#and it’s been around for over 40 years elon

[telesilla]

Can you even imagine trusting all your money and securities to fucking X?

[darkmaga-returns]

by Straight Arrow News, AP and NY Pos

Senator Joni Ernst’s office had been investigating the federal government’s telework protocols for the past year and a half and concluded that “The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12%.” She revealed that a paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily. Elon Musk posted this comment: “If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.” She said that President Biden set a bad example by spending little time in the White House. She reported that his administration is not transparent and it redacted the “work locations of over 281,000 rank-and-file federal employees.” Ernst also faulted federal employee unions for hampering efforts to compel workers to report on-site for their jobs. The union for the Social Security Administration negotiated a contract that will prevent the Trump administration from requiring employees to appear in person for work.

They’re being remote-ly professional.

A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily, a report from Sen. Joni Ernst’s office found.

Ernst (R-Iowa), who has long crusaded against the rise in remote federal work, is planning to reveal the fruits of her office’s year and a half inquiry to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy during their visit to the Capitol Thursday.

“The nation’s capital is a ghost town, with government buildings averaging an occupancy rate of 12[%],” Ernst wrote in the blistering report. “If federal employees can’t be found at their desks, exactly where are they?”

Musk took note of Ernst’s report ahead of his meeting with lawmakers to brainstorm ways to rein in the federal bureaucracy.

[mariacallous]

Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third largest market and reportedly more than 40 million users. And despite his bravado online, he seems to have backed himself into a corner.

Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an ongoing conflict between Musk and the country’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), a special court run by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that issued takedown orders on content it considers to be a threat to the integrity of its elections. Musk and X refused to comply, allowing accounts that were accused of spreading hate speech and disinformation to remain on the platform, a move that eventually triggered the ban.

Starlink was caught in the crosshairs too: The court froze the assets of Musk’s other company, saying it was part of the same “economic group” as X given its ownership, for possible use to pay off fines owed by X. When the block came into effect Monday, Starlink allowed its customers—more than 250,000 people, according to the company— to circumvent the X ban by using its satellite internet connection. After initial resistance, Starlink backed down and said it would comply. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that increasingly, it seems that Musk has overplayed his hand.

“I think he is realizing Brazilians are not going to take to the streets because X is suspended,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology for Digital Democracy. “Brazilian institutions are not going to back off just because Musk is cursing online.”

In response to a request for comment, an X spokesperson directed WIRED to a post from the platform's Global Affairs team. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech,” the post reads in part.

Meanwhile, Musk has continued to antagonize the court. Last week, he posted a seemingly AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars (which was later deleted), with the accompanying text alleging, “One day, Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real,” and another comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Voldemort.

“Ever since April, he has been toying with the image of Moraes, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and escalated in a problematic way,” alleges Bruna Santos, a researcher and activist with the civil society coalition Coalizão Direitos na Rede in Brazil. “He was fully aware and he knew what the consequences would be.”

WIRED reported how employees scrambled to avoid a legal crisis when Musk took over Twitter in 2022, just days before Brazil’s presidential runoffs. The company was served a consent decree from the judiciary, warning that if it didn’t keep its promises to keep safeguards around the elections in place, it risked being blocked. At the time, the country’s then president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters allegedly spread disinformation about the security of the country’s elections to cast doubt on the results. Musk had promised a rollback of the company’s existing content moderation policies, and promised a sort of “free speech absolutism” that, in practice, has let hate speech and mis- and disinformation flow freely on the platform.

At the time, the trust and safety staff, the people who kept violative content off of Twitter, were able to persuade Musk to keep the platform’s safeguards on during the elections. But less than a week later, most of them were fired along with almost 50 percent of the company’s staff in the first wave of layoffs.

As part of his effort to make X a free-for-all of free speech, Musk reinstated the accounts of far-right influencers like Allan dos Santos, who fled Brazil in 2020 to avoid being investigated for spreading disinformation. After Bolsonaro lost the election, some of his supporters stormed the Brazilian legislature on January 8, 2023, and since then, the TSE has been investigating the events leading up to the insurrection. Accounts like dos Santos’ were targeted by a TSE investigation launched in April and were the subject of the court’s takedown orders.

Musk has likened Moraes to a dictator, alleging that the court is forcing censorship. (Musk has, however, complied without complaint with blocking orders in places like Turkey and India, where they have been used to censor journalists and opposition.)

And while Ivar Hartmann, an associate professor of law at the Insper Institute of Education and Research in São Paulo, alleges that Moraes has stretched the power of the court to new—and possibly concerning—levels, he claims it is also important to distinguish between a democracy with different rules and a dictatorship.

In 2019, Brazil’s TSE court launched a fake news inquiry, headed up by Moraes. Since then, he has become a controversial figure. Some see him as defending the country’s democracy; others, like Hartmann, worry he may have accrued too much power.

“This is not Venezuela [where international observers widely believe President Nicolás Maduro rigged the country’s July elections],” he says. “Even if you wanted to argue that the type of court orders we've seen regarding social media platforms in Brazil in the past two or three years are shocking, which I would agree with, you don't see [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg going online and openly criticizing the courts and denying compliance with court orders in Brazil.”

Nina Santos says that even if there are valid criticisms of the approach Moraes has taken, Musk should comply with the court order and argue against them in court later. “We can discuss the decisions taken by the Brazilian court, but not whether Musk should comply with the Brazilian court or not.”

Musk’s response to the court order was to then break another Brazilian law. Like many countries, Brazil requires certain international companies appoint an in-country representative that can be contacted by the government and, in some cases, held responsible for a company’s failures to comply with the law. India, Vietnam, Turkey, and Russia all have similar laws.

On August 19, X announced it was closing its office after its in-country representative was threatened with prison time for the company’s noncompliance with the TSE’s orders. In closing the office, X was also suddenly in violation of Brazil’s localization laws. A suspension, at that point, says João Brant, digital policy secretary for Brazil’s Secretariat of Social Communication, was inevitable. “In a situation where a person like Musk was trying to pick and choose which orders he would abide by, it was necessary,” he says.

At this point, Musk has exhausted most avenues of escalation with the judiciary. And though he pulled SpaceX employees out of Brazil, he has already shown signs of wavering, at least when it comes to Starlink. Brant says that it is unlikely that Starlink will face any further consequences so long as it stays within the bounds of Brazilian law.

[mightyflamethrower]

Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who is running for late Sen. Diane Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat, is calling for a $50 minimum wage, defending her position during a debate Monday night.

The moderator asked Lee to defend her call for a $50-an-hour minimum wage during the event, noting that it is “seven times the current national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.”

When asked how that would be economically sustainable for small businesses, Lee immediately said that she owned and ran a small business for over a decade, creating “hundreds of jobs, benefits, retirement benefits, [and] also health care benefits.”

