Starship Rides Again, OpenAI Soap Opera, Candace/Elon, Media Matters, Bin Laden, J6
Starship Rides Again, OpenAI Soap Opera, Candace/Elon, Media Matters, Bin Laden, J6
The People's News for the People's Coin 11/15-11/21
Hey everyone,
This news digest covers six stories from a whirlwind week:
1. Starship’s second launch
2. The OpenAI soap opera
3. Candace Owens, Elon Musk, and anti-Semitism
4. Media Matters
5. Bin Laden’s viral TikTok letter
6. Newly released J6 footage
Don’t miss memes and news bites at the end!
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Starship Rides Again
Starship’s second test flight on Saturday was a smashing success.
Starship’s first launch in April made it to the point of separation between booster and rocket before running into trouble.
This time, separation was succesful. SpaceX employed a new technique called hot-staging in which the rocket ignited its engines before disconnecting from the booster.
The separation produced some incredible images.
After more than eight minutes of flight, the rocket lost communication with ground control and experienced a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
The next launch could happen within a month.
Here’s SpaceX’s full statement, a third-party summary, and several videos of the flight.
Congratulations to SpaceX for a magical and historic launch!
OpenAI Soap Opera
On Friday, OpenAI announced it had fired CEO Sam Altman.
Under Altman, OpenAI has become by some metrics the fastest-growing Silicon Valley company ever. It has been valued at $90B on the strength of its revolutionary AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
The reason OpenAI’s board gave for firing Altman was that he was not candid in his communications:
Altman’s firing came a massive shock. On 𝕏, a handful of theories arose to fill the explanatory gap:
Altman was deposed in a coup led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever for prioritizing AI’s growth over safety
OpenAI had internally achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—the point at which AI can learn to accomplish any intellectual task human can perform—which could pose existential risk to humanity, and Altman was not communicating this accurately in some way
Details from Altman’s personal life compromised his ability to lead the company
Elon expressed concern about the situation. (Elon founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, and credits Sutskever’s hiring with the company’s success).
Over the weekend, a significant faction of OpenAI’s board and 770 employees attempted to get Altman reinstated as CEO.
Sunday, Altman posted a photo of himself with a guest pass at OpenAI HQ.
Sunday night, Microsoft (which owns a portion of OpenAI) announced it was hiring Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new AI unit.
On Monday morning, The Verge reported that Altman was still trying to return to OpenAI.
Also on Monday morning, Sutskever posted a statement of support for Altman, appearing to go back on his effort to have Altmant removed.
Later in the day, Elon pressed for more transparency over the cause of Altman’s firing, which remained a matter of speculation.
A few hours later, he specified that his concern was about Microsoft and AGI. In the past, he has been critical of Microsoft’s control over OpenAI.
Elon has yet to speak at length about the situation, which is one of the most riveting tech stories of the year.
However, he did post two videos that hint at his perspective.
First, early Monday morning he posted the famous “Baptism” scene from The Godfather in which Michael Corleone assassinates the heads of other mob families after the death of his father, Vito Corleone.
The scene is the movie’s climax: a moment of maximum weakness, Michael strikes his enemies and rises to power, becoming the new Godfather
Over the last few weeks, a meme has been going around depicting Elon as “The Grokfather.”
The Baptism-scene video could be interpreted as Elon preparing to take advantage of the OpenAI chaos by releasing his Grok chatbot to the public and rising to his rightful seat of power at the head of the AI table.
Indeed, last night, Elon confirmed that Grok will soon roll out for 𝕏 Premium users.
The other video he posted was a summary of the events, portraying Microsoft as the ultimate winner of the OpenAI shakeup. If Microsoft ends up poaching Altman, Brockman, and the majority of OpenAI’s staff for next to nothing, it would mark a stunning victory—essentially acquiring a $90B company for next to nothing.
