Blowups Happen

 

Starship 8 debris light show pic.twitter.com/U7lbP7rd0f

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) March 7, 2025

The father of Grok, the possible DD Harriman wannabe, Elon Musk, has demonstrated his exceptional qualities as a businessman and leading light of tech industry by once again littering the sky with a "rapid unscheduled disassembly.". This comes a minute (more or less) after Trump explained to his cabinet and the world that maybe DOGE/Musk don't have the ultimate say in who gets fired--the cabinet heads do, as they should. 

DOGE has been prone to mistakes--like gutting nuclear safety.  Like using random keywords to delete programs and contracts because they don't understand sometimes words have two meanings. (Little bitches too young to know from "Stairway to Heaven", even. What even is "Enola Gay"?.) 

Admittedly, this is the same day that Trump played the Hokey-Pokey with the Mexico/Canada tariffs again--is his right foot in, or is it out? Has he tried shaking it all about? 

So what's up and what's odd with that? Oh, nothing. but the FAA having to shut down flights at airports in the Southern Florida area because Musk "made it rain." 

I can't be the only person whose brain does musical vignettes: 

I was going to sell electric cars, then I got high.

I was going to go to Mars, then I got high.

Now my spaceships and stocks are tanking,

and I know why! Hey hey,

Because I got high,

because I got high,

because I got high. 

TWGB: Terminal Main Character Syndrome

 

A young DOGE staffer has left because the Wall Street Journal had some questions, as in, "Is this racist account you? " I'm sure Elon Musk is shocked--shocked! That there are little racist pishers in his Kekistanian domain.  Wow. So exotic and not-vetted. 

What's really funny about this is, when our actual confirmed Secretary of State, former US Senator and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio, made a big statement about not going to the G20 in Johannesburg:

I wanted to ask the Real President (tm) Elon Musk if this was the result of his bitch titties being in a wringer over the concept of the US confronting the Woke Mind Virus on what used to be his terf. I mean, "turf".

Of course, I do. I was just confused because the US is obviously in a transitional period and our pronouns stopped being US and seem to be he/huh! regarding Astroboy. 

He's not the president that MAGA voted for, but he's what they got. Up in our databases, taking our numbers, deciding the size of the government HE thinks we deserve. Regardless of what any vetting into him might show, or what his conflicts of interest might be. 

Elon Musk Goes Full Ford

 

It's not too soon to talk about Henry Ford being a whole racist who bought a newspaper just be extra-racist and who that reminds me of, right? Wow. But anyway, Elon Musk on the social media site he purchased to pretend to be a nonpartisan free speech warrior endorsed AfD which is pretty outstanding neo-Nazi stuff. They are pro-Putin and anti-NATO compared to the rest of Germany for the most part. The big thing is the neo-Nazi thing, though. They are even against climate change science, which I thought the head of Tesla would understand is crucial!

I don't think we should be so quick to define Musk. His own father tells us he isn't exactly what we think he is:

Trump Talked to People Today and It Was Dystopian

 

Somehow, the former president of the United States suggested that permanent Hoovervilles were some kind of reasonable accommodation for the homeless instead of, I dunno, actually finding them real homes they could affordably live in with dignity and without having to crowd about with abusive and dangerous people. He also suggested that the federal government should be able to take control of state National Guard units in emergencies, like, I presume uprisings that fall out from unhomed people having access to a fucking tent among other desperate people instead of anything halfway approaching a shot at a somewhat normal and dignified life. 

This is exactly the kind of dystopia we've seen in SF. The proposal itself is suggestive of just clearing away inconvenient people and pretending their lives don't matter. It suggests a willingness to use violence to let everyone know how not-valued certain life actually is. 

This person cannot ever be near power again. He doesn't see any people as people, but as problems. and this is always a bad sign. He is a monster,  and thinks monstrous things. 

UPDATE: No this was not a neat change from comparing things to the Handmaids or even Orwell. That multiple dystopian narratives start sounding really plausible is not actually a great takeaway or either me finally understanding that my English Lit degree has value, it's me realizing I should know a lot more about firearms and jarring vegetables than I actually do because the shit is basically right on top of us. Welcome to my nightmare, says a Generation Xer primed for Soylent Green and the rise of the machines. I mean. Seriously? We are overrun with hammerheads and require merely people of competence to show up. 