“I know what worker productivity means, and that means that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of and have a living wage in the Bay Area,” Lee said. “I believe it was the United Way [that] came out with a report that — very recently — [said] $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,” she said, pointing to another survey that identified $104,000 as not being enough for one person, essentially classifying them as low income “because of the affordability crisis.”

She added:

And so, just do the math. Just do the math. Of course, we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage — you’re talking about $20, $25 — fine, but I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.

Lee ultimately failed to answer the question.SUBSCRIBE

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Fox 40 notes that “a wage of $50 an hour would total $104,000 over the course of a year.”

WATCH:

Her call generated mockery from critics, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who asked, “Who not $500 per hour?”

“Okay, why not $100 then? $1,000? Why not just make the minimum wage a billion dollars an hour? Then we’d all be richer than Elon Musk!” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk remarked.

“Economic illiteracy like Rep. Lee’s has been around for centuries. Every country that adopts it becomes a dystopian nightmare,” he added as others piled on:

Lee’s call comes as inflation comes roaring back with no immediate signs of relief, as detailed in Breitbart Business Digest.

RELATED — CNN’s Sidner: Hotter-Than-Expected Inflation Report “Another Sign” Economy “Getting Better”

[azuremallone]

I'll never watch a DeNiro movie again.

DeNiro doesn't get a cent from me. Zero. Nada. His insanity and political bent is unhinged. The rantings of yet another old man with dementia. This, coming from a man who just pumped out a baby with a 63 year old woman. Let's just consider that a moment.

Tiffany Chen was 62 at the time she got knocked up. But wait, how the fuck does that work? That's ten years after the average age that most women begin menopause (which is 51 in the US). She must have been on insane amounts of hormone therapy. Let alone the risks involved, which expand greatly after 40 for women.

I'll admit that their mixed Italian-Chinese baby is adorable. That kid is innocent and not part of this at all.

And so this is the guy who is equivocating Trump to Hitler, Mussolini, and making wild on television interviews where he rants about how dangerous and evil the former President is. He goes insofar on his latest rant to say that if Trump becomes President, everything will go to shit.

NEWSFLASH: Trump was already President, you senile old fart.

... all of that happened or will happen under a Trump Presidency. However, it didn't. It DID happen under BIDEN'S PRESIDENCY! Biden isn't even running the puppet show in his own head, let alone the Office of the President. It's everyone around him that's manipulating the country into violence, chaos, and extreme inflation with job losses, illegal immigration, infiltration by potential foreign military and terrorists through the southern borders, massively expensive groceries that have impoverished the needy and rampant homelessness across the country. No, I'm sorry Mr. DeNiro, you're a fucking fruitcake lunatic who has no sense of reality considering that your youngest child will be under 20 when you keel over from decrepitude.

Furthermore, the hard-left believes January 6th was some kind of coup. Furthest from, considering that the shadowy trials and way it was swept under the rug went off. No shots fired. No storming of the White House. In fact, the only shot fired was by a Federal employee to kill an unarmed woman after they had unlocked the doors and let people in. January 6th was a protest that got out of hand, sure, but to call it anything but is ignorant of the fact that across the nation there were no sympathetic uprisings or attempts to take seats of power, which is the fundamental definition of the lie thrown about it by the Leftists.

Meanwhile, the Biden Presidency has just witnessed all the years of hard-left ultra-liberal education go to shit because of the Terrorists that took over college campuses to espouse hatred and the genocide of all Jews, calling for their schools and the country to destroy Israel or be destroyed. All of the literature found in the encampments after they were broken up support the destruction of America and the promotion of Terrorist activities.

They were not peaceful protesters. They were breeding a ground to establish Terrorist cells on college campuses with the goal of causing mayhem, murder, and generally maligned behavior to say the least. This also in the light that there's been a 6,000% increase in the number of Chinese nationals coming across the Mexican border.

Anytime anyone anti-Trump speaks:

Anytime I speak with anyone anti-Trump:

[shao-hujiaqi]

SHAO Founder Hu Jiaqi Calls for Millions of Members to Support Musk

On the 29th of this month, an open letter signed by billionaire Elon Musk and over 1,000 scientists expressed concerns over the development of artificial intelligence. In the open letter, they called on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, to prevent AI from posing a threat to human safety.

They believe that AI labs are developing and deploying increasingly powerful digital minds, and this competition is gradually getting out of control. No one, including their creators, can understand, predict, or reliably control them. The uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence may pose a serious threat to humanity. Their appeal has received support from over 1,000 scientists worldwide.

The actions of Musk and the thousand scientists are in line with SHAO’s philosophy. Therefore, this open letter quickly received support from SHAO’s founder Hu Jiaqi. In a statement, he called on millions of SHAO members and Hu Jiaqi’s fans across 254 countries and regions around the world, to support the actions of Musk and scientists like Joshua Bengio, and express solidarity with this open letter.

As someone who has been paying close attention to technology and human fate for a long time, Hu Jiaqi has been calling for an end to the irrational development of science and technology since 1979, and has been doing so for more than 40 years. He believes that the irrational development of science and technology will bring extreme harm and inevitably lead to the extinction of humanity in the near future.

In order to prevent the extreme harm caused by such irrational development, Hu Jiaqi founded Save Human Action Organization (SHAO), which is dedicated to promoting a balance between technological development and human well-being. SHAO is a non-governmental international organization with millions of members and fans, dedicated to preventing the irrational development of science and technology in order to avoid the extreme harm and even threats to human survival it may bring. As the founder of SHAO, Hu Jiaqi has been calling on people to recognize the risks posed by irrational technological development and proposing reasonable preventive measures.

In this increasingly technology-dependent era, the development of AI technology is becoming faster and faster, but the risks that come with it are also becoming greater. If action is not taken in a timely manner, humanity will face catastrophic consequences.

Hu Jiaqi believes that in the face of rapid technological and scientific development, we must consider the potential risks that come with it, rather than just pursuing the convenience and progress it brings. In front of the crisis of human extinction, all considerations and concerns are not superfluous.

[ranthaven]

I know a lot of Drumpf supporters at work. I work in a factory owned by a pretty big multinational corporation. You know their products, you’ve probably used a number of them. The stuff we make is good, useful stuff that most people need at least a few of our brands, and we make stuff that is generally good quality and reasonably priced. But we do not operate without some amount of corporate corruption in terms of our effect on society.

I have also spent around 20 years working in publicly funded educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school. In that realm, I met a lot of people who really benefited from the programs and services we provided. But we often found ourselves working harder and harder just to avoid the loss of funding and the ongoing encroachment of corporate-style thinking in administration.

So I have met people from the whole range of our political spectrum covering the last 40 years. Most of them are not stupid. At all. They may be just average or in a range of, say, 10 points above or below average, but mostly all reasonable people with decent mental capabilities.

What do they all have in common, you might ask? How does a broad swath of society have a common thread that leads to our current situation? It is absolutely not that they are all dimwitted. That is just flatly wrong. I have met some inarguably stupid people, but nowhere near enough to account for the present moment.

