Pretty good summary here of what’s most dangerous about the self-coup happening in the U.S.
Connects the dots between Elon, Thiel, Vance, and Yarvin, and how they are using Trump.
Category Predictions
Trump is Playing RISK
Reviewing the week’s news, I can’t help but see some intentions emerging from the deliberately overwhelming flurry of Trump’s first few days of his second term, including his Davos address. I think his expansionist rhetoric is real – he intends to use economic, if not purely military, force to form an American protectorate across North and Central America, with Greenland added in to boot. His “jokes”, at first seemingly insane, are more than jokes.
Why am I thinking about the board game RISK? I think Greenland is in there mostly because it looks so huge up there on a Mercator projection of the world. For his ego, he wants to grab all that far northern territory, and take credit for doing it.
And Panama, it’s right next to U.S. controlled Costa Rica, so might as well grab that and secure the trade route to remove Chinese influence.
Canada is weak politically right now, and will hold out from a sovereign perspective, but would give up a lot of other concessions.
And Mexico, as a population (consumer) source would be amazing. It just needs to be brought in line for investment, and the declaration of the cartels as terrorists will allow bombing of their bases, sure to become popular with many, Mexicans included. Gaza has shown that people’s tolerance for indiscriminate loss of collateral human life is pliable if challenged relentlessly.
Coupled with withdrawal from other zones of the world stage (leaving Europe to fend for themselves, abandoning Taiwan), we might be seeing the emergence of the Orwellian world order of 1984. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia. Great.
X.com a thing?
So Elon just rebranded Twitter as X, the Everything App. This is partially a response to Meta putting out Threads a few weeks ago and expanding to 100 million users super fast.
People are saying it’s crazy to destroy the Twitter brand as that’s the most valuable thing about the company, but in truth it’s already tarnished by it’s apparent decline and by Musk himself. It dropped off the list of 500 most valuable brands.
So will we look back on this as a brilliant move?
We all laugh and point at Elon as this out of touch joke. But then one day he literally launches into the sun an electric car he literally built on a rocket ship he literally built, and while we are still laughing, we are also thinking… wait, woah.
My updated predictions are that he’ll finally get Trump to start “x-ing” again (which he will do anyway as the criminal charges ramp up and he tries desperately to become president again primarily to pardon himself), and that X will embrace porn. There is probably not a bad business case for both. Deplorable but… woah.
What Will Elon Do?
Here I am starting a series where I predict things.
Like, I claim to have predicted the iPhone in a technical journal article in the year 2000. And, to myself, I claim to have thought of Shopify in 2008, when I started a similar company of small online shops and amassed dozens, yes DOZENS, of sellers paying me 30 bucks a month.
So why not record more of these thoughts on my blog so I can check myself, later?
Here’s a prediction about Elon Musk that I haven’t seen others think of: he’s totally planning to introduce crypto micro and macro transactions to Twitter, as a subscription and transaction and “Patreon” model. He’s just been so obsessed with Crypto and it won’t go away.
Also I think he’ll buy Rivian.
The Helmet Has Spoken.
Dork Helmet 