Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate, the billionaire told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson during an interview Monday evening.
During the interview, which was hosted on Musk’s platform, X, Peterson asked Musk if he had “shocked” himself by donating a substantial amount of money to Trump’s campaign. Musk – who has previously criticized Trump, calling him a “bull in a china shop” – paused to correct the “media.”
“What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,” Musk said. “I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.”
Man, I was one of two people I knew whilst in college sounding the alarm about Citizens United, and everyone acted like I was overreacting, that it would get fixed (somehow) because Obama was going to save us all!
Oh fucking well I guess.
Here we a decade plus later, everything is broken, everything is literally on fire (forest fire season was NOT a commonly used term when I grew up), and there is no point in saying I told you so.
I wish I was Dr. Manhattan and could just sit on Mars.
Forest fire season has definitely been around since at least when I was a kid- it kind of depended on where you are, though.
Fires in California definitely were seasonal (as were Australian bush fires,) (I was like seven, but I gotta say, firemen were cool and Aussie firemen that did that thing were even cooler.)(okay it might have been the accent.)
I grew up in Western WA, in and near Seattle.
It used to be extremely rare for a forest fire to have any kind of effect on basically anywhere within 100 miles of Seattle.
Now, that region itself is getting previously unheard of heat domes, and its now basically multiple times per summer that a much larger than normal forest fire in southwest WA, or Oregon or even BC ends up making it so bad that news and the University of WA will tell people to jerry rig makeshift smoke filters out of HVAC filters and a box fan, and to basically not go outside for more than 15 minutes without a mask.
A whole lot of homes and apartments in western WA do not have AC, because it used to be the case that you would get maybe 5 to 10 days, nonconcurrent, above 85. You could just take it easy and have a lazy non productive day.
Now its a solid week, or multiple solid weeks of 90+ temps, and huge numbers of people do not have AC because we did not used to need it.
When I last lived in WA, in a 2.1k apartment, I had to buy my own window AC unit, cover the windows in mylar to reflect the heat and then use black out curtains after that, and also jerry rig the AC unit with an HVAC filter to just barely be able to keep one room below 95 degrees for about a week straight, with the whole room smelling like burning wood.
Oh it’s wide spread now, and much much worse.
The sadly ironic reality is most of the US was a fire ecology. With the total suppression of all wildfires, we’ve been sitting on a powder keg for decades. We’ve known it for decades, and climate change is a giant road flare slowly falling into it.
I was born in cali, and yeah, they had “fire season” there, in Minnesota we didn’t - at least not till recently when things finally got traction. The conversation is entirely different