As of yesterday (Tuesday) the situation is still unfolding. Last night, Elon posted an anonymous letter from former OpenAI employees accusing Altman of misconduct.
Another Reddit poster claiming to work inside the company accused Altman of allowing “greed and ego tripping” to get in the way of ethically developing AI.
Here are other details and a full summary of events:
Candace, Elon, and Anti-Semitism
Elon Musk and 𝕏 are being attacked for anti-Semitism.
The sequence of events that led to the latest accusations started last week with a skirmish between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro. Owens works for The Daily Wire, a conservative news organization founded by Shapiro.
Owens has been the clearest voices among conservatives questioning US support for Israel. She has consistently said the US should not fund any foreign wars and focus on solving problems at home.
Earlier this month, as the death toll in Gaza rose, she posted, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genoicde.”
The post led to accusations of anti-Semitism, a claim she debated on her podcast with Jewish comedian Ami Kozak.
Since the start of the Gaza conflict, Shapiro has used his platform to advocate for aggressive military action by the IDF, under the justification that Israel has the right to self-defense.
On Tuesday. a video of Shapiro speaking to a crowd went viral in which he called called Owens’s position on Israel/Palestine “disgraceful”, setting off a social media back-and-forth between the two.
The debate escalated into Wednesday afternoon.
On Wednesday evening, Owens appeared on Tucker Carlson, where she argued that conservative attempts to cancel people for not supporting Israel are similar to past liberal cancel campaigns for not supporting BLM or other social causes.
Owens went on to question why college donors (many of them Jewish) were withholding money now that universities were tolerating pro-Palestinian protest, but not during the last decade when colleges encouraged “anti-white explicit racism” among both professors and students.
The same topic of anti-white racism came onto Elon’s radar an hour before the Carlson/Owens episode dropped.
He responded to a post which pointed out that progressive Jewish donors have promoted anti-white hatred through neo-Marxist ideology in universities, and by accusing opponents of open border policies of being racist.
He elaborated his comment by specifically calling out the Anti-Defamation League for promoting anti-white racism, while clarifying that not all Jewish groups have advanced anti-white politics.
In another exchange, he reiterated this point that pro-Zionist leftist groups who attack American whites are attacking their own biggest supporters.
It’s true that the ADL has carried out an ideological campaign against white people.
The best example of the ADL’s anti-white bias is its own entry on racism, which promotes the factually incorrect idea that all racism is perpetrated to the benefit of white people.
The ADL definition of racism represents the kind of thinking that has become ubiquitous on college campuses and among far-left politics.
It’s also surprisingly tolerated by mainstream media outlets.
On Thursday, Elon pointed out the strange fact that “white” is the only race in mainstream political discussion that is not permitted to have a sense of ethnic pride.
For his comments, Elon was widely accused of anti-Semitism by the mainstream media.
Elon responded by accusing the media of lying.
On Friday, the White House issued a statement accusing Elon of spreading a “hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history.”
Several 𝕏 advertisers, including Apple, Disney, IBM, and NBC, issued public statements that they were boycotting ads on the platform because of antisemitism.
Almost immediately pushback came from moderates and conservatives, who saw nothing wrong with his posts.
In a widely circulated clip, Ben Shapiro criticized Elon’s accusers. Several other public figures made statements defending Elon.
The real reason for the attack on Elon is that he is confronting a core belief of contemporary left politics, which is that American society is made up of oppressors and victims.
The idea derives from Marxism, which groups society into categories of oppressive bourgeoisie and victimized proletariat.
In contemporary neo-Marxst ideology, all whites are by definition oppressors, no matter how poor they are. Literally every other ethnic group—Blacks, hispanics, asians, and, importantly, Jews—are oppressed victims of a systemically racist society engineered for the benefit of whites.
The is shorthand term for this belief system is, of course, “woke.”
For adherents of wokeness, politics has become a game to funnel power and influence away from white people to everyone else (rather than a game of ensuring meritocracy and preserving everyone’s fundamental rights regardless of skin color).
