A SpaceX equity investor just took over NASA. The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman yesterday, 67-30, showing bipartisan complicity in structural corruption.
Sometimes if it looks like corruption, sounds like corruption, and smells like corruption, it’s just plain corruption.
Isaacman made his fortune processing payments for SpaceX among others, then spent hundreds of millions he made (including from SpaceX) to buy flights from SpaceX. An obviously circular system of wealth generation.
And now? He has been injected as head of the government agency to award SpaceX contracts.
Markey tried to force SpaceX to release Isaacman from his NDAs covering the exact financial arrangements that made him unfit for the role. SpaceX of course refused because… corruption. The Senate confirmed him anyway because… corruption.
This corruption is some of the worst in American history? SpaceX has severe failures and delays on the Artemis lunar lander, the exact program Isaacman will now oversee as their NASA Administrator while personally profiting from all the failures and delays.
A buried lede in the Artemis II news from NASA (2026 moon flyby) is that SpaceX has been a disasterous and wasteful drag.
Remember how Musk told the world he would deliver Mars landings far faster than NASA could, landing ships continuously by 2018?
Source: Twitter
Isaacman can pour billions into failed projects to line his pockets until the auditors show up, and he jumps into a cartoonish villain’s spacecraft to escape.
SpaceX mission objectives – deploying satellites, completing orbital maneuvers, demonstrating reentry – ALL REPEATEDLY FAILED AT HUGE COST.
Satellite deployment: FAIL (door wouldn’t open)
Orbital maneuvers: FAIL (spacecraft started spinning)
Repeatedly calling big failures a success makes accountability impossible…
When Jacksonian levels of “regulatory corruption” are complete, you see someone appointed whose personal wealth increases when he directs public contracts to the FAILING company he’s invested in, fleecing taxpayers.
The corruption is structural and designed into the position like making America the 1830s again.
President Jackson was one of the most, if not the most unjust, immoral and corrupt men in American history
Trump gives government agencies to financial stakeholders. Same spoils system as Jackson, higher stakes.
Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew “white republic” Jackson. Historian Matthew Clavin says as terrible as Andrew Jackson was he likely would have despised Trump.
The immorality of the appointment is the model.
He’s paid SpaceX over $50 million for Polaris program missions
SpaceX refused to release him from NDAs to disclose exact amounts
He processes payments for SpaceX’s Starlink through Shift4
Shift4 invested $27.5 million in SpaceX in 2021
Isaacman is keeping his ~25% stake in Shift4 as NASA Administrator
He benefits from BOTH his personal SpaceX equity AND Shift4’s SpaceX position
Isaacman reported “more than $5 million in capital gains from an investment in SpaceX”
That’s just the appreciation – the actual investment value is undisclosed and likely much higher
He did NOT divest this equity – Senate Ethics Committee said it wasn’t required
Mission success or completion ends the revenue stream, while delays and cost overruns extend it. As an equity holder in SpaceX, Isaacman’s stake increases in value the more money NASA pours into SpaceX failures, inverse to results. Successful completion on schedule actually REDUCES his benefit by ending the contracts.
That’s the perversity of Trump “success is not an option” mission culture.
A SpaceX equity investor just took over NASA to run it into the ground.
Australian Intelligence Watched ISIS Cell Operate for Six Years and Did Nothing to Prevent Massacre
The 15 dead at Bondi Beach weren’t killed by unknown actors. They were killed by the son of a man who accumulated six firearms while his child maintained documented associations with convicted ISIS terrorist. These were associations Australian security services knew about since 2019.
Naveed Akram wasn’t a mystery actor.
ASIO investigated him for six months in 2019 after his close associate Isaac El Matari declared himself ISIS’s “Australian commander” and got seven years for plotting attacks.
Six months of investigation. Six months of red flags.
Naveed was “closely connected” to multiple members of that cell. The investigation of the ongoing threat was closed with a determination of “no ongoing threat.”
Then nothing.
His other associate, Youssef Uweinat, served as a youth leader at Wissam Haddad’s prayer centre while recruiting Australian minors for ISIS attacks. Got four years. Released. In August 2024, sixteen months ago, Uweinat was photographed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving a black jihadist flag at a protest.
Still nothing.
Naveed’s father Sajid applied for a firearms licence in 2020, received it in 2023, and legally purchased six weapons over the next two years. No mechanism in Australian law connected the son’s known extremist associations to the father’s firearms application.
The databases of father weapons supply and son extremism don’t talk to each other.
