Tag: Tesla

Musk Drops Poop Emoji on DeSantis, Self

THURSDAY 5/25/23

By Todd Lassa

A bunch of tech bros – female as well as male, but mostly male – enter a Twitter space called Twitter Spaces and fumble with the technology for 20 minutes. Until minute 21, the man of the hour is nowhere to be heard (it’s audio-only).

Preparation?

Elon Musk sycophants being the type of sycophants that give Trump sycophants a run for their money, the tech bros stumble over each other trying to explain how this sh*t show is a sh*t show only because Musk has too many followers (no mention of how many might be the bots the new owner promised to root out when he dropped $44 billion on the company) clogging the system.

Anyone familiar with Musk’s Tesla quarterly earnings calls with analysts would recognize his performance Wednesday night.

One tech bro – the female in the crowd – compares Twitter Spaces’ technical issues with Musk’s SpaceX “intentionally” blowing up the biggest-ever space rocket on purpose. There’s the beta test.

“Ron DeSantis just crashed Twitter,” one tech bro exclaims. “Imagine what he’s going to do to Donald Trump.”

Jake Tapper had 568,000 viewers on CNN the previous night, another tech bro says. Musk already was up to 728,000. Tech bros just love big numbers.

These are tech bros rationalizing the sh*t show behind Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis long-awaited declaration he is running against former President Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.

DeSantis tells all the listener-“viewers” he is declaring his candidacy “ to lead our great American comeback.”

Issues?

The mess at our southern border. Drugs coming in through the southern border. Crime in our cities. A president who takes his cues from the woke mob.

“We must restore sanity to our nation.”

“Woke” will become a drinking game for DeSantis stump speeches.

Embracing energy independence; the DeSantis version of “drill, baby, drill.”

“We must reject attacks on our law enforcement,” DeSantis declares, using a talking point that could cut both ways, against the January 6th insurrection as well as “defund the police.” The governor promises to actually build a border wall. as an “energetic executive who will take on the issues” as well as “reconstitutionalize the executive branch.” 

DeSantis touts his lax COVID lockdown and how Disneyworld was open when Disneyland was not. By the time “journalist questions,” including one about the Second Amendment by ex-Brietbart News/ex-NRA flak Dana Loesch concludes the Musk sh*t show incumbent presidential candidate Joe Biden has trolled DeSantis with the tweet, “this link works,” to his campaign website. Several pundits from the other side say Twitter Spaces had much lower viewership – as low as 139,000 – than the tech bros had claimed. The Daily Mail runs a Trumpian front page headline: “Ron’s Desaster.”

Still, Loesch proclaimes she will vote for the Florida governor in her primary (leaving open the likelihood she will vote for Trump in the general). Musk’s free-speech open forum is full of hard-right pundits, asking the same sort of fawning softballs that New Hampshire citizens lobbed at Trump during his CNN Town Hall.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Texas Faces California’s ‘Green’ Energy Supply

By Bryan Williams

Welcome to the club, Texas! California has been mismanaging its electrical power grid for going on 20 years. How can the two largest states in the nation by population, both with vast natural resources and human ingenuity fail their residents like this? It is 2021. Citizens should not be without electricity in the United States because of  political and managerial problems.

That Texas is red and California is blue is also a conundrum. How can both political parties (California has been run by Democrats for nearly a generation -- Governator Schwarzenegger acted like a Republican for all of two years or so -- but that’s for another column -- and Texas, dominated by Republicans) get this so wrong?

I can’t speak to Texas’ woes, but I can to California’s. Democratic Gov. Gray Davis rushed in where only fools dare tread back in 2001, and actually put the state into the electricity buying business using taxpayer dollars, in order to stave off erroneous shortages of electricity due to market manipulation of California’s electricity supply. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, California’s electricity problem developed different causes with the same results: Millions left without power in the state that gave us the iPhone, PayPal, Tesla, and is home to Alphabet/Google, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Stanford University (that is to say -- places with LOTS of smart people.

