Yesterday, Wonkette reported on Wednesday’s congressional hearing in which myopic former wrasslin’ coach Jim Jordan accused a bunch of ad executives of colluding to not advertise on conservative media sites like The Daily Wire. All because private companies still have the right to decide where to place ads, and for some reason those with legit products don’t want them associated with the beet juice cures and admiring documentaries about Horst Wessel that infest right-wing media like the shingles virus.
One place a lot of companies have decided they would prefer to not advertise their products is on tech billionaire and baby-makin’ machine Elon Musk’s X, or the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, which has seen its ad revenue plunge like a skydiver with a malfunctioning parachute since he took it over a couple of years ago. On X, after Wednesday’s hearing, free speech and anti-censorship warrior Musk shrugged his shoulders and admitted that a mark of maturity and character is standing by a principle even when you disagree with the results.
Ha ha ha, just kidding, he threatened to sue all the companies involved and suggested that they should also be held criminally liable:
Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket. Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.
The sad part is that some states probably will consider criminal prosecution, or legislation requiring all these woke soap companies to advertise on places like Right Side Broadcasting, or some other unforeseen way of defending free speech through coercion and threat of state-sponsored punishment.
And that wasn’t even the funniest stupid shit we read about Elon Musk this week. There was also this New York Times deep dive into his plans for getting to Mars, which are more sophisticated than our preferred method of strapping him to the nosecone of an Atlas V rocket and firing it in the general direction of the Red Planet. But not by much.
The Times has some very entertaining details, along with Musk’s ridiculously short timeline:
While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
Even 100 years was already an optimistic goal. NASA has said it won’t even land people on Mars until sometime in the 2040s, never mind building a self-sustaining civilization with a million citizens by then, and even NASA’s timeline is probably 80 percent PR. We suppose we just lack vision, or some shit like that.
In recent months, Musk has apparently told employees at SpaceX to work on designing habitats and spacesuits, and also studying whether humans can reproduce on Mars. He also reportedly “volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony.” Musk denied on Twitter that he has ever said anything like this, but we 100 percent believe it. If there is one thing above all else Elon Musk wants, it’s to be able to brag that he was the first man to fuck on Mars.
And there is no question he said this, there is apparently a video:
[H]e said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”
Eugenics. He’s talking about eugenics. Luckily there is no history of that going off the rails.
So much of this Times report is filled with all sorts of understated hilarity highlighting the tension between the paper’s desire to report on all this gibberish with a straight face for some reason. Like this passage:
“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay.
Whether Mr. Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.
It is not debatable. Musk is 53. Unless he wants to go live on a space station full-time starting right now to slow the aging process, or he freezes his head in a cryogenic chamber. Which is an avenue of research we might actually get behind.
Elsewhere, the story talks about how all of Musk’s ventures have allegedly been in service of his groundbreaking vision of humans one day spending their lives trapped inside giant plastic enclosures like ants in an ant farm:
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
We already tried government by Twitter, it was called the Trump administration, and it turned about half the country into head cases in desperate need of being hooked up to a Xanax IV drip 24 hours a day. Even the kids on the island in Lord of the Flies at least had the sense to have a system whereby only one person could talk at a time. Somehow we don’t see @Hitler_boner88 agreeing to shut up while someone else is holding the conch shell.
As for the cybertrucks, ha ha ha, sure, those barely drivable low-rent toaster ovens don’t get made fun of enough on Earth. Let’s make them galaxy-wide laughingstocks.
He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview, he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla, will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said.
Oh, thermonuclear explosions would warm the planet, all right. To steal from Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, anyone not wearing two million sunblock the day Elon is nuking the surface of Mars is going to have a really bad day.
Our own personal sci-fi theory that there is an alternative universe where Elon Musk is the obscure and impoverished author of the most pedantic space adventure novels ever committed to paper remains in play.
[Xitter / New York Times]
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Musk also reportedly “volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony.”
Hang on, Kurt Vonnegut already wrote "The Big Space Fuck."
https://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/big-space-fuck-kurt-vonnegut/
Totally OT but I have to—Fridays I get all the warrants and the detectives doing undercover stuff online to get child pornographers and soliciting people seem to wait and give them all to me…and they are worse than you imagine. I just read a horrible one, maybe the worst I’ve seen and you should know I’m pretty jaded.
I called the detective to swear him in and was like, I seriously hate seeing these from you because I know it’s going to be rough but thank you for doing this work and he’s like, I know—I vomited while doing this one.
There are some really horrible people out there.
Some really wonderful ones, obviously—I’m trying to focus on all the people, the majority, who are not monsters…