Ecching These Down, Here

The Billionaire's Protective Society

They are doing their best to make sure nobody hears about or go sees "Musk".

Musk is trying to buy the election, pouring about half-a-billion into PACS and campaigns. He is almost single-handedly funding Paxton's campaign, so he is, in essense, trying to buy a U.S. senator outright.

Vote Democatic, folks. Let's make Musk waste his money.

But think of this. Half a billion is about 0.05% of his net worth. If you're worth $100,000,that's equivalent to you donating fifty bucks to a candidate.

We need to fix the problem we have with all of these hyperrich buying media outlets and politicians. We can do it the easy way, with rolling taxes back to what they were in 2000 and outlawing all of the accounting and tax shenanigans that they use to accumulate their hordes.

Or we can do it the way the French did in 1789.

One of the two will happen. This situation is going to become more and more intolerable and sooner or later, the pot's going to boil over. Sooner or later, people will wake up that it's not immigrants and transgendered who are making their lives harder and more costly, it's the oligarchs.

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

Mustangs and more at Hahnweide:

It's probaby possible to overstate the importance of the P-51 to the air war over Europe, but it'd be hard to do.

Would You Buy a Car or Internet Service From Benedict Arnold?

That's what you would do if you buy a Tesla or use Starlink.

Musk is a traitor and he deserves to spend the rest of his life in a Federal slammer. He seems to be little more than a stock-swindling conman, whose main skill is hyping his undeserved reputation as a smart guy and a financial genius. Sort of like his Epstein Bro, the Orange Dementia Patient.[1]

His corporations should be confiscated as having them owned by a traitor is a threat to our national security.
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[1] Who is too far gone to realize that cognitive tests aren't IQ tests and that, if they keep giving them to him, they're looking for something.

While Trump is Bombing Iran, He's Selling Off Weapons-Grade Plutonium

On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched an application for interested parties to apply for access to a maximum of 19 metric tonnes — a little under 42,000 pounds — of weapons-grade plutonium, which has long been a key resource undergirding the US nuclear arsenal.

One of the companies anticipated to receive shipments of the fissile isotope from the DOE is Oklo, a “nuclear startup” backed — and formerly chaired — by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Earlier in October, Oklo was one of four US companies chosen by the DOE to join a new pilot program meant to rush the testing and approval of experimental reactor designs.
...
“If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn’t be such a great concern, but it just doesn’t seem feasible,” Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists told the FT.

Right, let's give bomb-making materials to a bunch of tech bros. You know, the clowns who keep deluding themselves that they are the smartest guys in the room and nothing they do can ever go wrong.

So not only are they fucking around with AI, they're also going to have the materials for making nuclear weapons. The tech for making them is generations-old and it leaked into the public domain late in the last century.

I wouldn't trust those chuckleheads with a kit to make a Glock, let alone stuff to make nuclear bombs. Does anyone seriously think that this will end well? That kilos of plutonium won't go missing and pop up for sale on the dark web?

There are some very stupid people running our country.

Trump Begins His Election Interference

President Donald Trump on Friday said he told his administration to file its lawsuit to block certification of the U.S. Senate race in Alaska if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, kicking off what many fear could become a lengthy battle between the government and states over certifying an election where the president’s party is struggling.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters as he landed for a campaign rally in Florida.

My guess is that the complaint is full of Fox-New/Trumpist worthy bullshit and nothing that even approaches a legal cause of action. It's filing something to appease the Orange Dementia-Patient-in-Chief.

But this is more a part of the Trump-Putin plot to delegitimize our political system and, to some extent, it's working.

Step one: Don't vote for a Republican for any position, whatsoever. Send them all home.

Caturday

I tried to get a photo of him doing something funny, but he walked off, then turned around and posed.

Deadbeating These Down, Here

Because It's Friday

UP 844 is back!



Still the only Class 1 railroad steam locomotive that was never put out to pasture.

Smooching These Down, Here