Why? Because for years our politicians have replaced reliable electrical production with renewable resources like solar and wind to save us from the evils of CO2 pollution. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, California is a net exporter of electricity. But the sun sometimes is hidden behind clouds, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Meanwhile, the state’s nearly 40 million residents need more and more electricity to power those iPhones, Teslas, and all those Chromebooks (made by Google – one of which I am typing on now) that millions of kids need to be taught at home due to COVID school shutdowns. A brilliant, potential solution to California’s unstable energy supply is to use old electric car batteries to store excess electricity from solar and wind farms, but those “battery farms” are still years away. Really, how will that look to have stacks and stacks of greasy old car batteries next to those gleaming solar panels?

At the same time, baseline electricity production like (brace yourselves - I’m going to say something controversial) clean nuclear power is being shut down all over the state. Why? Because anything nuclear must be bad (right?), and because of short-sighted politicians in Washington, our nuclear power plants aren’t allowed to recycle their fuel like those in Europe, so we have to store spent nuclear fuel rods in pools of water in open air. Brilliant!

As for natural gas power plants, they emit too much CO2, and use fossil fuels to make electricity, though the California plants make more than enough energy from this to feed the entire state. What about hydro-electric power? Here’s another clean, renewable source of electricity, right? More and more of these century-old plants are being decommissioned because California’s left-leaning politicians are worried about their effect on fish. Meanwhile, California ratepayers (who pay the highest rates in the nation) get to sit in the dark and the heat, and now, the smoke. Now, California utilities are allowed to shut off power for wildfires sparked on land that state and federal political officials have for years failed to clear out. Meanwhile, those same politicians have failed to hold our electric utilities accountable for running the shoddy equipment that can spark fires, in the first place.

So to repeat, welcome, Texas! One question: When can we shut down the politicians and get back to the basics of providing electricity in the richest state in the richest nation in the world?

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•Read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on President Biden’s supply chain review — Click on Forum above.

A New Hat For America

By Jim McCraw

While it is maddening to know that President-elect Biden couldn’t get a really good start on 2021 between President Trump’s recalcitrance and COVID-19, there will eventually be a Biden administration, and it will be in trouble up to its hips from Day One.

Herewith, a suggestion for Biden/Harris I believe is important, and eminently doable. As Congress fights over both short- and long-term follow-up bills to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES), which ends the day after Christmas, I think it might be time for something as ambitious (though relatively easy, considering the big funding levels already proposed) and quick to do as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), circa 1933. Let’s call the new one the American Reconstruction Corps (ARC).

Lord knows there are plenty of skilled and unskilled people out of work.  And there are plenty of American infrastructure projects, largely ignored by the previous administration, that need doing.

Biden is not FDR, and we do not have a modern Robert Moses, the mid-20th Century “master builder” of New York, Long Island, Rochester and Westchester counties (it’s certainly not Donald J. Trump).

We are not Frank Lloyd Wright, the Ford Motor Company Whiz Kids, nor the first seven astronauts. We are just Americans who recognize a need to get a lot of things done by a mass of people willing to work. There has got to be a way to do this.

With widespread distribution of COVID-19 vaccines likely coming with warmer weather next summer, why couldn’t we dispatch squadrons of out-of-work Americans to do road, tunnel and bridge repairs that have been waiting years for funding and final approvals?  And not just men, which is how the original CCC operated. Skilled and unskilled women need work, too. At, say, $20 per hour.

Why not send platoons of the willing into every one of the national parks to do repairs and cleaning?

While the original CCC troops had uniforms, meals and housing, I humbly suggest self-provided work clothing, bring-your-own meals, work near home, and ARC baseball caps in red, white and blue.

There will be periodic need for FEMA supplies and equipment after summer storms, so why not divert some FEMA funding, vehicles and materiel to help Americans fix the things that are already broken?

Yes, men and women working and sweating in close quarters for eight-hour days may be problematic from a health standpoint, but with masks, distancing and frequent washing and spraying, I think it could work. Let’s get some guys from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Ford, Google and Tesla to volunteer, put them in a room and see if they can figure this out while Biden and Harris get on with the rest of the recovery.

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