Why the f*ck is Musk advertising Starlink on Salon? By Hal M. Brown If he was trying to troll me, I took the bait.

 

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I was reading “There's more film and television for you to watch than ever before — good luck finding it” on Salon and found it jarring to see the ad shown above for Starlink, one of Elon Musk’s companies. It popped up, literally popped up onto my laptop screen as it replaced another ad.

The ad was on the side so as you read down the article it remained there, but it also was between sections in the article.

I looked at several other articles but it seemed to be only on the one about streaming video.

Regardless of whether it was elsewhere in Salon I wondered who in their marketing department thought readers of this progressive anti-Trump and anti-Musk website would be in the market for Starlink, let alone click on it the ad to learn more about it.

They managed to sucker a click from me because I was curious about it and thought it might be a good topic for a Substack if I couldn’t think of anything else.

This is what the the first parts of the website look like. Here’s the first page I saw when I clicked. (You can enlarge the following images by clicking on them.)

Then scrolling down:

The Starlink device works because Musk, as of April 2025, had 7,135 Starlink satellites in orbit, with 7,105 of them operational. SpaceX plans to deploy a total of up to 42,000 satellites in the future. (Reference Wikipedia) For it to function you have to point the device at the sky.

“Streaming, video calls, online gaming, remote working and more are now possible in even the most remote locations thanks to the world’s most advanced internet system.”

Here are two more:

I won’t add more screen grabs since the photo of the cybertruck is a good one to end on. If someone thinks the cybertruck is the cat’s meow in aesthetic design maybe they will be the type of person who wants to buy Starlink. If you want to see the rest of the website you will have to give it a click here.

This is marketing aimed at a domestic American market for use while doing things like camping or traveling, not for Ukrainians using it to communicate vital military information. 

I can speculate that Musk, assuming he is involved in this advertising initiative, figures it is worth it to see if there are enough MAGAs willing to spend a premium for the kind of internet connectivity it provides. I seriously doubt a non-MAGA would want to do anything to add to Musk’s wealth.

I don’t know whether or not anyone realized that putting an ad on Salon was akin to advertising salmonella in a supermarket commercial. It is quite possible that nobody considered who would see the ad and that an algorithm search for website articles about streaming video. The word streaming appears 23 times in this story, including in the subtitle. 

With Starlink you can watch streaming video in the wilderness.

It makes for a better story if I assume that Musk himself approved the ad in Salon as a way of trolling us liberals. That would make sense if he’s into such marketing minutiae. If this is the case, he reeled me in. 

Consider me trolled.

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All that glitters: Trump's self-aggrandizing clownish PR stunt, his glorious Golden Dome, is worse than a budget breaking waste of money. By Hal M. Brown You don't have to be a military expert to figure this out. I'm not one. However, all you need is common sense to see this.

 

Trump says he wants to build a dome of gold1 to make us all feel safe from a nuclear missile attack. Of course, gold is his favorite metal, because it glitters and he thinks it proves how great he is. In fact, not only is it a weak metal, but isn't even the strongest. Tungsten is. If he wanted to use a name to outdo Israel's Iron Dome he should have called it the Tungsten Dome.

This is nothing more than the most expensive self-aggrandizing PR stunt in history. It is also dangerous and not for the reasons some have put forth saying it would cause potential enemies to develop ways to thwart it.

This aside, even if this defense sytem actually worked as promised it seems highly unlikely that any country with nuclear missiles is going to attack us that way.

I doubt any country is going to waste their resourses to build a comparable system. Consider how large Russia and China are.

I find if difficult to believe that either country would want to spend the huge amounts of money it would take to design and build such a system.

What enemies, even countries without ballistic missiles, will be will be donig is working on both their defensive and their offensive cyber capacity. Some may also be working on bio-warfare. Diseases can be introduced into the United States by infected human carriers or diplomats or others smuggling in vials of toxins.

DOGE has cut cybersecurity staff (see “Chaos continues in D.C.'s cybersecurity job market” in Axios). DOGE already accidentally cut and later restored Ebola research, but I have no doubt that there are other deadly infectious diseases that can be weaponized and that those studying ways to combat them could have their funding cut.

Trump has already done so much to make us weaker from cutting foreign aid to ruining our relations with former allies. Now with this Golden Dome siphoning off resources best used for other forms of defense he is doing even more.

This isn’t out of the Project 2025 playbook. This more sounds like those calling Trump “Putin’s puppet” weren’t just being paranoid.2

Another possible reason he may want to have this built is to use the early attack warning capacity so he has more time to hustle into the White House bomb proof bunker along with Laura Loomer or some other young woman who thinks he’s a young Elvis incarnate, and possibly the White House chef (aka Ronald McDonald). He also has a rudimentary bomb shelter at Mar-a-Lago (reference).

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Footnotes

1

Like the golden dome on top of his Perchance AI created clown head, the Golden Dome for missile defense will end up so thin it is unlikely to stop enough missles to make a difference.

2

We might call Putin the Trumpaler in homage to the Rumanian ruler Vlad the Impaler. He was said to have strengthened his government by brutally punishing his enemies. His full name was Vlad Drăculea and Bram Stoker dervived the name Dracula from him. (Reference)

Who are those masked men? They certainly aren't Lone Rangers. By Hal M. Brown

 This is the first episode of the Lone Ranger TV show where the question “who was that masked man” was asked and then, by themselves in front of the sheriff’s office, Tonto asked the Lone Ranger if he’d ever take off the mask when they were fighting the bad guys and he explained why he wouldn’t. Watch the video here. In the early radio shows, the TV show, or movies, in closing scene just before the “hi-yo Silver away” someone always asked something along the lines of “who was that masked man?’

