Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has called for Australian politicians to abandon Elon Musk’s social media platform X and has said that Elon Musk should be jailed indefinitely.

Musk’s crime? Refusing to comply with the country’s chief censor’s demands for censorship, not only in Australia itself but around the world.

The recent injunction obtained by Commissioner Julie Inman Grant temporarily halted the distribution of posts containing footage from the terrorist attack.

The tech mogul has expressed much resistance to complying with the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s demands to remove content. This comes after Musk failed to remove footage and speech surrounding the recent attack, involving the stabbing of a Bishop in Sydney.

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During an interview with Sky News Australia, Senator Lambie criticized Musk for allegedly fostering hatred by allowing the content to remain on his platform. She announced her boycott of X, urging her colleagues to follow suit, saying, “When you want to lead by example, it has to happen from here, so start switching off X.”

Lambie called Musk a “social media knob” with “no social conscience” and suggested that he should be jailed indefinitely. “Someone like that should be in jail and the key be thrown away,” Lambie said.

Senator Lambie’s remarks gained traction amid an ongoing backlash against Musk’s disregard for global censorship orders from the eSafety Commissioner. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton expressed dissatisfaction with the billionaire’s free speech stance, with the Prime Minister calling for stronger government control over social media companies.

Prime Minister Albanese called Musk “arrogant” for refusing to carry out the government’s censorship demands, calling the censorship orders merely an enforcement of “common decency.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Technocrat Threatens Musk With “Sanctions” Unless He Stamps Out Free Speech On Twitter

January 24, 2023

EU Technocrat Threatens Musk With “Sanctions” Unless He Stamps Out Free Speech On Twitter

The battle over Twitter is often made to appear complex and chaotic, but it can all be boiled down to a simple dichotomy – It’s about the people who demand censorship in favor of the establishment narrative vs. the people who want free speech and fair rules applied to everyone equally.

Everything else is noise and distraction.

The complications arise when we try to define free speech when it comes to social media. Private companies are not subject to many legal boundaries related to free speech rights. This is an argument that the political left and government representatives made constantly during the massive purge of conservative and liberty oriented accounts by Big Tech companies since 2016. And, as we saw with Twitter previous to Elon Musk’s takeover, governments took full advantage of this legal loophole in order to silence people using social media websites as middlemen.

The ongoing release of the Twitter Files proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that collusion between Big Tech and governments for the sake of censorship is a reality. In America, at least, this is a constitutional no-no. The fact that politicians and agencies like the FBI were actively seeking out and targeting ideological opponents and having them silenced on Twitter is a direct violation of the 1st Amendment and these people should be subject to prosecution (the FBI even shelled out at least $3 million to Twitter for services rendered).

Prosecution might never happen, but at least the evidence is undeniable today after years of the public being lied to.

The reality that Twitter was acting as an enforcement agent for government censorship around the world tells us exactly why so many establishment officials have been up in arms over Musk’s purchase of the platform…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Elon Musk Calls Out ‘Corporate Journalism’ Over Coverage of His ‘Twitter Files’

January 1, 2023

Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway, on Aug. 29, 2022. (Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images)

Elon Musk Calls Out ‘Corporate Journalism’ Over Coverage of His ‘Twitter Files’

Elon Musk has criticized mainstream media outlets over their coverage of the so-called “Twitter Files.”

“Why is corporate journalism rushing to defend the state instead of the people?” Musk wrote on Twitter on Dec. 27, in response to a tweet from journalist and documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse. The latter was sharing his new Substack post about how corporate media rushed to defend the FBI and the state instead of exposing them.

“The Hunter Biden laptop story shows the extent to which the corporate media has become the propaganda arm of the state,” Woodhouse wrote in his Substack, pointing to the recent release of the seventh installment of Twitter’s internal documents.

Independent author Michael Shellenberger published the seventh installment on Dec. 19, revealing how there was an “organized effort” by federal law enforcement agents to discredit the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop report, by targeting social media and news companies.