This ideology first took root in the universities in the 70s, in the form of a far-left “critical theory” studies in humanities departments.
Over time, it spread from the humanities to other disciplines, and then to media outlets and HR departments.
By the mid 2010s, it had become fashionable to express negativity toward white people that would (rightly) not be tolerated toward other ethnic groups.
Anyone who deviated from this new orthodoxy in too public a way was asking to be cancelled.
The problem arising now is that this view—American whites are the oppressors of everyone else, including Jews, are victims—is not entirely supported by facts.
Jews are an uneasy fit as an oppressed minority in America because they are by far the most prosperous ethnic group in the country.
To lump Jewish people with other ethnic groups as victims of American bigotry, and then pin the blame on all white people, somehow misses the bigger picture of what is happening with the US, Israel, and Gaza.
When Elon pointed out that some Jewish communities have supported this Neo-Marxist ideology, but are now unhappy that it is being turned on them as if they are white oppressors rather than victims of white oppression, he touched a third rail.
Advocacy groups like the ADL point to statistics culled from social media to promote the narrative that, while Jews may be more succesful than their ethnic minority peers, anti-Semitism is perpetually on the rise, so Jews still count as victims rather than oppressors because of the hate they endure.
As Elon has pointed out, the non-profits compiling this data take an extremely loose view of what counts as anti-Semitism. He has filed lawsuits against these groups for making false accusations that 𝕏 is responsible for increased anti-Semitism.
In one telling example, a Soros-funded group called the “Institute for Strategic Dialogue” flagged 30,000 anti-Semitic tweets on the basis that they contained Soros’s name. The reported was cited by the Washington Post to headline that Elon has “overseen a rise in antisemitism and other hate speech on Twitter.” (Soros has also used his influence to aggressively promote open borders policies both in North America and Europe, though most mainstream media outlets consider it anti-Semitic to point this out).
Many of the leftist groups promoting the narrative that anti-Semitism is worse than ever are not calling balls and strikes about discrimination, but weaponizing the accusation of anti-Semitism against conservatives to advance their own partisan interests.
This is why left-leaning outlets were so quick to call Elon anti-Semitic, while Jewish voices on the right came to his defense.
Proponents of the idea that America is uniquely anti-Semitic also struggle to explain why America historically supports Israel as much as it does.
Since the end of WWII, America has given hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel, which is already more prosperous than the US on a per capita basis.
Israel enjoys unparalleled influence on US foreign policy. Our current President has accepted eight million dollars over his career from the Israel lobby, the most of any politician in American history.
In the present, Israel is waging a borderline genocidal war against a population of poor, young, brown people, effectively holding all Gazans responsible for the actions of a small number of terrorists.
Leaders of both mainstream political parties unanimously support this military effort. None are calling for a ceasefire, and all but a few congresspeople advocate sending billions of US taxpayer dollars to further arm Israel.
College students—typically the most eager group to levy the charge of bigotry—are now on the receiving end of these accusations for questioning this foreign military effort.
In between the neoconservative Zionist right and the woke anti-white left, there is a sensible moderate position suggested by Elon and Candace’s comments.
It should be permissible to celebrate all ethnicities and backgrounds, not just ones that media and think-tank arbiters determine are acceptable.
White people should be able to express pride in their heritage without being accused of Nazism. All racism is wrong, including trendy woke hate against whites and actual anti-Semitism against Jews. The same standards must apply equally to everyone.
It should also be permissible to hold a good-faith debate about whether funding another Middle East war on behalf of Israel is really in America’s best interests without being accused of anti-Semitism.
Calling for a ceasefire is not evidence of prejudice against Jews, and Israel shouldn’t get a blank check to wipe out Gaza from the American people because they’re worried about being labeled as bigots.
Media outlets should inquire into and report on what Americans actually think about these issues, not tell them what they must think to avoid being canceled or denied employment.