In November 2025, father and son flew to Manila, together, and declared Davao as their destination. Together they went to the gateway city to Mindanao, which ASIO’s own website identifies as a “target destination for foreign terrorist fighters“. They spent nearly a month in the region known for ISIS training camps that have operated since 1994.
No alert.
No enhanced scrutiny upon return.
Nothing.
Three weeks later, as a result of this militant training to kill Jews, they opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration with all six legally purchased weapons. ISIS flags were in the car, as could have been predicted. Their IEDs failed to detonate.
The question today is NOT how ISIS radicalized two men in Sydney.
The question is how an overt extremist network of convicted members with public protests, a known prayer centre, and documented youth recruitment operations ran for six years under active observation without triggering a single intervention.
Denying one firearms license would have prevented a father from legally stockpiling the weapons they would use to massacre Jews. Firing 4 rounds in 5 seconds from a bolt-action rifle is terrorism training that Australia enabled.
Musk’s formulation of “If you have a womb, you are a woman. Otherwise, you are not“, is the biological-determinist reduction that underpinned Nazi ideology about women.
Source: Twitter
The specific reduction of womanhood to a single organ, with rights of citizenship/identity derived only from reproductive capacity, is what Hitler used to do.
Nazism overtly made biological reproduction the definitional criterion for women’s social value. Hitler articulated this view most directly in a 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft), where he contrasted the “larger world” of men (state, struggle, willingness to die for community) with the “smaller world” of women (husband, family, children, home). He framed these as complementary “battlefields” by stating that for women, childbearing was the equivalent of men’s military sacrifice.
The regime’s position, like Musk today, was explicitly biological-determinist: a woman’s entire value in society was tied to their reproductive capacity. The Nazis manifested policies like the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross) medals awarded for bearing children, and the exclusion of women from professions, higher education, and political participation. The Lebensborn program flowed from womb-is-destiny framework, feeding into Lebensraum. The specific framing around the womb as definitional appeared in Nazi ideological texts more broadly. Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century was explicit about the biological essentialism that Musk now promotes.
Musk’s 13 words simply compress this flawed and historically inaccurate Nazi logic. If he were smarter he would have used 14 words.
Gender categories beyond biological sex are the human norm: Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa, Māhū in Hawaii, Muxe among the Zapotec, Kathoey in Thailand, the Bissu of Sulawesi, Mukhannathun in early Islamic Arabia, the Galli priests of ancient Rome. The womb-as-definition claim isn’t ancient wisdom, it’s twentieth-century fascism. Musk is promoting Nazi dog whistles as doctrine, and those nodding along are historically illiterate.
What’s really going on is Musk deadnaming his daughter and calling her identity a “tragic mental illness”, before invoking Nazism as why. He is calling her a failure in his master plan for a white nationalist concubine operation.
This is not a father making an abstract philosophical judgment about gender, he’s platforming hate speech to dehumanize his own child.
The fact that Musk recently posted that he does not believe Hitler, Stalin or Mao are responsible for deaths (because their “employees” were) shows that he does not take accountability for harms that he apparently intends to inflict against his own daughter.
Joe – Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod – Funny you should ask, I’ve got a car now.
Joe – Oh wow, how’d you get a car?
Rod – Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe – You’re kidding!
Rod – I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe – Uh, what kinda car do ya’ got?
Rod – I’ve got a BITCHIN CAMARO!
The most dangerous actors aren’t the incompetent or the overtly malicious, they’re the genuinely skilled professionals who understand that what they’re doing serves no legitimate purpose but continue doing it well.
Admiral Holsey stepping down suggests at least one officer has decided not to be that person.
Alvin Holsey, Admiral Who Oversaw Boat Strikes Off Venezuela’s Coast, Retires: The admiral had abruptly announced that he would step down as the head of the U.S. Southern Command.
Understanding why requires looking back fifty years.
Creighton Abrams was arguably the most capable American tactical commander since Ulysses Grant. Both demonstrated mastery of logistics, both operated under severe political constraints, and both accepted operational risks their predecessors had avoided.
26th December 1944 Commanding 37th Tank Battalion, CCR, 4th Armoured Division, Lt. Colonel Abrams requested he be allowed to dash his Sherman tanks through Assenois to breach German defenses and reach Bastogne to relieve the surrounded 101st Airborne. Abrams was right, and for this Third US Army Commander, General George S. Patton called him the “world champion” tank commander.
A critical difference between these two men lay in civil-military alignment: Grant’s civilian leadership shared his strategic objectives, while Abrams served an administration whose domestic political imperatives systematically undermined coherent strategy.