The common thread, my friends, is a concerted effort by the wealthy elites and a surprisingly willing pool of corruptible politicians stretching back to the immediate post-WWII era when the elites were not completely in control and largely immune from any efforts to keep them from gaining extreme power.

In this roughly 80-year period, the wealthy elite and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have worked both publicly and behind the scenes to destroy every vestige of civilization that enabled the rise of the “lower” classes to relative equality and an almost fair share of our national prosperity.

They have worked to destroy public education, which has been the single greatest leveler of our society in all of history. They have worked the machinery of capitalism to the most destructive end of its spectrum of function. They have used every technological advance to destroy our commons of communication in every way they could find. And it has taken them a fairly long time, a lot of hard work, and quite an expenditure of money to achieve this social destruction.

Think about all the things you can still find in history books, old newspapers, and archives. Think about names like Ronald Reagan, Edwin Kaiser, Rush Limbaugh, Joseph McCarthy, Leonard Leo, Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and so many more. And then there were even more who have labored in relative obscurity. All of these people and all of their work has, on one front, been focused on destroying the ability of the American people to actually know anything, let alone understand any of what they do find out.

Even so, it is still less than half of our voting population that is convinced to vote for what the Republican Party has been turned into. Not because these people are stupid or dimwitted, but because the system has been rigged to keep them from being able to trust. If you believe you can’t really trust anyone you don’t actually know in person, how can you make good decisions?

The system has been designed over time to pull us all apart and break our social bonds in every possible way. You don’t have to be stupid for this to cause you psychological damage and an inability to vote for the good, or at least somewhat better, choices that are offered. You just have to have lived in the US anytime over the last 80 years.

Like the op, I sincerely hope we are all ready to work for the good, or at least better, future we ALL deserve. Please don’t give up, don’t quit, and don’t you dare let the bastards beat you down.

Lets be honest, most of the folks who voted for Trump are halfwits & heathens pretending to be patriots, or worse, Christians. The ones I know in a real life are a few generations into their ignorance and didn’t stand a chance standing up to his brand of bullshit. It was designed for the dimwitted and it worked, especially since it was backed by billionaires who made sure the misinformation & toxic iconography was force fed them at every level of their lives. Distracted and dumbed down by  anti- transgender talking points and xenophobic lies. They bit the bait like a blind catfish after a winter in the muddy waters of misfortune. They’re on the hook now and we will all pay a price for their stupidity. In the end truth and justice will win, if I had any doubt I’d already be gone. Instead I am ready for what may come. My hope is that you are too.

[head-post]

UK Parliament votes against investigation into child rape gangs

UK Parliament voted on Wednesday against an enquiry into mass rapes of children by migrant gangs from Pakistan.

According to the results of the parliamentary vote, 364 MPs voted against the Tory initiative. Only 111 MPs were in favour of an enquiry into the rapes and sexual exploitation of children in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and other towns in the north of England, which were committed from the late 1980s and early 1990s until the mid-2010s, mostly by people from Pakistan.

Last week it was revealed that Jess Phillips, the UK’s deputy Home Office chief executive, refused to launch a national enquiry into these sexual offences and the police, prosecutors and local authorities’ response to them, despite a request from Oldham Town Council. She suggested that such an investigation should be conducted at a local level, as was the case in Rotherham and Telford. The Daily Telegraph saw her refusal as a reluctance to alienate Muslim voters.

Phillips told Sky News on Wednesday that the British government would allow a national enquiry into these sexual offences if approached by victims. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for his part, said from the parliamentary rostrum after meeting with the victims that there was no consensus among them on the issue. He added that the authorities should not focus on another investigation but on implementing concrete measures to protect women and children.

UK PM pleaded guilty

Sexual offences committed against underage girls in the north of England, which were silenced or ignored for years, only began to be publicised in 2012. Starmer, who became leader of the Labour government in July, led The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013 and has previously acknowledged that in some cases police and prosecutors avoided bringing ethnic and religious minorities to trial for fear of accusations of racism and Islamophobia. However, Starmer said on January 6 that it was he, when he was head of the CPS, who started prosecuting members of these criminal groups.

According to the BBC, the Rotherham enquiry found that between 1997 and 2013 alone, some 1,400 children suffered sexual abuse, mostly by British men of Pakistani origin. The Telford investigation in turn revealed that around 1,000 girls had been sexually abused over a 40-year period. More than 100 people have been convicted of the offences in the two towns alone.

Musk: “Starmer must go”

Earlier, US billionaire Elon Musk called UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer “complicit in the mass rapes” committed by gangs. “Starmer must go and he must be charged for his complicity in the worst mass crime in British history,” the entrepreneur wrote.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, leader of the party Debout la France (France Arise), commented on the news on X:

“364 British MPs vote against national enquiry into Pakistani gang rapes. Double punishment for the victims: to the horror of the crime is added the rejection of their parliament.”

Read more HERE

[newstfionline]

Thursday, January 2, 2025

World’s 500 Richest People Surpassed $10 Trillion in Wealth This Year (Bloomberg) The world’s 500 richest people got vastly richer in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the group of billionaires to a new milestone: A combined $10 trillion net worth. An indomitable rally in US technology stocks played a key role in turbocharging the trio’s wealth, as well as the fortunes of Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The total value of the fortunes tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index was $9.8 trillion at Monday’s close, down slightly from a Dec. 11 peak of $10.1 trillion following a post-Christmas selloff. Their wealth is similar in size to last year’s combined gross domestic products of Germany, Japan and Australia, according to data compiled by the World Bank.

Driver rams New Year's revelers in New Orleans, killing 10 (AP) A vehicle raced into a crowd of New Orleans revelers early on New Year's Day, killing 10 people and injuring 35 others in what the FBI is investigating as an act of terrorism. The driver of the vehicle was killed in a firefight with police following the attack around 3:15 a.m. Wednesday along Bourbon Street in the city’s bustling French Quarter, the FBI said. After the vehicle came to a stop, the driver emerged from the truck and open fire on responding officers, New Orleans police said. Officers returned fire, striking and killing the driver. Two officers were shot and are in stable condition.

Dark New Year’s Eve in Puerto Rico (Bloomberg) Nearly all of Puerto Rico was without power Tuesday after its fragile electricity grid collapsed, triggering an island-wide blackout. The power outage started early in the morning and, by midday, about 85% of Puerto Rico’s 1.4 million customers remained without electricity, according to Luma Energy, the private company that operates the system. Officials said it may take 24 to 48 hours to fully resume service.

Ukraine halts transit of Russian gas to Europe after a prewar deal expired (AP) Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers that pass through the country, almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor, after a prewar transit deal expired. Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, confirmed on Wednesday morning that Kyiv had stopped the gas flows “in the interest of national security.” Russia’s Gazprom said in a statement on Wednesday morning that it had been “deprived of the technical and legal ability to supply gas for transit through Ukraine,” due to Ukraine’s refusal to extend the deal. Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network—set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union—to Europe, under a five-year agreement that ran through the end of last year. Gazprom earned money from the gas and Ukraine collected transit fees. Before the war, Russia supplied nearly 40% of the European Union’s pipeline natural gas.