Friday night, with the cancellation campaign against him in full swing, Elon posted that 𝕏 would suspend accounts calling for genocide against Israel.
He justified the policy on the basis that all calls for violence violate 𝕏’s terms of service.
The post drew condemnation from the Pro-Palestine left, who accused him of censoring on behalf of Israel. ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt praised the news.
Elon then reiterated 𝕏 draws the line at any calls for genocide. Candace warned him to tread carefully.
Several moderate and conservative advertisers pledged to buy advertising on 𝕏 as a counterbalance to big corporations that canceled the platform for alleged anti-Semitism.
Tuesday night, Elon announced that all advertising revenue from 𝕏 associated with the war will be sent to hospitals in both Israel and Gaza.
What do you think: did Elon’s remarks cross the line, or was he just speaking a taboo truth?
Media Matters
One of the big names behind the campaign to cancel Elon is the media watchdog group Media Matters.
Newspapers and TV stations cite Media Matters as a neutral arbiter of the news, but in reality it is a highly partisan attack dog for the left.
In the last two weeks, it has published at least eight hit pieces against Elon and 𝕏.
One article claimed that 𝕏 was placing advertisements adjacent to anti-Semitic content. The article was used as justification for several advertisers to stop advertising with 𝕏.
In response, 𝕏 executives debunked the article’s claims using data to argue that Media Matters attempted to create a situation in which ads appeared next to negative content, and were mostly unsuccessful.
Internal data from 𝕏 showed that the combination of anti-Semitic posts and advertisements were served only to Media Matters, who attempted to game the algorithm to produce the result its article sought.
Another source within X reported that there was no evidence the screenshots of anti-Semitism next to ads used by Media Matters were authentic.
𝕏 CEO Linda Yaccarino resisted calls to resign and painted the debate as an issue of free speech against censorship.
To many watching, it appeared as if Media Matters has been caught in a fraudulent attempt to destroy 𝕏’s business.
Over the weekend, Elon said 𝕏 would file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters.
On Monday, he followed through with a lawsuit filed in US Federal Court. Several State-level AGs said they would also open up investigating into Media Matters for fraud.
Last night, Tucker Carlson posted a video accusing Media Matters of being “a censorship organization funded by George Soros and a lot of other people who hate Western civilization designed to prohibit people from saying certain things. The things they’re prohibiting people from saying are 100% true”
The story took a darker turn when someone pointed out that Media Matters’ founder was David Brock, a Democratic Party operative.
Brock is the former boyfriend of James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in DC at the center of the Pizzagate controversy.
Elon responded to the post by writing “Weird”, setting off another slew of mainstream attacks on him for boosting Pizzagate.
It got weirder when another account pointed out that one of the journalists who claimed to debunk Pizzagate had just been arrested for possessing and distributing child pornography. Elon responded with double exclamation points.
What do you think: Is Elon being irresponsible to entertain these possibilities? Or is Media Matters getting what they deserve?
Bin Laden’s TikTok Virality
Another fascinating side-plot from the Israel/Palestine debate was the unexpected virality of Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.”
Last week on TikTok, several videos went viral of young Americans claiming the letter changed their perspective on America’s role in the world.
(Note: youtube took down the video of the TikTokers—it’s still available here on 𝕏)
After the document went viral, The Guardian removed it from their website to prevent its spread (the full text is archived here).
It’s not entirely clear which aspect of the letter caused it to be censored.
One possibility is that the letter glorified terrorism, and was removed on the grounds that it was an incitement to violence.
Another possibility is that the letter accuses Israel of controlling US foreign policy, and further claims Israel directs America’s economy and media, so it was removed on the grounds of anti-Semitism.
After the letter went viral, an Iranian newspaper leaked a phone call with ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt saying that Israel has dangerously low support from younger Gen Z Americans.
The immediate response among right-leaning outlets was to accuse young leftists of lunacy for siding with a terrorist.
