ex-Republicans who left the party when you and the crazies took it over. The overwhelming majority are liberals and moderates who are doing the necessary work to make sure you and your ilk are going to be quickly relegated to the ash heap of irrelevance. 

The photo above is one of heroes, Kevin. Heroes. There was a time when you might have seen them the same way. Now you aren't fit to lick their boots. 

The Nazis Keep Marching On

I used to have a tag on here called "Secret Authoritarians." They aren't really being that secret about it anymore, are they? The January 6th domestic terrorist attack and insurrection has now been more clearly documented. Check it out.

Just imagine the hay that would be made if these were liberals. Instead, it's a lot of denial and propaganda about what is quite plainly conservatives being EXACTLY what I said they were all along. 

They are Nazis in every sense of the word. 

Manipulation

 

The Dragon Level Hypocrisy of the Right