Other installments of Twitter’s internal communications have shown how the media giant placed certain individuals on “secret blacklists,” debates over how to handle former President Donald Trump’s account before it was suspended in January 2021, and how the FBI allegedly flagged accounts and tweets for Twitter to take action against.

The FBI has dismissed the “Twitter Files,” alleging that “conspiracy theorists” are attempting to discredit the bureau.

A Twitter user responded to Musk’s question by writing, “Simple… it’s Corporate Journalism… Not Journalism.”

To which Musk replied: “Exactly. Why would anyone trust corpo journalism?”

Substack

In the same thread, Musk also said that he was “open to the idea” of buying the Substack platform, while responding to a tweet from Wall Street Silver.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The ‘Twitter Papers’ Reveal the Totalitarians Among Us

December 5, 2022

The ‘Twitter Papers’ Reveal the Totalitarians Among Us

I admit to being skeptical of Elon Musk as a free speech hero. He has moved from one US government-subsidized business to another on his path to becoming the world’s richest person. But there is no denying that his release of the “Twitter Papers” this past weekend, which blew the lid off government manipulation of social media, has been a huge victory for those of us who value the First Amendment.

The release, in coordination with truly independent journalist Matt Taibbi, demonstrated indisputably how politicians and representatives of “official Washington” pressed the teams that were then in charge of censorship at Twitter to remove Tweets and even ban accounts that were guilty of nothing beyond posting something the power-brokers did not want the general public to read. Let’s not forget that many of those demanding Twitter censorship were US government officials who had taken an oath to the US Constitution and its First Amendment.

It is important to understand that both US political parties were involved in pushing Twitter to censor information they didn’t like. There is plenty of corruption to go around. However, as the Twitter Papers demonstrated, vastly more Tweets were censored at the demand of Democratic Party politicians simply because Twitter employees on the censorship team were overwhelmingly Democratic Party supporters.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence released in this first installment of the Twitter Papers was a series of Tweets from the Biden 2020 campaign to its contact inside Twitter asking that the social media censor them. An internal Twitter document shows that the censor team “handled these,” meaning censored them.
…click on the above link to read the rest…

2021 Year in Review: Crisis of Authority and the Age of Narratives

January 9, 2022

2021 Year in Review: Crisis of Authority and the Age of Narratives

Every year, friend-of-the-site David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This year is no exception. Poignant and delightfully acerbic when necessary, considering the troubling times. As with past years, he selected Peak Prosperity as the site where it is published in full. It is longer than our usual posts, but worth the time to read in full. This is Part 1.

Introduction

Dave: You do lack self control, but I learned and laughed making my way thru this.

~ Larry Summers (@LHSummers), former Secretary of the Treasury

I’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty. What began more than a dozen years ago as a synopsis of the year’s events in markets and finance for a few friends morphed beyond my control into a Year in Review (YIR)—an attempt to chronicle human folly and world events for the entire year. It captures key moments before they slip into the brain fog. The process of trying to write a coherent narrative helps me better understand WTF just happened and seminal moments that catch my eye.

By far my favorite end-of-year recap for the last ten years. Finished it yesterday. Once again David hasn’t disappointed. He’s on my I want to go to dinner with list.

~ Jim Pallotta (@jimpallotta13), money manager and former owner of Boston Celtics

I’m game, Jim, even if it’s just a pretzel, nachos, and a brewski. The title, “Crisis of Authority,” is a double entendre. On the one hand, previously trusted authorities that we relied on to better understand the world are long gone. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tim Russert have been replaced with Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Brian Stelter. Oops. Scratch Chris Cuomo..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Elon Musk: “Civilization Is Going To Crumble”

December 9, 2021

Elon Musk: “Civilization Is Going To Crumble”

Even billionaires like Elon Musk can see that the current state of affairs is completely and utterly unsustainable. If we stay on the path that we are on, and there are absolutely no indications that we plan to reverse course, societal collapse is inevitable. In fact, as I detail on a regular basis, societal collapse has already begun all around us. Unfortunately, most people still can’t bring themselves to admit that it is actually happening.