Another, more libertarian faction argued that terrorism and violence is unequivocally wrong, but the letter makes valid point about how US foreign policy has been harmful to muslims in the Middle East.
This perspective dates back over two decades, to when Ron Paul argued during that US military intervention in the Middle East led to 9/11, rather than the standard explanation of “they hate us for our freedom.”
What do you think: it possible Osama bin Laden expressed legitimate grievance agains the US, or do his actions negate his words?
J6 Footage released
During any other normal time, the biggest story of the week would’ve been the release of 40,000 hours of footage from January 6th by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
As with the footage released earlier this year, this batch shows unarmed protestors peacefully milling around the capitol building, often escorted by law enforcement.
Trump applauded the move to release the footage. No explanation has been given for why it took so long, nor why Trump’s request for 10,000 troops before the protest was declined.
Various clips of protestors walking harmlessly around the capitol ciruclated on X, where they became stock footage for memes.
What do you think: was the J6 narrative manicured by the media to spook the public? Or was it really a violent insurrection to seize power?
Dogey Treats: News Bites
𝕏
X CEO Linda Yaccarino refused to step down amidst pressure campaign by advertisers. Elon pointed out that BlackRock and Vanguard own all the advertisers pulling out of X.
SpaceX
SpaceX released its next generation of Starlink terminals
US Politics
After Xi spoke in San Francisco, Biden called him a “dictator”. Elon posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Xi, along with the text, “May here be prosperity for all.” Trump accused Biden of being “owned by China.” Why did China say it couldn’t control Trump?
NY Congressman Daniel Goldman called for President Trump to be “eliminated.”
What is Trump’s Quantum Leap?
Fulton County, GA acknowledged that 3,600 ballots were duplicated in the 2020 Presidential election.
Joe Biden said Gavin Newsom could be President.
Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling the possibility of Ukrainian victory “magical thinking”
Trump said of Trump Derangement Syndrome, “It’s a great honor. I had a disease named after me.”
A mentor of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was given a 30 year prison sentence in a child porn case with over 500 victims. Buttigieg’s office denied he knew the man.
Global Politics
Pro-Bitcoin Libertarian candidate Javier Milei won the election to become Argentina’s president. Elon followed Milei and said, “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.”
Tucker Carlson traveled to Spain to cover anti-communist protests. Elon said the episode covers “many interesting topics.”
Global Financial System
The IMF released a digital Currency handbook
Will the collapse of WeWork be the straw that breaks the regional banks?
Citigroup commenced layoffs.
155 developing countries have signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
BlackRock submitted a proposal for an Ethereum ETF to the SEC.
South Korea’s national pension fund purchased $20M worth of Coinbase stock.
Binance agreed to pay the US government a $4.3B penalty for money laundering. Its CEO CZ will step down as part of the deal. Did BlackRock take down Binance before launching its Bitcoin ETF?
Israel-Palestine
Mainstream media outlets including the BBC were critical of the Israeli government for failing to produce evidence that a hospital in Gaza was harboring Hamas terrorists. John Lyon, an executive editor at ABC news, called the episode Israel’s “WMD moment.” Are American citizens still buying Israeli propaganda?
Dave Smith and Laura Loomer debated the Israel-Palestine war live on X, hosted by Zerohedge.
Pro-Palestine protestors fought with police outside the DNC and chanted “Genocide Joe.”
A 2010 letter from Osama Bin Laden surfaced in which he said if Joe Biden were ever to become President he should not be assassinated because he “is totally incapable of assuming this office, and his assumption of power will push America into a deep crisis.” Was Bin Laden’s post-9/11 letter written by the CIA?
Health
Is documented contamination in covid-19 mRNA vaccines a violation of informed consent?
Evidence emerged that Fauci’s advisor suggested he delete emails.
What’s behind declining US fertility?
Memes of the Week
Elon’s Memes
Thank You!
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