Poor sad Elon

I think I finally figured out what conservatives mean by 'White Genocide.' It's when you've spent your entire life being more pampered than a prized steer on a Kobe beef plantation, and people call you out for being exactly the over-medicated anal suppository you appear to be.

In an interview with the Washington Post, the world's richest man whined about being a 'whipping boy' for everything that's gone wrong with Trump II: Dumber and Dumberest:

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything. “Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Who knew that bragging about eviscerating essential government services and randomly firing lifetime civil servants while waving around a chainsaw would get under peoples' skin? Never saw that coming.

Meanwhile, in a 'sometimes life just hands you a metaphor' moment, SpaceX just had another 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' of one of its rockets over the Gulf of America Mexico.

The SpaceX Starship, the largest rocket booster ever built, didn't merely blow up. All kinds of other shit went south along the way: propellant leaks, engine failures, pod bay doors that refused to open despite how politely they asked the HAL 9000. [1]

Oh, and by the way: The rocket that just exploded has been approved to carry actual humans to the moon for NASA's Artemis mission in 2027.

I have a great idea for how Elon can earn back confidence in his failing companies and exploding rockets: Volunteer to crew the next 'manned' mission. Take Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg along with him. They can make a movie about it: Three Amigos in Space!

One of the things I encounter a lot whenever anyone talks about Elon on Linkedin, aka "The World's Most Boring Social Network" ™, goes more or less like this: "You libtards loved Elon and his electric vehicles in 2018. Your such hypocritics."

Yes, and people probably thought Dr. Hannibal Lecter was a damned fine psychiatrist until he started eating his patients.

I do feel bad for people who bought Teslas before Elon became a Nazi-loving ketamine-huffing sperm-distributing nutball "went crazy."

[Narrator: Elon has always been crazy, people just weren't paying close enough attention.]

On the other hand, I don't feel bad for anyone who bought a Cybertruck. They deserve all the ridicule, scorn, and flying door panels they can eat.

It's the data, stupid

Elon may be gone from DC, but two huge problems remain.

One is the damage DOGE has already done that can't be easily undone -- especially if the GOP-controlled Congress bends over and grabs its ankles yet again and retroactively makes these wildly illegal actions legal via a 'budget rescission package.'

The second problem is what happens to all the highly sensitive personal taxpayer data DOGE is currently in the process of stealing. And that's not the only stuff the DOGE teens shoplifted -- like, for example, confidential information from the National Labor Relations Board. Per a report in the as-yet-still-funded NPR:

[A]ccording to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers... technical staff members [at NLRB] were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile... members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.

Multiple this by every single agency that Musk's team of teen avengers took chainsaws to — the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Federal Housing Administration, and many many more.

What are they planning to do with all these information they had no right to access? I can make a few semi-informed guesses, and they aren't pretty.

Worst case scenario: They're going to feed the data into Grok X, Elon's wildly paranoid and extremely unstable AI model, and train it to determine who's a friendly and who isn't. Who gets their taxes audited. Whose federal benefits are delayed or denied. Who gets to enter or leave the US, and who doesn't. Who gets 'investigated' for completely made-up reasons. Whose life becomes more difficult (or worse) because they voted for the wrong person.

I wish I were just being paranoid. But I can't think of any other reason why they would steal this data and make it nearly impossible to figure out what they did.

This is the question everyone should be asking: Where's our data, and when are we getting it back?

How's this season of Idiocracy going for you? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] In other words, it acted a lot like a Cybertruck, but without one of those stupid-ass wraps.