I don’t always agree with everything that Elon Musk does or says, but he is certainly a very interesting guy.

He is not afraid to anger the establishment, and he often expresses opinions which run counter to the dominant narratives of our day.

For example, he just told the Wall Street Journal that our declining birth rates are “one of the biggest risks to civilization”…

“There are not enough people,” Musk told a Wall Street Journal event Monday. “I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people,” he said.

The tech billionaire said low and rapidly declining birth rates are “one of the biggest risks to civilization.”

Without a doubt, birth rates are certainly dropping quite precipitously.

In fact, here in the United States the birth rate is at an all-time record low, and every single U.S. state has now dropped below replacement level.

In other words, if birth rates do not start rising we will soon see our population steadily shrink.

We are witnessing similar trends all over the globe right now, and this deeply alarms Musk. He believes that if birth rates do not start going back up, “civilization is going to crumble”…

Musk added that too many “good, smart people” think there are too many people in the world and that the population is growing out of control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op

May 8, 2021

Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op

Listen to this article:

The world’s two wealthiest people are fighting over the moon, which just says so much about where our species is at right now.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private space exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled “From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality—whatever the cost.”

The mainstream press cannot get enough of these two unfathomably wealthy plutocrats and their outspoken ambition to colonize space, with Musk advocating Mars colonization and Bezos preferring to ship us all offworld to live in giant Amazon space tubes. They love it for the same reason they love war and status quo politicians: it fits in beautifully with the capitalist world order.

Space colonization is largely a capitalist perception management op promoted by the likes of Musk and Bezos to strengthen the narrative that it’s okay to continue the world-raping global capitalist principle of infinite growth on a finite world because we can escape the catastrophic ecological consequences of that paradigm by fleeing to space.

“Ecocidal capitalism is fine, we’ll just go to space before it kills us!” is the message we’re all meant to absorb. And too many do. A large obstacle to waking people up to the existential crises we are facing as a species is the blind faith that technology will save us from the consequences of our mass-scale behavior, and therefore we don’t need to change. Which suits the world’s richest men perfectly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Musk: Electric Cars Will Require a Lot More Electric Power Than We Currently Have

December 16, 2020

Musk: Electric Cars Will Require a Lot More Electric Power Than We Currently Have

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says we’ll need more electricity to power cars like his. A lot more.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.

Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.

There’s no unicorn energy source or free lunch. Currently, electric cars are primarily powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the sources we use to generate electricity, after all, according to the Energy Information Agency. Renewables are growing but still account for less than 20% of U.S. electricity.

There’s no free lunch when it comes to renewable energy sources, which may not even be all that renewable. Wind and sun are free, but the means of generating power from them are not.

They require batteries, which requires extensive mining and the use of toxic chemicals.

Mining is a dirty business.

Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.

“If not managed responsibly, this has the potential for new adverse environmental and social impacts,” the report says.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Elon Musk At War With German Environmentalists Protesting His New Gigafactory

January 28, 2020

Elon Musk At War With German Environmentalists Protesting His New Gigafactory

It was just a couple of days ago that we first reported that Tesla would need to cut down “thousands of trees” in order to build its Gigafactory 4 in Germany.

In that article, we noted that the company needed to clear so much forest space to put up its factory that dozens of protesters recently organized a gathering known as a “Forest Walk” to protect against Tesla’s tree removal activities at the site, according to Teslarati.

The protesters were dressed in yellow vests, replicating the “Yellow Vest Movement” in France and are also concerned about what the deforestation may do to the drinking water in the area.

This past weekend, in a fit of hilarious and ironic virtue signalling cognitive dissonance, Musk responded to the criticism, saying on Twitter “this is not a natural forest — it was planted for use as cardboard & only a small part will be used for GF4.”

Oh, well in that case, just cut down as many trees as you want, Elon.

Musk also responded to criticisms about water usage at Gigafactory 4, ~~lying~~ saying “Tesla won’t use this much net water on a daily basis. It’s possibly a rare peak usage case, but not an everyday event.”

