Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Elon Musk thought there would be less than 35,000 Covid cases in the United States. He told Sam Harris that he would donate a million dollars to a charity if he was wrong. He was totally wrong, but rather than pay up for losing the bet, he started publicly insulting Sam Harris. This event should cause us to question Elon’s judgement and his integrity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkbKB9uID1I
MAGA Republicans ranted and raved about a deep state they mostly imagined, and then created a real one…
“at the same time that he’s focused on dismantling the deep state, Trump seems to have built his own undemocratic, unaccountable executive apparatus.
How else should we view the incident that The Washington Post reported on last week involving Elon Musk, the unofficial head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio?
As DOGE was slashing its way through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rubio issued a waiver ensuring that “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” should continue, despite the announced shutdown of USAID. “Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House,” the Post reported. “But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [Luke] Farritor and [Gavin] Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.”
As a result, USAID clinics that were supposed to be protected by Rubio’s order were shuttered.
That is an almost perfect illustration of how conservatives used to believe the deep state operated—with unelected, unofficial back-channel operatives overruling the plainly stated instructions of those who are nominally in power.”
…
“this should be worrying to anyone who takes seriously the threat of the deep state or values the rule of law.
Whatever your views of Musk and Rubio as individuals, it simply cannot be that the Senate-confirmed secretary of state is having his decisions overruled by a man (or his lieutenants) who still lacks any official place in the White House’s organizational chart and who runs a rebranded version of the U.S. Digital Service, an agency meant to streamline the executive branch’s digital outreach efforts that has no statutory authority to make spending decisions.”
…
“while the situation with USAID and Rubio is the most high-profile, it is not the only example of DOGE and Musk operating like the very deep state Republicans used to criticize.”
…
“Overruling the decisions made by legally appointed officials. Dodging transparency. Refusing to identify who is running the show. Are Musk and the DOGE just the deep state by a different name?”
https://reason.com/2025/03/04/doge-goes-deep-state/
“”Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/05/dead-people-arent-bankrupting-us/
Elon Musk thought Covid would remain under 100 cases in the United States, and was extremely confident about this belief. Disagreements over this ended his relationship with Sam Harris.
Elon would publicly insult Sam over misleading clips of Sam that misrepresented what Sam said. Sam would email Elon explaining the context, and Elon would tell Sam to fuck off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vzBTpIF_hI
Is Elon Musk lying about his video game skill? Does he pay people to get him a high rank?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXzcyICt6bQ
Trump’s speech was filled with falsehoods. Does he lie to make Republicans repeat what they know is a lie as a sign of loyalty? Is he flooding the zone with bullshit to overwhelm society so that it can’t effectively fact check him? Could he possibly believe all the falsehoods he says?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvHHkGYi_A
Lindsey Graham, along with many Republicans, have turned over all integrity and honesty for Trump. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, and over Republican Senators who used to have strong independent opinions, is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBhR99pdHps
“A former FBI informant charged with fabricating corruption allegations about President Joe Biden and his son has agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges to resolve two pending federal criminal cases against him, according to a court filing.
Alexander Smirnov, 44, admitted to lying when he told the FBI that he took part in meetings with executives from Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015 or 2016 about a scheme to pay $10 million to Joe and Hunter Biden. Joe Biden was the vice president at the time of the fabricated meetings, and Smirnov claimed the purported payments were bribes to “protect us … from all kinds of problems,” according to a plea agreement filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/12/smirnov-bidens-plea-agreement-00194004
IDF killing civilians and lying about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy-1yz87Yus
“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/383336/trump-election-elon-musk-misinformation