Can anyone explain to me why the fuck Musk is being briefed by the Pentagon? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? He has no clearances, no standing in government, nor any need to know.
I do not think he’s going there to hear anything classified.
Yet it would certainly be possible if he were granted a security clearance. Would not even need an Executive Order.
He plans to buy it, only proper to give him a tour.
He actually does have some security clearances, related to his role at SpaceX and its support for launching military satellites.
He probably shouldn’t have them, given his admitted drug use and cozying-up to foreign dictators, as has been discussed on these boards from time to time; those behaviors, as well as his refusal to comply with mandatory reporting rules, are disqualifying under the law.
But, for the record, he does currently have such security clearances.
In fact, IIRC, he got them under/from the Biden administration.
On the 1-5 scale, 5 being the most sensitive, he currently holds #3
Top Secret: Unauthorized disclosure could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.
And it would take quite a bit of additional vetting to raise to level 4 or 5. Would the American (and Chinese) public be notified of that happening?
Upon reflection, I think he’s there because Trump has the attention span of a gnat, is nearly senile, and tends to either doze off or lose interest in anything that’s not about him. So he’ll use Musk to explain it all to him later.
If Musk has any clue about the logistics of war and the adage (written in 1871 by Helmuth von Moltke) and generally rounded out to be:
No Plan Survives First Contact With the Enemy
I’ll give him some credit. How many flaming Tesla Trucks can be dropped from a B-52? That might turn out worse than Dresden. “So it goes”
The US Military has plans for every kind of invasion (generally offensive as there is no longer a possibility of a sneak air and sea attack like Pearl Harbor - and that was as far as they could go). China’s Navy can likely encircle Taiwan and try and siege them into submission. Trump has said, very coyly (as he has no clue) “China knows what I’ll do”. Musk isn’t an aerospace guy any more than JFK could have plotted a course to the Moon. Unfortunately, Werner Von Braun isn’t around yet the USA doesn’t need help any more to start lobbing ballistic missiles from Guam to wherever. Or use B-52s, B-2’s, the 7th Navy.
Perhaps someone at the Pentagon had some idea about rigging Space-X tech to carry warheads and launch a massive attack and sink as much of China’s Navy in 10 minutes as possible, then it comes to “Does the USA wish to do a land invasion of mainland China?”. China has a big standing army and they live there. So yeah, “Never fight a land war in Asia”. What is the goal or plan and how do you expect it to survive what I guess would be second contact with the enemy?
I thought it extremely unwise and stupid to announce plans for a War with China, unless the Pentagon is just blowing smoke. If not, it’d be like us playing chess and me telling you, “I’ve got a plan to take your rook and only lose a pawn in three moves.”
No way will a nuclear power capitulate without using at least “some” of their arsenal.
On top of all that, everything is “need-to-know”, whether or not you have a clearance.
Operation Dump Trucks
Agreed on all that. And it’s always possible that Xi just shrugs it off, knowing how dependent Trump is on daily posturing as the Biggest Bully on the Globe. ‘Our war on China’ no doubt gave the MAGA faithful quite a thrill.
Pissing me off today: that Trump’s latest favorability rating remains at 49%—how is that possible??? And also that he and Elon seem to remain hand-in-tiny-hand:
Extra-legal treatment of Tesla vandals (and likely even those who merely peacefully protested at dealerships) is on its lawless way!!!
That’s not even close to the whole story though:
He is tanking among independents and even many people who give him an overall favorable rating are not happy with the executive orders (68% are “concerned”), so that favorability rating is unlikely to stay that high unless he miraculously changes what he’s doing.
He’s also insanely polarizing, with 92% approval rating among Republicans and 92% disapproval among Democrats.
Changing the Tesla logo on your own car is now a misdemeanor.
That should be 100%, (or more 
)
I guess you can never get everyone to agree on anything.
Turns out that he intentionally released people’s social security numbers with the JFK document dump.
I was given the task of releasing that, because many presidents have gone through it and they haven’t released. And I said, release. We even released Social Security numbers. I didn’t want anything deleted
It’s bullshit, of course. No one did it on purpose. Just incompetence that he has to lie about and deny.
I think we’ll be seeing a whole lot more of this ill-advised stuff happening. Total self-own most of the time, with perhaps a little true leaking by people who are angry/upset with everything that’s going on. Our national security and intelligence services are going to be severely compromised and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see some big 9/11-level event at some point in this next 4 years.
I’m sure our enemies are hard at work trying to take advantage of the situation. I also expect that there is going to be some massive terrorist event that we can’t even imagine happening in the next year or so.
Which will then be used as justification for ever more draconian measures against anyone regarded as insufficiently MAGA patriotic.
If this were being done by anyone not so conspicuously idiotic, I’d suspect such an attack to be the object of the exercise.
So every few days at my government job we get some guidance about how to act relative to Trumps anti-trrans executive order. Today it was that they were erasing anything anybody put in the Nickname section of the employee directory, and that we weren’t supposed to fill it in again or else they will just have to erase it again, and that if you want to change your actual name in the directory you will have to file for the change with proof of a legal name change and then go through the process of getting your badge an PIV card resissued. It total bullshit all in fear that someone might ask to be called by a name that doesn’t match the gender that is expected of them, but that isn’t what pisses me off.
What pisses me off is that every time we get one of these directives is is ordered to be in compliance with the DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT executive order. which is the most godawful bullshit name of an directive I have ever seen. How preventing some trans-man from having his friends call him Bob instead of his birth name Mary, protects women I don’t know. It doesn’t even form a nice Acronym DWFGIEARBTTTFG doesn’t roll off the tongue. They should have called it the Defending Ignorant Edgelords Trolling Response Against Name Selection, and have truth in advertising.
Disclaimer: Obviously what the order actually does to in terms of restricting trans peoples civil rights and access to medical care pisses me off even more than the name, but the utter bullshit of the name just twists the knife.