Company planning documents, however, estimate that the factory would need about 98,000 gallons of water per hour.

The company remains in the process of “jumping through hoops” to get the plant up and running, according to Bloomberg.

One of those hoops included clearing the area of wartime bombs. Disposal officers carried out controlled detonations of seven wartime bombs on Sunday at the site.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Powering the Tesla Gigafactory

December 13, 2018

Powering the Tesla Gigafactory

Tesla has repeatedly claimed in publications, articles and tweets from Elon Musk that its Reno, Nevada Gigafactory will be powered 100% by renewables. Specifics on exactly how Tesla plans to do this are sparse, but the data that are available suggest that Tesla’s 70MW rooftop solar array won’t come close to supplying the Gigafactory’s needs and that the other options that Tesla is now or has been considering (more solar, possibly wind, battery storage) will not bridge the gap. As a result the Gigafactory will probably end up obtaining most of its electricity from the Nevada grid, 75% of which is presently generated by fossil fuels.

Lest there be any doubt about Tesla’s claim that the Gigafactory will be powered with 100% renewables, here are some tweets from Mr Musk:

July 27, 2016: Should mention that Gigafactory will be fully powered by clean energy when complete

June 8, 2018: Gigafactory should be on 100% renewable energy (primarily solar with some wind) by next year. Rollout of solar has already begun

August 25, 2018: Tesla’s Gigafactory will be 100% renewable powered (by Tesla Solar) by end of next year

Plus this excerpt from the January 2016 Gigafactory tour handout:

(The Gigafactory) is an all-electric factory with no fossil fuels (natural gas or petroleum) directly consumed. We will be using 100% sustainable energy through a combination of a 70 MW solar rooftop array and solar ground installations.

Plus this one from Tesla’s “press kit”:

The Gigafactory is designed to be a net-zero energy factory upon completion. It will not consume any fossil fuels – there is no natural gas piped to the site nor are there permanent diesel generators being used to provide power … The entire roof of the Gigafactory will be covered in solar array, and installation is already underway. Power not consumed during the day will be stored via Tesla Powerpacks for use when needed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Driverless Cars and the Cult of Technology

September 13, 2018

We constantly hear that driverless cars are just around the corner. We’re told they will revolutionize transportation and enable us to continue using our car-based transport and land-use system. If they’re made by Tesla, they’ll be powered by magic, solar-powered, super efficient batteries and we’ll all be able to keep living our hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive lifestyles without any damage to the environment. The only problem is we’ve been hearing about all this for the last five to ten years and there’s no evidence that it’s anything but the same old technological, utopian dreck that we’ve been hearing since General Motors debuted “Futurama” at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Technological utopianism fueled by science fiction is nothing new. If you’ve never seen it, watch Disney’s short animated film “Magic Highway” from 1958. It’s remarkably similar to this recent promotional film for an Elon Musk tubular underground transportation systemin Los Angeles. They’re both fantasies that maintain our inefficient, car-oriented transportation and land-use systems and help the Automobile Industrial Complex retain its stranglehold on our imaginations. They’re also fantasies that dovetail with corporate capitalism’s fantasy of automating the entire workforce and using technology to eliminate jobs and reduce costs.

In many ways, driverless cars have all the makings of a massive cult–the Cult of Technology. This is the idea that technology will somehow solve the problems of human greed, over-population and over-consumption of planetary resources, and therefore will also solve the related problems of climate change, waste, pollution, and species extinction. It’s an old fantasy but one we still buy into. It preys on our laziness and gullibility and it distracts and deludes us so much that we can’t see basic realities staring us in the face.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Evidence The Economy Is Deteriorating

August 27, 2018

More Evidence The Economy Is Deteriorating

“Financial-market and economic prospects remain far shy of the hype and headlines, amidst tanking consumer optimism and negative revisions to recent reporting.” – John Williams, Shadowstats.com

The economy may seem like it’s doing well if you are part of the upper 10% demographic. Though, in reality, for most of the upper 10%, doing “well” has been a function of having easy access to credit. NASA Federal Credit Union is offering 0% down, 0% mortgage insurance for mortgages up to $2.5 million.