Dark Doldrums Overshadow Europe’s Energy Markets (NYT) Europe is watching the skies for a gremlin that can roil its energy markets and stoke political tensions between neighboring countries. This weather phenomenon, known as the Dunkelflaute, has become a source of frustration to government ministers and a potential pitfall on their journey to cleaner energy. A German term that translates to “dark doldrums,” Dunkelflaute refers to a spate of calm days when dense clouds descend over northern Europe. This weather pattern may occur two to 10 times a year, usually in the fall and winter, and lasts 24 hours or longer. In the past, these spells of murky quiet would have made little difference to energy markets in Europe. But in recent years, as countries like Germany and Britain have spent billions to tackle climate change by shifting to cleaner sources of energy, the Dunkelflaute has gained notoriety. A generation ago, Europe relied on steady, predictable flows of energy from nuclear and fossil fuel plants. Now, much of the region’s power comes from solar arrays and wind farms, whose output varies with the whims of the weather. During the gloomy stillness of a Dunkelflaute, solar panels produce little power and wind turbines slow to a halt. Without these two mainstays of renewable energy, grid operators need to call on backup power plants like natural-gas-fired generators.

Five killed and emergency workers targeted as firework chaos mars Germany’s New Year celebrations (CNN) Five people have been killed and dozens of emergency workers were injured as a spate of incidents involving fireworks marred New Year’s Eve celebrations in Germany. Despite calls for a nationwide ban on the private use of fireworks, they continue to be a significant part of New Year’s celebrations in the country, with thousands of the pyrotechnics set off on city streets each year. Among those killed were two people in the eastern state of Saxony, according to local public broadcaster MDR, including a 45-year-old man who was killed after handling what was described as a “firework bomb.” Firefighters and other emergency services personnel were targeted by the fireworks during festivities overnight on Tuesday into Wednesday, authorities said.

Myanmar’s War Has Made It the Global Crime Capital (NYT) The flower fields stretch out from the mountain village along most every road—fluttering patchworks of white and pink and purple. The beauty in this corner of Shan State, in northeastern Myanmar, might seem a respite from the country’s brutal civil war. Instead the blooms are a symptom: It is all opium poppy in these fields, and Myanmar again ranks as the world’s biggest exporter of the raw material to make heroin and other opiates. And that’s just the beginning. Since descending into a full-blown civil conflict nearly four years ago, after the military overthrew the elected government, Myanmar has cemented its status as a hotbed of transnational crime. It is a playground for warlords, arms dealers, human traffickers, poachers, drug syndicates and generals wanted by international courts. Myanmar is now the biggest nexus of organized crime on the planet, according to the Global Organized Crime Index. The criminality flourishing in Myanmar’s fertile soil carries disastrous consequences for its 55 million people. It is also spreading the fruits of transgression across the globe.

The South China Sea could become a major flashpoint in 2025 (Economist) In early 2024 Taiwan looked like the most dangerous flashpoint in Asia. China, which claims the self-governing island as its own, was frustrated by Lai Ching-te’s victory in a presidential election there in January. It had branded him a “dangerous separatist” who could provoke war. Soon after his inauguration in May, Chinese forces staged two days of naval and air drills around the island, putting military commanders on edge in America, bound as it is, by law, to help Taiwan defend itself. In 2025 the focus of concern may shift southward. In the South China Sea, long-running friction over disputed rocks and reefs has escalated into dramatic clashes at sea. They have mostly occurred between Chinese and Philippine coastguard vessels. But with neither side willing to back down, such encounters could quickly escalate into a naval confrontation that might suck in America, a treaty ally of the Philippines. One place to watch is Sabina Shoal. The outcrop in the Spratly Islands lies 150km west of the Philippine province of Palawan, but is also claimed by China, Vietnam and Taiwan. Second Thomas Shoal, also in the Spratlys, is another possible flashpoint. The outcrops involved may seem too small and remote to be worth risking a broader flare-up. Yet each side has cause to stand firm. The Philippines’ president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, has pledged to do more than just protest against Chinese encroachment in waters claimed by his country. America is also determined to reinforce its treaty with the Philippines and to stop what it calls Chinese “salami-slicing”—small acts of aggression that make territorial gains. China sees the chance to show America’s allies that they cannot rely on it for help.

Optimism and despair in the Middle East (AP) In Damascus, the streets were buzzing with excitement Tuesday as Syrians welcomed in a new year that seemed to many to bring a promise of a brighter future after the unexpected fall of Bashar Assad’s government weeks earlier. While Syrians in the capital looked forward to a new beginning after the ousting of Assad, the mood was more somber along Beirut’s Mediterranean promenade, where residents shared cautious hopes for the new year, reflecting on a country still reeling from war and ongoing crises. War-weary Palestinians in Gaza who lost their homes and loved ones in 2024 saw little hope that 2025 would bring an end to their suffering. “The year 2024 was one of the worst years for all Palestinian people. It was a year of hunger, displacement, suffering and poverty,” said Nour Abu Obaid, a displaced woman from northern Gaza. In Lebanon, a tenuous ceasefire brought a halt to fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group a little over a month ago. The country battered by years of economic collapse, political instability and a series of calamities since 2019, continues to grapple with uncertainty, but the truce has brought at least a temporary return to normal life. On Beirut’s seaside corniche, Mohammad Mohammad from the village of Marwahin in southern Lebanon was strolling with his three children. “I hope peace and love prevail next year, but it feels like more (challenges) await us,” he said.

Freezing in Gaza (Drop Site News) On the morning of Dec 28th, Yahya Al-Batraan, a 40-year-old father of five sons and three daughters, got up in his dilapidated tent in Deir al-Balah’s western parts near the beach to find his 1-month-old baby, Jomaa, had frozen to death. His twin brother was hospitalized for hypothermia at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and faces a similar fate. Al-Batraan was displaced from Beit Lahia a year ago. His two brothers and many of his relatives were killed before his eyes. His house was razed to the ground after Israeli troops invaded and annihilated the camp. Six people have frozen to death in Gaza during the past week, where the temperatures have reached the low 40s in Fahrenheit—or about 8 degrees Celsius; five were infants less than a month old. Al-Batraan’s newborn baby will not be the last to die from hypothermia as conditions continue to deteriorate in the besieged territory. “My wife and I got up in the morning. We checked the children as always. But my 1-month-old twin didn’t show any vital signs at all. When I touched him, his body was like a bottle of ice. I took him and rushed to the hospital on foot because I didn’t have the money for a taxi or even an animal-drawn cart. Doctors instantly told me that he passed away. I couldn’t hold my senses and burst into tears. Just moments later, my wife rang me to inform me that the other twin wasn’t breathing. … The hardest thing someone can ever endure is to see their children dying in front of them. There are no words to describe this feeling. My message to the world is that we’ve lost our dignity and everything. We need warmth and peace. Someone has to stop this genocide.”

