Elon Musk: “I’m dark MAGA”

Stephan: 

Do you have an account on X? Do you participate with it in any way? If you do you are supporting a man who describes himself as a “dark MAGA”. You are participating in a project Elon Musk has created to destroy American democracy.

Elon Musk and former President Trump during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024.
Credit: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg

In the middle of his Butler, Pennsylvania rally Saturday, former President Trump called up one of his most powerful allies — Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X.

Why it matters: This was Musk’s first time at a Trump rally since the night of the shooting, when Musk posted that he “fully” endorses Trump.

  • Musk literally jumped onstage with his arms held high, Reuters reports.
  • “The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire,” Musk said, calling the election a “must-win situation” for Trump that could be “the last election.”

Wearing a black “Make America Great Again” cap, Musk said at Trump’s side: “As you can see, I’m not just MAGA — I’m dark MAGA.”

  • Musk urged the crowd to register to vote: “Be a pest to everyone you know.”
  • Invoking Trump’s words just after he was shot, Musk finished by saying: “Fight, fight, fight! Vote, […]
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Revealed: the US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics

Stephan: 

It is impossible to exaggerate the greed of American pesticide corporations. They don’t give a damn if tens of thousands of us die of painful illnesses. All they care about is maintaining and increasing their profits. They are aided in this by an evil corporation, v-Fluence in Missouri. These group of scum, as this report describes, is paid huge sums of money, some of it coming from the tax dollars you and I pay, to weaponize and distribute misinformation to confuse and corrupt government officials and the public into accepting the corporate lies about agricultural pesticides. Here are the facts about what is happening and the effects it is having on your life.

Pesticides being sprayed on a cotton field in Arizona. Credit: mvp64 / Getty

In 2017, two United Nations experts called for a treaty to strictly regulate dangerous pesticides, which they said were a “global human rights concern”, citing scientific research showing pesticides can cause cancers, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and other health problems.

Publicly, the pesticide industry’s lead trade association dubbed the recommendations “unfounded and sensational assertions”. In private, industry advocates have gone further.

Derogatory profiles of the two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak, are hosted on an online private portal for pesticide company employees and a range of influential allies.

Members can access a wide range of personal information about hundreds of individuals from around the world deemed a threat to industry interests, including the US food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva and the Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey. Many profiles include personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values.

The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by […]

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Scientists collectively agree animals experience consciousness

Stephan: 

Here is yet another confirmation of what I have been telling you for years about the existence of the Matrix of Consciousness. What is important is that once one realizes the Matrix it changes one’s entire thinking about why fostering wellbeing at every level is to vitally important to our own wellbeing. This is one of the reasons pesticide agriculture is not just wrong, it is evil.

Humans have had relationships with their pets for thousands of years, talking to them, coddling them, and imbuing them with human attributes. But are these animals “thinking,” and do nonhuman animals have the same sorts of feelings that humans have? Most people with pets would say “yes.”

What does the science say? In recent decades, researchers have begun to find scientific answers to questions of consciousness for a variety of species. The broad consensus is that many animals are sentient (have conscious thought), that there are different types of cognition, and that a larger number of animals require protection and more research is needed for a wider range of species.

At an April 2024 meeting at New York University, 39 prominent scientists from different disciplines issued “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” emphasizing “strong scientific support for the attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds” and “at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”

The declaration, signed by 

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The Rise of the Right-Wing Tattletale

Stephan: 

This is what MAGAts are doing to reduce women to handmaiden status. by legalizing and rewarding tattletales for turning women in who get abortions, either through medications or doctors. As I read this it left me with the feeling that Republicans are turning us into the communist Soviet Union or Nazis Germany. This has nothing to do with fetuses, if it was the same people would be big sponsors of infant care. But they are not, quite the contrary. They are also sexual perverts obsessed with controlling LGBTQ people. And yet, I know that in less than a month millions will vote for MAGAt Republicans at both the federal and state levels. This is how sick the United States culture has become.

Photo-illustration by Vanessa Saba. Credit: Bernd Eberle / Getty

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called […]

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A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start

Stephan: 

Texas, as this well-researched article lays out, has become essentially a christofascist state bearing little resemblance to the governance of a Blue state like Washington. It is a demonstration of how we have become two countries uncomfortably linked in a single nation.

Credit: ProPublica

Reporting Highlights

  • Statehouse Influence: Oil tycoons Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks have pushed the Texas statehouse to the far right by funding relentless primary campaigns against other Republicans.
  • Christian Nationalist Beliefs: The Texas statehouse is advancing policies that threaten the separation between church and state.
  • Trump Ties: Dunn is now linked to think tanks that are jockeying to influence a second Trump administration.

Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a […]

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The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

Stephan: 

If you read SR regularly you know I have written papers in peer-reviewed journals, and published multiple articles in SR describing how about a third of the emergency rooms in the United States are not owned by the hospitals in which they are located. They are owned by non-medical equity funds, and the doctors and nurses are employees of those financial entities. This article describes just how evil this is, and how it is destroying the already inferior healthcare Americans get.

An illustration of a doctor running in three different directions with timers floating above her head. A giant orange monster is seen just behind her.

John didn’t start his career mad.

He trained as an emergency medicine doctor in a tidily run Midwestern emergency room about a decade ago. He loved the place, especially the way its management was so responsive to the doctors’ needs, offering extra staffing when things got busy and paid administrative time for teaching other trainees. Doctors provided most of the care, occasionally overseeing the work of nurse practitioners and physician associates. He signed on to start there full-time shortly after finishing his residency.

A month before his start date, a private equity firm bought the practice. “I can’t even tell you how quickly it changed,” John says. The ratio of doctors to other clinicians flipped, shrinking doctor hours to a minimum as the firm moved to save on salaries.

John — who is being referred to by a pseudonym due to concerns over professional repercussions — quit and found a job at another emergency room in a different state. It too soon sold out to the same private equity firm. Then it […]

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