Follows is the creed of the Lone Ranger. It was written by the creator of the Lone Ranger Francis Striker. He also created the Green Hornet and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon:

I believe that to have a friend,

a man must be one.

That all men are created equal

and that everyone has within himself

the power to make this a better world.

That God put the firewood there but that every man must gather and light it himself.

In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.

That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.

That 'This government, of the people, by the people and for the people'shall live always.

That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.

That sooner or later... somewhere...somehow... we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.

In my Creator, my country, my fellow man.

Now we have a cadre of masked men and women who aren’t fighting for law and order. There’s no way they follow the Lone Ranger Creed, let along the U.S. Constitution. If they we wouldn’t see them trampling on the cherished rights of people accountable to nobody. They are behaving like the villains the Lone Ranger and Tonto (someone Trump and his anti woke minions would consider a DEI hire) brought to justice.

No doubt you’ve followed the story about the mayor of Newark and the members of Congress who tried to get into the New Jersey detention center and were arrested.

What made me sick inside and sick for my country was watching all the federal agents. 

Some had uniforms, some bullet proof vests with ammunition and others wore light jackets with names of various Trump SS-like agencies on the back, others just seemed to be in regular clothes. I wasn't able to count how many, but there seemed to be at least 20. They look like they might be preparing to raid a drug cartel hideout.

You can see them in action in the video on the left below.

A few of the agents had their faces exposed but most of them were masked. The simple explanation as to why these agents decide to be masked is that they want to hide their identities. I think there are other reasons. One is that this enables them to feel empowered to be more violent than they’d be if their face was exposed. The other is that it is more intimidating to be confronted by someone in a mask wearing dark sunglassed. When interacting with someone who has this kind of power you want to look them in the eyes, you want to see their face.

It was, to put it mildly, a chaotic scene:

.

Why doesn't the fashion conscious Trump and his psychopathic and sadistic Himmler, Tom Homan, get them all to wear the same uniform instead of a hodgepodge of outfits? After all the country is fast becoming Nazified. If they want their own SS or Gestapo they might as well all wear the same uniform. Camo fabric might be the most intimidating, but whatever they wear red arm bands with T on them would be appropriate.

Update from BlueSky:

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Does anybody know what the f**k Trump believes when he says things like he did today? By Hal M. Brown

 

When Trump stopped to talk with reporters on his way to speak with Republican lawmakers about getting the budget bill passed he went off on the following tangent:

But I really — we're going to start looking into this whole thing with who signed this legislation, who signed legislation opening our border. I don't think he knew! I said, there's nobody that could want an open border. Nobody. And now I find out that it wasn't him. He opened it. Who was operating the auto pen? This is a very serious thing. We had a president that didn't sign anything. He had almost everything. He opened the borders of the United States of America, and I kept saying, who would do such a thing? Allowing criminals to pour in from all over the world, not just South America — all over the world.

They came in from Africa, they came in from Asia, they came from the Congo, the prisons in the Congo, in Africa. These are rough, rough people. The prisons from the Congo are empty. You know where they are? They're in this country. Who would sign this? Nobody would sign it. No sane person would sign it. You know who signed it? Radical left lunatics that were running our country and the autopen signed it.

And they didn't want him (Biden). And they were disappointed in getting him because they wanted Bernie Sanders. And then after about two weeks, they said, 'Wait a minute, this is a gift. He'll do anything. We're going to use the autopen.' And they use the autopen and everything. He didn't approve this stuff because when Joe Biden was with it, he would never have approved that. You take a look. he would have never approved open borders.

These remarks came at the 1:40 mark in the video which you can see here.

How much of this does Trump really believe? Does he believe any of it? Is all of it a performance? Nobody but Trump really knows and he may not even know himself.

For example, are the prisons in Congo empty because all their “rough, rough” inmates are now here thanks to Biden?

The governemt of Congo begs to differ:

‘Everything he is saying isn’t true’: Congolese governments denounce Trump’s baseless stories about emptied prisons.

Excerpt:

There is no evidence for former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that “the Congo” has emptied prisons to allow violent criminals to come to the US border as migrants – and the governments of both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo say Trump’s assertions are entirely false.

“Everything he is saying isn’t true,” Democratic Republic of Congo spokesperson Patrick Muyaya Katembwe told CNN in a text message on Thursday. Asked specifically about Trump’s claims about Congolese prisons being emptied of violent criminals, he said, “Never ever, it’s not true.” And, he said, “we want him to stop” telling these stories, since “it’s very bad for the country.”

Serge Mombouli, the Republic of Congo’s ambassador to the US, said in an email to CNN on Friday: “There is no truth or any sign nor a single fact supporting such a claim or statement.”

Put this in the “Does He Believe It Or Not?” file along with the ludicrous fairy tale about Haitians eating pets in Springfield (see Wikipedia):

(Amazingly, above is a Twitter post by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, 2024, referencing the hoax with an AI-generated picture.)

Trump obviously is driven to attack Biden at every opportunity and the announcement that he has stage four cancer hasn’t given him pause. His attacking Biden yesterday came as an abrupt segue from one topic to another. I’m reminded of the first shark attack scene from Jaws (here).

At least before then the happy swimmer was attacked the audience was warned by the ominious music. We knew it was coming anyway because the name of the movies was “Jaws.”

Perhaps we should have a musical sound track playing just before Trump goes off on a nasty rant. He is, after all, like a shark in a feeding frenzy when it senses blood in the water.

What explains this aspect of Trump’s behavior? Could it be he has a dual personality? If he does, he could have one amiable personality that makes sense and another nasty and delusional one telling him what to blurt out when he’s talking about something else.

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