U.S. Strikes Militant Group in Yemen That Has Kept Up Attacks on Ships (NYT) The U.S. military said on Tuesday that it had carried out a series of strikes on the Houthis, the Iranian-backed group in Yemen, as the group suggested it would continue attacking Israel and ships in the Red Sea if there was no cease-fire in Gaza. It was not immediately clear whether the strikes would be a setback for the Houthis, who have remained undeterred even as they have come under attack from the United States and Israel.

[bllsbailey]

Don Lemon’s Latest Rant Against MAGA Shows Someone Needs a Wellness Check, Stat

When life gives you Lemons... well, there's no making lemonade out of this particular situation.

Former news anchor turned TikTok wannabe Don Lemon, once a member of the CNN cult before it became clear he was too unhinged even for their tastes, went on a rant about the supposed MAGA "cult."

It's unclear from the clip what prompted Lemon's meltdown, but it appears to have something to do with the recent dustup involving Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and immigration hardliners who had a spirited debate on X regarding the H-1B visa program.

What the former CNN host fails to realize is that the MAGA movement has been defined by spirited debates that will hopefully forward discourse in this country and move America to a better place. Very much not a cult.

Unlike Democrats and the media (I know, they're one and the same), who agree in lockstep on every leftist issue, no matter their own personal beliefs. Which is, of course, the very definition of what makes a cult member.

And yet, here you have Lemon, losing his mind and thinking the online debate is a sign that Musk and Ramaswamy are getting beaten down by groupthink in the movement.

“Finding out, you dumb f**king idiots? Now you’re just figuring this s**t out? You’re so f**king stupid, and you deserve it. You f**king deserve it because you’re so dumb," Lemon appears to be saying to those who got heat over their pro-H-1B takes.

It's difficult to discern which stage of grief Lemon has entered with this rant. Whatever it is, it seems clear he's gone full Lemon. Nobody goes full Lemon.

"You’ve been co-opted because you’re in a f**king cult, and you don’t even realize it ‘cause you have stupid MAGA brain, and you don’t get it," he continued speaking with all the fervor of a pre-teen. "How stupid and dumb are you?"

It really defies any explanation of how an adult male could sit there thinking the phrase "stupid MAGA brain" is a solid insult. Eight-year-olds would think that's a bit childish.

Don, buddy, I saw you unzipped your little turtle neck there (from both sides), but it seemingly wasn't enough to return oxygen flow to that little organ inside your dome. Maybe don't wear that thing anymore.

Trump Has Entered the Chat on H-1B Visas

Watching Don Lemon's public breakdown since Trump won the election has been amusing at times and concerning at others. Is there nobody among his friends and family willing to step in? To get him the help that he needs?

Rants like this are precisely why President-elect Donald Trump has accurately defined Lemon as the “dumbest man on television." So dumb CNN couldn't take it anymore. So dumb that he announced a new show on X and then had it canceled after one interview.

You may recall that CNN canned Lemon after a series of baffling remarks about women on "CNN This Morning."

Ramaswamy Schools CNN Host Don Lemon on How Ignorant He Is on Civil Rights

In a commentary about former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Don attempted to show off his knowledge of the opposite sex by indicating women in their 50s are past their prime.

“Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry," he said. "A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”

Lemon's new flailing is the latest in a string of embarrassing efforts over on whatever show he thinks he's producing on TikTok. Last week, he was owned by a soccer player after attempting the Democrat cult messaging that Musk is the "real" President-elect.

Don Lemon Has 'President Musk' Propaganda Slapped Down to His Face: 'We Own the News Now'

When he's not getting slapped around by YouTube personalities, he's having to fend off viewers who like placing a turkey filter over his head while he's speaking.

This will, now and forever, be the funniest image in the history of social media.

Lemon may have left the true cult in CNN, but it's clear he's still suffering from "stupid anti-MAGA brain."

Will anybody intervene and help this guy get the help he so desperately needs?

[aizenat]

I’m dying over musk and ramaswamy going mask off and revealing how lazy and mediocre they find average Americans. And Americans are so triggered while having never been to college, not reading a single book for years on end, denigrating and dismissing formal college education (“you don’t need a college degree to be smart,” claiming they have “street smarts” vs “book smarts” and pretending that makes them better than academics, complaining about schools being liberal and woke and discouraging each other to pursue it all while boosting up manual labor jobs that anyone with an able body can do without any real skill or knowledge, etc), and having literally voted for trump because understanding the nuances of political philosophy and policy was too hard for them.

Americans are aggressively mediocre and cheer on each other’s mediocrity. Why do you think red pillers complain about gold digging women even though the average man makes $40-80k; not even close to 6 figures or millions where maybe you can have that concern then? Why do you think they complain about women going to college more than them and therefore getting jobs where they can support themselves, making them not needed? And instead of becoming better men that women would WANT to be around (being nicer, keeping up good hygiene and style, developing interests and a personality outside of sports and/or video games and anime, becoming emotionally mature and being willing to help clean and cook and manage the household alongside a woman, etc), they instead spread tips and tricks on how to neg and gaslight women into being with them as their mediocre selves. Losers like umar telling women to give a man $700 dollars a month to make his dream come true instead of going to the bank to get a business loan like any other entrepreneur should (cuz his credit won’t allow for it). These men would rather fight tooth and nail to force women to accept their mediocrity than rise to the slightly higher expectations women have for them than previous generations had (literally it’s like a 15% higher expectation and they’re crying about it 🙄).

How can you see that and tell me modern/the average American isn’t lazy? When men would rather work a stupid and tedious dead end job for $60k then come home and play video games until it’s time to eat the food his woman makes and then watch tv as she puts the kids to bed. At what point is he doing anything to improve himself? Expand his mind? Anything? And then you’re surprised when tech bro billionaires are like “yeah you know Americans don’t get enough stem degrees so we gotta outsource that too.”

Americas biggest problem is its refusal to invest in its own people. Instead of paying Americans a living wage doing manual jobs, they’d rather outsource to immigrants who will work for much less. Instead of investing in American factories, we outsource the majority of our factory jobs in the global south for pennies. All so the wealthy can stay wealthy. Elon is right: you will be at a net loss for a while as you invest in homegrown workers. But what is the answer? To just outsource all labor overseas? What are Americans supposed to do then if we keep refusing a universal base income? That’s sort of where we are now.

But the mediocre voted for the man who has ZERO interest in investing in getting Americans up to speed. The very systems needed to allow for more American tech works are about to be dismantled. Elon and Vivek are right that American culture does celebrate and reward mediocrity. He’s right we celebrate prom queens more than we celebrate the smart nerd looking to go to an Ivy League. For the past 15 years anyone who went to college was mocked for “wasting time and money,” and more kids would rather be influencers than anything that would require them to get a degree.