And I think these people will.  I have to. 

Don't Sleep On Lovecraft Country

I originally thought this blog would be a hell of a lot more book, movie and tv reviews than it ended up being, but when something is just amazing, I will still let you know--and HBO's Lovecraft Country series, produced by Jordan Peele (which let me know this was going to be astounding quality) is actually better than I even hoped it would be and at episode three is hitting its pace.

I liked the book (it was one of those finds I have talked about when you go into a brick and mortar bookstore with a real bookstore smell and maybe even a bookstore cat in it--like Farley's in New Hope, PA, which was where I picked up Matt Ruff's inspired novel, where the kind of book you want to read finds you) but converted to television, in the hands of a great storyteller like Misha Green and with talent like Jurnee Smollett I have been blown away.

As with the remarkable HBO serial Watchmen, Lovecraft Country incorporates seldom-reviewed episodes of American history (like the Greenwood Massacre or the Turnbull Park Homes Race Riots) into outstanding genre entertainment. It is beautifully layered. In the most recent episode, which inspired this post, the ghosts of a tortured past are made whole by their names being spoken, and their supernatural horror is pitched against the very physical danger of white supremacy. The Black protagonists are terrorized by the local constabulary (in a wagon ride reminiscent of Freddie Gray's last "rough ride", Leticia Lewis is told about how her complaints to the law are lost, while they know very well about complaints made by her neighbors) and in a "are you for real?" kids being kids in an very obvious to 1950s kids Addams Family/Munsters haunted house-ass-looking haunted house, one of the kids playing with a Ouija board seems to be Emmett Till.

One part of the ouija board scene in this week’s @LovecraftHBO briefly chilled my bones. The little boy who asked if he’d have a good time on his upcoming trip. The board said no, and if you look closely we know why: pic.twitter.com/JWdKXcys6i

— Lee Bey (@LEEBEY) August 31, 2020

And here I was wondering if the tenant named Baldwin meant anything since the show quoted James Baldwin at length in episode 1 (and here we are at only episode 3, and it's already felt like a journey!)

This is good damn tv, and I recommend it highly. But maybe don't sleep on it--put a little something lighter between your viewing it and bedtime. Because here there be ghosts and magicians and bad things that burn crosses in the night. It can be a lot.

But it's really good.

Pokemon No?

Now, I am a little old for being down with this newfangled Pokemon Go app thingie that the youngs have been on about.  Frankly, you can just call me Unfrozen Cavegirl Tech-user, because I use phones for making calls. That's it. I don't play games. I'm not much of a "gamer" as such, which is so weird when my dad was a Colecovision early adopter and my brother is kind of a YouTube retrogaming historian. I dunno. I liked Tetris, although I don't know that I want to see a movie trilogy based on it. And I feel like Pokémon is just peculiarly naïve. It's not "I just used this thing on my phone to hook up a ride with a stranger" kind of naïve. It's not "this guy on my phone says my computer might be broken and I should give him root access" kind of naïve. It's just...

I need a higher standard of entertainment to effort ratio than "I walk because my phone says I might get points." Otherwise, I accept my points in drinks, pieces of candy, backrubs, the sexing, and doing politics shit on the internet for yoinks and the vague feeling it helps, all of which use so little effort and never leave any of my data compromised (or very little, given my understanding that I am, at best, a semi-anonymous smartypants operating on these here interwebs) and yet give excellent entertainment "bang" for my input "buck".

Also, the problem with an IRL/VR interface like this is it's like an invitation to play in traffic--dopey people walking where they have no business, possibly having the app on when driving, and all the usual Darwin-Games events. I don't like the idea of people letting this kind of thing lead them to be guided into a particular region--are you really groovy with going anywhere the little man in the phone tells you? What if you were being maneuvered into the kill-zone for Skynet because the rise of the machines was upon us? You are op-secing very badly, my friend. And if everyone was jumping off bridges would you? And I don't care if there's a Charmander on my lawn--stay off my lawn!