Someone I know suggested the tax cut stimulus had run its course. But the narrative that the tax cuts would stimulate economic activity was pure propaganda. The tax cuts stimulated $1 trillion in expected share buybacks and put more money in the pockets of corporate insiders and billionaires. The average middle class household spent its tax cut money on more expensive gasoline and food. Since the tax cut took effect, auto sales and home sales have declined. Retail sales have been mixed. However, it’s difficult to distinguish between statistical manipulation and inflation. I would argue that, net of real inflation and Census Bureau statistical games, real retail sales have been declining.

As an example, last week Black Box Intelligence released July restaurant sales. While comparable store sales were up 0.54% over July 2017, comparable restaurant traffic was down 1.8%. On a rolling three months, comp sales are up 0.46% but comparable traffic is down nearly 2%. With traffic declining, especially a faster rate relative to the small increase in sales, it means the sales “growth” is entirely a function of price inflation. If Black Box Intelligence could control it’s data for price increases, it would show that there is no question that real sales are declining. I have been loathe to recommend shorting restaurant stocks because, for some reason, the hedge funds love them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming

August 22, 2018

If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming

Sometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth. In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos in the global financial marketplace, but authorities continue to assure us that everything is going to be just fine. Of course we witnessed precisely the same thing just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke insisted that a recession was not coming, and we proceeded to plunge into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Is our society experiencing a similar state of denial about what is ahead of us here in 2018?

Let me give you a few examples of some recent things that global economic leaders have said, and what they really meant…

–Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk: “We are definitely not going bankrupt.”

Translation: “We are definitely going bankrupt.”

Tesla is a company that is supposedly worth 51 billion dollars, but the reality is that they are going to zero. They have been bleeding massive amounts of cash for years, and now a day of reckoning has finally arrived. A severe liquidity crunch has forced the company to delay payments or to ask for enormous discounts from suppliers, and many of those suppliers are now concerned that Tesla is on the verge of collapse…

Specifically, a recent survey sent privately by a well-regarded automotive supplier association to top executives, and seen by the WS , found that 18 of 22 respondents believe that Tesla is now a financial risk to their companies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Not So Happy Motoring

March 30, 2018

Not So Happy Motoring

It hasn’t been a great month for America’s electric car fantasy. Elon Musk’s Tesla company — the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy — is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody’s to junk status, a failure to produce its “affordable” ($36,000 — Ha!) Model 3 at commercial scale, a massive recall of earlier S Model sedans for a steering defect, and the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can’t determine that based on what’s left), and which killed the driver.

Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago. Don’t blame Elon for that.

There’s a lot to like about electric cars, of course, if, say, you’re a Google executive floating through life in a techno-narcissism bubble, or a Hollywood actor with wooly grandiose notions of saving the planet while simultaneously signaling your wealth and your “green” virtue cred. Teslas supposedly handle beautifully, ride very quietly, have great low-end power, and decent range of over 200 miles. The engine has something like twenty moving parts, is very long-lasting, and is easy to repair or change out if necessary.

Are they actually “green and clean?” Bwaahaaaaa….! Are you kidding? First, there’s the energy embedded in producing the car: mining and smelting the ores, manufacturing the plastics, running the assembly line, etc. That embedded energy amounts to about 22 percent of the energy consumed by the car over a ten-year lifetime. Then there’s the cost of actually powering the car day-by-day. The electricity around the USA is produced mostly by burning coal, natural gas, or by nuclear fission, all of which produce harmful emissions or byproducts. But the illusion that the power just comes out of a plug in the wall (for just pennies a day!) is a powerful one for the credulous public. The cherry-on-top is the fantasy that before much longer all that electric power will come from “renewables,” solar and wind, and we can leave the whole fossil fuel mess behind us. We say that to ourselves as a sort of prayer, and it has exactly that value.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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