But their solution isn’t to invest time and money into building up Americans. And the Americans who voted for them don’t even value education to demand otherwise. This is what happens when anti intellectualism runs rampant in a country where the average joe doesn’t have access to education nor the ability to build a decent life for himself without it. Or hell when the only ppl with college degrees able to get a decent life are the stem bros anyway. No one sees the value in learning multiple languages, learning how to read and write well, studying philosophy and the sort. All of this is needed to understand the stem shit too but we don’t understand that because it’s not immediately profitable. Our for profit society is killing us and Americans keep voting in the party that wants to make breathing a for profit activity we have to pay for. And yall still don’t fucking learn!

This is the problem. MAGA wasn’t to say they want to be great but Americans are too lazy to do the real work to improve. Reading and humbling themselves to actually LEARN from people with more knowledge than them instead of being intimidated by them. Making schools better for k-12, and giving more affordable and free college and secondary education options for the rest of us. A universal base income so people hand the freedom to pursue academic careers and degrees that will make us better. The problem is these mediocre idiots want to go back to a time where mediocrity got you a mortgage and four kids and a dog. Now mediocrity gets you shit and their reaction is well make it hard for those ACTUALLY doing the work to improve themselves intellectually instead of making it easy for THEM to improve. Because that would require them to learn actual policy. And that’s just too much work for the average American.

And so here we are. The fuck around and find out stage of MAGA would be funnier if we didn’t all have to suffer under their idiocy and bullshit.

[yourreddancer]

from Darren Cook FB comment:

The google search “did Biden drop out?” surged on Election Day. The problem was NOT the message or the messenger, Harris & Walz were phenomenal and I’m still not entirely sure if it wasn’t fraudulent somehow with Musk and his billions. Trump had been saying for weeks “we don’t need your vote, we have enough votes” and he had a little secret with Mike Johnson who trump said is going to be there a long time. He knew he was going to win somehow. 

Then at the end of the race he just appealed to the raunchiest fans by performing a sex act on a microphone and talking about Arnold Palmers junk. He was making a mockery of the contrast between him and her flawless campaign? Anyway that’s just a theory. It is our reality now. 

He is a white supremacist. Russia is an all white society and america is about to become more white. There will be no limit on the cost to deport the 11m illegal immigrants, estimated at $88B per year. Wonder if that will cause inflation? This man cannot take the presidency with absolute immunity for official acts, which would be anything he chooses. He will do whatever he pleases. I don’t know why there isn’t a 5 o’clock alarm. But it doesn’t matter. Vance is 40 years old and completely controlled by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks who are products of South African apartheid (white supremacists as well)

This isn't a coincidence. Now they’ve got the presidency with total immunity and a Supreme Court with 6 of his justices.

A large swathe of young people do not consume legacy media and have no idea what’s happening in the world. They listen to and watch misogynistic bro casts where they lame everything that is wrong in their lives on transgenders and illegals. Where they promote ”Trad wives” who stick to their gender roles and the women stay home barefoot and obey their husbands. I just hope when they make the lives of transgender people a living hell that if they decide they can’t take it anymore, I hope they make a spectacle of their suicides and do it in groups in front of the White House. Perhaps it will wake some people up. 

Society is disintegrating. We can’t let this happen in Canada. Read project 2025. It’s a horror show. Trumps got free rein. He’s immune. Male white supremacy is taking over. The handsmaid tale is coming true. Either that or I’m losing my mind. Society has become so fragmented and we each go into our own silos and we haven’t been paying attention to how these young men have been radicalized by the algorithms of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The border wall is getting built now. Even if congress doesn’t grant him the money, he’ll use an executive order. Unconstitutional? It’s an official act. He’s immune.

I’m starting to think Australian Rupert Murdoch, who has been radicalizing people for 30 years, Musk, Putin and Trump are all working together to recreate white supremacist authoritarian oligarchies like in Russia where a few dozen straight white men control every and all the wealth while the poor suffer. 

They will probably default on all US debt and obligations, and switch to cryptocurrency for the great “reset”. Everything will be worthless and the billionaires will buy up everything with their crypto. Russia has said since the 50’s that they would destroy America from within. They have succeeded in getting the presidency with immunity. After the insurrection he committed crimes he knew he would be charged for and challenged them and got rewarded with immunity, just in time for his second term. Was covid actually released by China to make this all happen cause China was promised Taiwan? Am I a conspiracy theorist or am I finally seeing clearly? We’re fucked. These billionaires around the world are collectively worth trillions and they are taking full control of society. I feel like it’s an episode of Black Mirror. He’s going to have Elon’s robots protecting him, AI will not be controlled legislatively, neither will social media or the algorithms.

[duhragonball]

UAWC Update: 20,070

All right, I'm 40% of the way to my goal for the month. I don't have a lot to add to that, so I'll take this time to mention that I left Twitter last week.

I didn't have a very big Twitter footprint, so I don't think it matter much, but if anyone cares, I got more active on the thing in 2019, after Tumblr instituted the porn ban and everyone thought the site would go out of business or something. For years, my profile just read "I sure hope Tumblr doesn't self-destruct", because I really never understood what to do with Twitter and I was only using it in case people couldn't find me through Tumblr.

And I did tweet stuff over that five year period. Nothing particularly interesting, I think, but I guess I got something out of it. Then Elon Musk bought the thing, and I decided to stick around and watch it decay. I had to turn off DM's because I kept getting messages from spambots, likes became private, except sometimes they weren't? I'm not sure? The Trending tags section seemed to malfunction a lot. Gradually, everything you'd go to the site to do got a little shittier.

Eventually I got fed up with using it on mobile, so I deleted the app from my phone. On Firefox, I can actually block all the shitty ads, and that made the experience much easier to deal with, and also I couldn't use Twitter unless I was at home, which probably helped my mental health a lot.

Then the Brazil fiasco happened, when Elon tried to play hardball with the Brazillian government. I forget all the details, but the short version is that for a while it became illegal for Brazillian citizens to access Twitter, because Elon wouldn't implement the content moderation required by their laws. Using a VPN to get around this would incur a steep fine. So a lot of Brazillians made the jump to Bluesky.

I was on a trip when the Terms of Service thing changed, so when I got home I logged in for the first time in a while and there was this stupid message telling me I couldn't use the site until I agreed to the TOS. And the TOS said that anything I wrote or any images I posted would be used for training AI, and that was the last straw for me. I got a Bluesky account late last year, but I hadn't used it much because there was so little activity. But when the Brazil thing happened, there was a big influx of users, and I'm not sure it ever stopped. So by the end of October I was checking both sites, and a lot of the people I followed were making the jump, and it seemed like I might as well cut the cord on Twitter. The AI thing just gave me a good reason to go through with it.

From what I hear, there's another mass exodus going on now. I know Elon implemented some change to the block feature where the people you block can still read your tweets, and that really pissed people off, and the U.S. Election seems to have been a catalyst. I heard Taylor Swift fans are leaving the site in droves, but that could be for all sorts of reasons, really.

