Posts Tagged ‘Elon Musk’

Making Life Multiplanetary

By mike flugennockSaturday - May 31st, 2025Categories: media, right wingnuts, space, Trumpism

“Some may focus on the lows, but behind the efforts of Starship – and other programs like New Glenn, Neutron, Vulcan, Terran, Stoke, etc – is a massive space economy taking shape: tens of thousands of jobs, billions in private investment, all aimed at truly opening the last great frontier.

When these capabilities arrive, they will spearhead a new era of exploration and discovery – and the lows will become a chapter in a much longer story.”

– Jared Isaacman, Trump NASA Administrator Nominee,
05.28.2025

I saw the news of the latest SpaceX Starship explosion with a complete lack of surprise a few days ago, and it had me somehow flashing back to Musk’s performance at that post-Inaugural shindig, and his bluster about putting boots on Mars… and a joyful, iconic moment on the Moon, waaayyyy back when I was an awestruck kid of 15.

(continue reading…)

Continue reading "Making Life Multiplanetary" »

Donald’s Drive-Thru

By mike flugennockMonday - May 19th, 2025Categories: Economy, media, right wingnuts, Trumpism

Though actually quite grim and cringe as hell, I found this news sickeningly funny somehow, in ways reminiscent of the big-ups drum beating Sept 2005 BLS jobs report the month after Hurricane Katrina. Y’think Microsoft was hoping Mickey D’s would pick up some of that layoff headcount?

Then, of course, is the cringingly upbeat economic hard-sell in the Mickey D’s announcement featuring the new Labor Secretary, and the obvious clumsy-ass tap-dancing they’re going to have to do around our new quack-ass Health & Human Services Secretary – especially seeing as Big Mac’s is one of El Presidente’s favorite brands.

You deserve a break today!

11 x 15.75 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 790kb

Continue reading "Donald’s Drive-Thru" »

Fashionably Fashy

By mike flugennockFriday - January 24th, 2025Categories: 2024 Election, elections, media, Party Animals, right wingnuts, Trumpism

“Not a single Roman work of art — sculpture, coinage, or painting — displays a salute of the kind that is found in Fascism, Nazism, and related ideologies… It is also unknown to Roman literature and is never mentioned by ancient historians of either republican or imperial Rome. The gesture of the raised right arm or hand in Roman and other ancient cultures that is attested in surviving art and literature had a significantly different function and is never identical with the modern straight-arm salute.”
— Martin Winkler, in “The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology”

…just in case you run into any fashy apologists or Musk symps trying to explain it away by saying it’s a “Roman Salute”.

So just cut the crap already, ‘cos all the wide-open fash are wide-open loving it and — like the original — the Early 21st sequel also features craven-ass collaborators, in the form of the Democratic Party.

11 x 16.5 inch high-res color .jpg image, 777kb

Continue reading "Fashionably Fashy" »

A Successful Launch

By mike flugennockMonday - April 24th, 2023Categories: media, space

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship. Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire Space team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!”
— SpaceX statement 04.20.2023

“Where’s the KABOOM?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”

— Marvin The Martian

So, I was hitting some sativa bud and banging my head on the table the other day trying to shake loose a decent France uprising cartoon, and THIS weirdness fell out. I’d given up on a France cartoon at the moment and was just doing my daily space geekery, reading about the spectacular SpaceX launch failure and the attendant “hah, I MEANT to do that” spin from SpaceX, when I found my train of thought wandering to the Twitter valuation crash and the Paid Blue Check shitshow and was suddenly, like…

…like, yeah; Musk was really laughing off the Twitter valuation and the hot mess about the paid Blue Check accounts that’s been all over the news lately, and then a day or two later another one of his goddamn Starship tests goes sideways on him and the SpaceX PAO flacks are babbling a bunch of balloon juice about how much they learned today, and it was one of those moments of inspiration and serendipity that screamed “quit twisting your panties trying to think of a France cartoon for a moment and jump on THIS shit, man! Here it is!” Like, yeah — crashing and burning, in metaphor and reality.

11 x 17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 420kb


Continue reading "A Successful Launch" »

  • The latest

  • My back pages

  • Categories