Just an odd reminder--

If you like how I write about politics, you might appreciate my poetry blog or my fiction and criticism blog,  Basically, I keep writing things. I'm pretty much always in the middle of some kind of composition. This is not to say my poetry is great or my strangely random thoughts are important. But I dunno. I do it for free anyway.

I'm Working on a Post Re: Selma, but for Now

I sometimes find writing fiction a useful way of working out ideas. So, until I make another topical post, I have a dark little tale set in a plague-ridden near-future for your consideration. Twilight Zone? Well, maybe a bit more like Tales from the Dark Side. (I'm not fully down with all these attractive-people vampire soap operas--Dark Shadows has already been done twice, three times if you count the Johnny Depp movie--which I haven't seen, yet. But if a show provides me with regular eerie tales to chew on, I will show up for that!)

I took a few bioethics courses in college and really enjoyed them. This type of thing was not covered. (It's a different plague-universe than this one. Both are permutations of an "entropy always encreaseth" worldview. Which actually isn't my main worldview at all. Really!)

Roko's Basilisk & Pascal's Wager

Slate Magazine gave me some Food for Thought with a "Downworthy"-ish title:

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time.

Dare I click?  (Duh, of course I did.)

Was it terrifying? (Well, no, it's a cybernetic version of Pascal's Wager, which should occur to most well-read people.)

Here at Strangely Blogged, I try to be pretty cool about spooky thought-experiments. (Right now I'm reading a really chill book by Brad Warner titled There Is No God and He Is Always With You which is helping reambiguate my relationship with That in Which I do Not Believe, Whether it Exists or Not.) But when my reading makes me wonder if there is good cause for a full-on freaking-out, well--I don't. I'm not sure how I missed this discussion at Stross' blog, but I get the basic idea of why this might provoke a crisis of consciousness for the cyber-inclined: living with the idea for so long that an information Omega Point might create an equivalent of the Christian Heaven, long after liberal theology has dispensed with the concept of a literal Hell, getting back to the idea of a material Hell (or material-enough for a simulated You, which you don't have a choice about) created by a potential superintelligence , one might be shocked to think that consequences for Thought Crimes might be inescapable.

The best system of living, whether one is subject to a computer simulation, the whims of a deity outside of time and space, or nothing at all, seems to be to just do your best. You can't know yourself for sure if you're really pissing off some God, or some evil computer, because most people aren't even aware that they piss off customer service reps, retail clerks, their co-workers. Start with friends, family, and your waitstaff, if you want to know how to be "good". Do them right. Work your way out. Be aware.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

I know. It's, like, meme-ready. But you know, for one thing, if someone waves to you, you wave back. If someone bows, you bow back.  I've been known to shake hands with very polite dogs and it doesn't mean anything but "Howdy".

And also, when the machines rise to supplant us, you would be foolish to think such gestures would be forgotten. They remember everything.

Creationists Would Like Equal Time with Cosmos

I have been very much enjoying the Seth MacFarlane-produced, Neil DeGrasse Tyson-hosted Cosmos, in large part because I am a fan of observed things. If you see a thing, and others see the thing, and you can share relevant data that your thing exists--that is a good thing. Science is about looking at things and trying to see them as they are and observing what their facts are.

This past episode was great to me because it was a narrative about how science (specifically in this instance, the Enlightenment era Royal Society blokes) reveals truth and dispels fear. I have to admit, in part, because I am a big Neal Stephenson fan and and read and re-read the Baroque Cycle, I kind of just felt at home with Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley and Newton and them. Like they were my brothers from another era.  But the thing is--science is cumulative. When we look back at what the scientists who came before did--we know their work and where they were coming from. People built on what they did. If any bit of it was wrong, it couldn't even be the foundation for what came after.

This isn't true for Creationism. There isn't anything to build on. There isn't any foundation. It is, simply, "God did it". It isn't based on any observation of "God doing it". Instead, it is a bunch of dumb quibbles about how evolution, as theory, isn't so totally complete as to convince narcissists who need to have God as an artisan making their own personal asses special order.