I'm a little curious what the current state of Twitter is right now, but that's exactly why I deleted my account. Even when I could log in, I couldn't really tell what was going on, so this way I save myself the hassle.

If you're still using Twitter, my advice is to just quit cold turkey. Delete your account, or if you're worried about people using your handle after you're gone, I guess you can delete all your tweets and go private. I don't know. Me, I'd rather make a clean break. Bluesky is shaping up nicely, and if you want to find me there, the handle is the same. But there's nothing left for you on Twitter, trust me.

[mariacallous]

As a blizzard swept Ottawa in February 1984, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau decided to take a walk. The next morning, he woke up and organized a hasty meeting of his senior staff to let them know that he was retiring.

Trudeau’s walk in the snow has, in the 40 years since it happened, become shorthand in Canadian politics for taking some time to reflect, sleeping on it, and quitting.

Today, many in Ottawa are checking the weather forecast for storms, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—Pierre Trudeau’s son—faces mounting calls to take his own walk in the snow. Down a finance minister and facing the dueling prospects of an internal revolt and a snap election triggered by the opposition parties, the prime minister has, nevertheless, refused.

Over the past year, Justin Trudeau’s personal popularity has sailed off a cliff, accompanied by support for his Liberal Party. Facing the back end of an inflationary spiral, a cross-country housing crisis, declining social services, rising taxes, economic sluggishness, and a general fatigue with a leader who’s been in power since 2015, things were already looking dour for Trudeau.

But, as I wrote during his first real period of turmoil in 2019, Trudeau’s support inside his own party borders on cultish. So, even if his unpopularity prompted some teeth gnashing, his party remained—at least, up to this week—loyal.

Even after his party suffered a humiliating special election defeat in Toronto in June—the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party losing a special election in midtown Manhattan—calls for Trudeau to step aside, at least from his own partisans, remained rare.

Publicly, at least. This summer, I happened to sit next to Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s environment minister, in a train station lounge as he loudly mused about how best to quell an internal “campaign to show [Trudeau] the door.” That campaign remained in the shadows for months. Another election loss, this time in Montreal, ramped up the outside speculation, but Trudeau’s patriots again remained  mum. The few politicians who piped up with the suggestion that Trudeau ought to retire were not running for reelection, so their criticisms were brushed off.

Among the 100-odd members of Parliament who plan on carrying the Liberal Party’s banner into the next election, virtually every one of them have bent the knee to Trudeau.

Canadian politicians have always inclined toward a lemming-like loyalty to their party leader. But this is quite a different level.

In the early 2000s, the Liberal Party was rankled by infighting amid a power struggle between Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin. That fight ultimately resolved in favor of Martin, who went on to win one election before being turfed two years later.

More recently, the opposition Conservative Party metaphorically defenestrated its mild-mannered leader in an Australian-style caucus spill in 2022. The party instead opted for populist Pierre Poilievre—who has successfully wielded all manner of anti-woke shibboleths and conspiracy theories, from becoming an enthusiastic booster of the anti-vaccine Freedom Convoy movement to declaring that he would not let the globalists force him to “eat bugs.” (Poilievre, polling high, has since endeared himself to Elon Musk and counts U.S. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s college best friend as one of his closest allies.)

But Trudeau has never been one for public spats. That’s why the past week has been particularly surreal.

Rumors have percolated for months that Trudeau has plotted a reset of his government. In part to placate internal dissenters—who had been passing around a gentle letter calling for him to reevaluate his political future—and in part because he had a number of retiring and underperforming ministers, Trudeau planned a cabinet shuffle.

As part of that shuffle, Trudeau planned on bringing in Mark Carney, who has served as a governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, as Canada’s finance minister. When he informed his current finance minister Chrystia Freeland, about the move, she balked.

Freeland, who also serves as Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, had been at odds with her boss for weeks. Trudeau, desperate to reverse their party’s popularity slide, had wanted to send checks worth 250 Canadian dollars (about $175 in the United States) to the majority of the country. Ostensibly a measure to ease the hurt of inflation, it was a naked attempt to curry favor. Freeland pushed hard against the move, insisting that it was an imprudent use of money, particularly as the Canadian debt is mounting. The move looked only more absurd as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump turned up the temperature on a possible ruinous trade war with Canada.

Facing the prospect of being demoted for her intransigence, Freeland opted to quit instead. In her resignation letter, published last Monday, Freeland reminded the prime minister that Canada could soon be facing 25 percent tariffs from the United States. “That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment,” she wrote.

The move briefly turned off the gravity in Ottawa. A planned fiscal update that Freeland was supposed to deliver, scheduled for Monday morning, was canceled in a panic. Members of the Canadian Parliament raced to the capital—including some who were supposed to be campaigning in a special election on the West coast. (Which they lost miserably.) The Liberals called a hasty caucus meeting, where Trudeau pleaded with his party to keep his job.

The meeting ended, and the parliamentarians filed out one by one or snuck out through the back door, with most refusing to comment on the prime minister’s future.

By the end of the week, things had returned back to a strange calm. Trudeau has made no signal that he intends to leave—and nobody has the power to remove him until, at least, January.

Unlike the Conservatives, who installed an ejector seat in the leader’s chair a decade ago, Trudeau’s caucus has no power to remove a leader. (Unless they just lost an election.) Parliament will have a chance to express a vote of no confidence in Trudeau’s government early next year, though it is far from clear that such a vote will succeed—the center-left New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois have continued to prop up his unpopular government.

Instead, the country—including many of Trudeau’s allies—will spend the holidays watching the weather and wondering if, or when, Trudeau will finally venture out for his walk in the snow.

[noticiassincensura]

New milestone for Elon Musk: Starlink’s satellite internet reaches 4 million subscribers

A person with a Starlink antenna. SpaceX has celebrated this important milestone on social media, indicating that their service is now “in over 100 countries, territories, and many other markets.”

Elon Musk and his aerospace company, SpaceX, have achieved yet another milestone, though this time no rockets were involved. The star of this significant achievement is Starlink, the company’s satellite internet service, available in Spain and recently incorporated by United Airlines into its flights. This technology has now reached 4 million subscribers.

Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, mentioned on Tuesday, September 24, during a hearing before the Texas House of Representatives Appropriations Committee (USA), that she expected Starlink satellite internet to reach a new customer milestone this week, calling it “very exciting.” Just two days later, on Thursday, the aerospace company confirmed via Starlink’s profile on X (Twitter) that they had reached 4 million customers.

“Starlink is connecting more than 4 million people with high-speed internet in over 100 countries, territories, and many other markets. Thank you to all our customers around the world!” the company celebrated on the social network. This is a significant milestone, especially considering the company has gained 1 million new subscribers since the end of May alone.

Starlink has seen rapid growth since it began offering services in its beta phase in October 2020. By December 2022, the company reached 1 million subscribers. The second million was achieved in September 2023, and 3 million subscribers were reached in May 2024. Now, the fourth million has been achieved in just under four months.

It’s worth noting that the current Starlink constellation includes nearly 6,000 satellites orbiting the Earth at low altitudes, and the service is available in almost 100 countries, catering to both individual users and large companies, airlines, and cruise lines. Additionally, the service is on track to generate $6.6 billion in revenue this year, a significant increase compared to approximately $1.4 billion two years ago, according to consulting and research firm Quilty Space.

With Starlink, SpaceX has created a constellation of internet satellites capable of providing low-latency internet connections anywhere in the world. The network connects to users through antennas and exchanges high-frequency information with ground stations. In Spain, the service has a one-time cost of €249, which includes an installation package with an antenna and a WiFi router, while the subscription costs €40 per month

[nityarawal]

9/18/2024

Grok The Numbers

(Numbers Station)

Morning Songs

Eclipse Was Soft

Like A Dandelion Weed

Soft

Sparkly

It Came Over Me

The Eclipse

Camping In My Car

On A Mountain Top

Like A Treehouse

Warm By Candlelight

40's Cold Nights

The Eclipse

Of The Blood Red Moon

My Phone Was Charged

What Did It Reveal

The Inner Consciousness

Of My Physiology

Took Precedence

Transcendence

Heat Over Came Me

Dandelion Fluffs

Pushed The

Trumpleberry Toxins

Out Of My Tufts

Elon Won't Stop Shooting

Rockets

Is It The Dyke Clicques

He Lost His Rocket

Emoji

And Just Says "Yeah,"

On Podcasts

He Loves His Followers

On X

So He Comments

"Yeah,"

And "Whoa,"

"Wow,"

He Loves His Followers

On X

So He Comments

"Wow,"

44 Billion Communion

With The Masses

Or Do You Think

It's The Dyke Clicque

Moderating

At T.I.T.T.S Again

On Foul Play

For The Trumpers

They're Sold Out

To Airforce

They Threw A Knife

Down In My

Driveway

And Beckoned Me

With Violent

Invitations

Bullying

If You Want To Be

A Rockstar

Or President

You Need

A Defense Team

Taylor's Marched

Out In Leotards

With Old Swifty Mom

Arranged Superbowl

Dollies

What We're We Ever

Jealous Of

These Celebrities

Who Lost Their Right

To Tea

They're Just Juggling

Bean Counters

For The Old Man's

Team

We're So Bored

Of The Bimbos

Perverted Conservators

Physicists Want

Better

We're So Bored

Of Plastic T.I.T.T.S

And Now You Give

Us

Seventy Million

Transgenders

Military Made

Presents

A Colassal

Mistake

Military Lied

When They Stole

Your Kids

As An Alibi

Military Lied

When They Cut

His Junk

Castrated Your

Kid For Court

And Plied Your

Baby Mammas

With Addoral

Military Lied

With 40% Rapes

So Much More

It's Closer To 90%

With Wars

Check The Data Intake

Fakes

And We Witnessed

The Waste

Military Lied

Gaza Had Forty Thousand

Dead In April

Do We Just Triple

DA Numbers

Or Quadruple

Military Lied

Kamala Wants A Real

Mom

She Hemmorhaged

Our Money

And Our Kids

Willie's Too

Kamala Wants

A Deal

On Genocide

She Always Does

Amateur Law

Degree 101

Kamala Wants

A Deal

Mrs. Emhoff

Wants Your Junk

With The Dr. Biden Nanny

That Groomed Their

Son

You Gonna Stand

Up For America

Or Lay Down With

Israel

Kamala Wants Your

Junk

Trumpleberry Took

Your Homes

Hoping For Games

Celebrity Singers

To Trump His Campaign

While He Checks Out

By Force

He Been Raped

By Transvestites

Cyberbeast Looters

Loomering

The Magicians

Remember

We Been Raped

By Second Gentleman

And Friends

And We Won't Take

That Moldy

Grandpa Asunder

We Been Raped

Violated At Large

I Didn't Want

Mark Milton's

Dirty Hands On Me

Byron Katie

Mediators

Or Mark Ritchie

"Daughtery"

Or Any Of Your Mark's

Terrorists

And Certainly Not

12 Dykes Drooling

Shedding All Over Me

And My Blood Red

Moon

I Didn't Want

Christopher Stapleton

To Defend Me

From His Foul Colleagues

He Failed Time And

Time Again

Since Jay Curatolo And Olesya

Adam's

Russian PD Mail Order Brides

A Pathetic Doppleganger

Public Defender

Who Most Certainly

Mollested His Kids

With Boss Mathew Roberts

I Didn't Want

Eight Years

Of Grooming

For Muskies

While He Fluttered

With Talulalah

On A Castration

Damages

From English

Monarchy

Old Moldy Fettishes

Gone With The

Queen

I Didn't Want

Jaima

To Steal My Kids

At Space-X

I Didn't Want

Molly To Laugh

And Headhunt

My Colleagues

With Adam

I Didn't Want

Hollie To Do A

Cowgirl Dance

For Marijuana

For Her Marine

Chris DearHeart

Farm

While My Kids

We're Raped

On Political

Circumstance

I Don't Want To

Sponsor

Adam Steck's

Trannys

His Australian

Gigolos

For 'Thunder From

Down Under'

Nor His European

Hasbeens

Sexslaves

Matchmaking Scams

We Don't Want

Your Invitro Moms

Bought

We Wish You Hadn't

Violated Her

It's Not Cheap

To Give Gay Attys

Kids

And No One Wants

A Gay Man

In The Bathroom

No One Wants A Gay

Man In Puberty

Around Kids

No One Wants

Gay Man For

President

Kidnapping

Our Kids

In Transgender

Crimes

No One Wanted

To Be Drafted

For Kamala's

Slave

Or Alibi

Maya And Meena

Are Done

Ella Retired

And Went To Bat

For Gaza

Brat

Fundraising

From Seventy Million

Detransitioners

You'll Have To

Answer To That

#4BillionMothersStrong

#Nitya4Eternity

One Billion Dead

1/8th Of Global Population

You're At Our

Mercy

One Million Americans

Gone

Or Is It True

Alot Of People

Crying On YouTube

Brazil Suing

To Hide

What Did They Do

Grok The Numbers

Give Us The Casualties

Grok The Numbers

Data Knows

Missing Persons

Jane Does'

Grok The Numbers

John Does'

And Settle Today

Twelve Trillion

Annually

Pissed Away By Boys'

Club

Yes We're Tallying

Everything

Best Be

Flowing The

Children

Other Way

Back To Moms

Home

Mercy

Peace & Love Eternal,

Nitya Nella Davigo Azam Moezzi Huntley Rawal

Encinitasbeachhome.com

@elonmuskfanslounge @elonmuskdaily @elonmuskparody @teslamotorsblog @cybertruck @grokwrites-blog

#Grok #NumbersStation #Nitya4Eternity #4BillionMothersStrong