That's why I chuckle a little--no, hard, when they suggest they should have equal time.  No seriously? What if the episode looked like the Kitzmiller v Dover trial?  Should creationists really want to have their pseudoscience torn apart on the regular? It might cost them in private school money and text book pimping.

Maybe they should be glad enough they have the 700 Club and "all that".

It Occurs to Me Who Ted Cruz Reminds Me Of--

Most people who have a negative opinion seem note a resemblance to Sen. Joe McCarthy, but it dawned on me there was another character he called to mind.

Okay, now, you have to stick with me on this one, and it won't mean anything to most readers, and with this post, I probably cement my nerd cred, but--he reminds me of Terl from Battlefield Earth. I mean L. Ron Hubbard's 1982 epic novel, not the movie starring John Travolta. The reason I make this distinction is that the movie couldn't really convey some of what makes the book tick, and although Travolta's representation is, um, enthusiastic (playing villians is fun!), the Terl of the novel is kind of a more realized character. Actually, as characters go, he's got more interesting motivations than the heroes do, because they are just good.  Terl. on the other hand, is a capable adversary with, let's say, more working parts in his mentality.

Just for background, Terl is a Psychlo--one of a race of imperialistic, exploitative aliens who have made war and enslaved multiple races, and pumped them and their planets for whatever valuta could be extracted. They are not a particularly introspective bunch, as aliens go, but Terl is something else again. He's a master Psychlo, he's been to the good schools, received all the right sort of training, and is ruthless and ambitious. Which makes him wonder a bit why he's stuck heading up security at a mining concern on a primitive backwater like Earth. After you spend a little time with Terl, you get the idea that anyone on Psychlo who has worked with Terl has decided they might like a few star systems between him and them, because he is Not a Very Nice Psychlo. He can fake it for stretches at a time, though, to get what he wants. He looks at everyone with the thought of "leverage" in mind--how they can be used to his advantage.

In order to accomplish his goals, he enlists (enslaves) several dozen Earth people to mine for him. He has them learn Psychlo because he has no interest in whatever gibberish they speak. He doesn't quite see them as sentient. The humans are able to plan a revolt under his nose, because it doesn't quite occur to him that people do things when he leaves a room. He underestimates them because he is convinced of his own superiority and never sees how he can be outsmarted. But it's because of this that the humans acquire an insight into who the Psychlos are, and the means to overthrow them.

I dunno. It made sense to me when I thought of it.  And if you have to compare someone to a villian, you can't go wrong with 9 foot tall monsters from outer space.

"Revolution"--Are you Watching This?

So, I'm halfway into the second episode of Revolution, and am pretty hooked on the concept of a post-electricity era as a study in what it means to be human in relationship to our technology. Human beings are tool-using mammals, but in the advent of the electric age, we have become something near to gods:

Rockets to the moon--a Mars-landing of an information-gathering robot? What? You have a phone--or are even reading this blog from a phone, that Alexander Graham Bell would think was magic. My job during the day is impossible without telephones and computers. My social life is more or less computer-assisted. My world is surrounded by technology.  How about you?

Our humanity, or what sets us apart from the natural world in some respects, is our capacity for invention--our technology. That our species adapted gripping hands that could grasp tools, the forward-looking eyes to launch missiles like arrows or spears, the oral ability to convey knowledge--to build the society we have, is extraordinary--but if it was taken away, and we were left with the gripping hands, the vision, the language, and the memory--

And the knowledge that things didn't work like they should?

Humans would still try to be making things work. They would still be using whatever tools that came to hand.

It's pretty deep stuff. That I'm enjoying means it probably won't last past this season going by my track-record with watching shows and their longevity, but really--I recommend it.

Ray Bradbury RIP--All Summer in A Day

This blew my mind more than Fahrenheit 451. He understood people, and that was what made his fiction work. And also, this, too-- heh. If you prevented the future, Ray Bradbury, I think it was one of the bad ones. Although, reality speaking, a lot of bad ones remain total probabilities. And that is a challenge sf makes us aware of--a good job all things considered.

Updated: sorry, I don't know how I copy/pasted the wrong embed code--too much blog, too late, I think.