The constitutional position on Abrams’ tactical work under President Nixon is unambiguous. Congress never authorised military operations in Cambodia; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’s writ extended to Vietnam alone. More significantly, the military maintained dual reporting systems that recorded ordnance falling on South Vietnamese coordinates when it actually struck Cambodian territory.
This went far beyond unauthorised action into being a deliberate falsification designed to deceive the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war.
A crime.
It occurred within a broader pattern: Nixon had intervened to obstruct the 1968 Paris peace negotiations to secure electoral advantage, then required the war’s continuation through 1972 for re-election. American casualties served the GOP’s domestic political purposes, literally throwing soldiers’ lives away to win votes.
Abrams’ role was executing Nixon’s strategically incoherent and illegal policies whose consequences extended far beyond military failure. The destabilisation of Cambodia, while not solely attributable to American mistakes, was materially accelerated by it, contributing to state collapse that enabled Khmer Rouge consolidation and genocide.
The Khmer Rouge were teenagers wielding the latest weapons technology to destroy a country from within, a pattern I’ve traced to DOGE staff weaponizing AI to systematically dismantle American state capacity. Two million died from Pol Pot; current projections suggest two million a year dead from DOGE cuts.
Abrams’s culpability should not be reduced to mere order-following. The Abrams Tapes, declassified two decades after his death, demonstrate that he understood the conflict was “basically a political contest.” His failure was therefore not one of comprehension but of institutional role: generals propose military solutions because military solutions are what generals are positioned to propose. His legitimate concern, that American withdrawal was outpacing South Vietnamese military capacity, was correct. His proposed remedy, however, reflected the persistent American misapprehension that a complex insurgency with deep political roots could be addressed through conventional operations against geographic sanctuaries.
The hunt for COSVN epitomised this confusion. American planners conceived of a simplistic targetable headquarters, a “jungle Pentagon”, despite evidence they faced a distributed network of cadres. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan compounded this Americanization error by treating military capability as the binding constraint when the fundamental problem was political legitimacy. The Saigon government’s inability to command popular loyalty was never a problem that American firepower could resolve, especially from 90,000 feet.
The sixty-day operational limit also telegraphed the campaign’s own negation plan. Any adversary capable of basic strategic patience would disperse, wait, and return on schedule. That anyone would claim American success was measurable in captured rice and destroyed bunkers merely confirmed total absence of meaningful strategic metrics. The North Vietnamese simply relocated deeper into Cambodia, the Cambodian state authority collapsed further, and so the Khmer Rouge recruitment accelerated.
Most damning is how the promised “breathing room” was a shrewd lie, exposing the American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon as a delusional sycophant. His saccharin cables consistently contradicted accurate CIA assessments and field reporting, to give Nixon what he wanted to hear instead of reality. The Paris agreement that Nixon celebrated as his gift to the world was immediately ignored and within months the North Vietnamese were rolling into Saigon after domestic American backlash had accelerated withdrawal timelines.
None of this absolves Hanoi’s strategic choices, Thieu’s venality, or the Khmer Rouge’s ideological pathology. It shows American ideological intervention created conditions that other actors easily exploited. Whether Abrams’s resignation, like Holsey’s, or public dissent would have altered this trajectory is unknowable. What remains clear is that his silence stands as complicity in an illegal campaign whose strategic bankruptcy he understood.
Nixon knew peace talks were potentially ending the war in 1968 but he convinced America to elect him by scuttling them. He repeatedly lied to the public and to South Vietnam to take power, which meant expansion and prolonging of war while declaring himself the anti-war leader. Tens of thousands more Americans were killed needlessly by him, just to abruptly abandon South Vietnam and let it fall catastrophically in 1975.
Cambodia’s genocide followed.
Abrams had to hide his knowledge that the President’s war plan was strategically bankrupt. Today Hegseth doesn’t have to hide anything because his audience doesn’t care.
The cruelty is the point now; the incompetence is a feature. You don’t need competent complicity when there’s no accountability mechanism left to evade. You just do the crimes, lie about them badly, contradict yourself publicly, and get rewarded because the crimes signal tribal loyalty.
The system that produced Abrams’s silence has decayed into one that produces Hegseth.
Admiral Holsey walked away. Under Trump there will always be someone who won’t.
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I ran over my neighbors
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Now I’m in all the papers
My folks bought me a bitchin’ Camaro
With no insurance to match
So if I happen to run you down
Please don’t leave a scratch
I ran over some old lady
One night at the county fair And I didn’t get arrested
Because my dad’s the mayor
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Donuts on your lawn
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Tony Orlando and Dawn
When I drive past the kids
They all spit and cuss
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And they have to ride the bus
So you’d better get out of my way
When I come through your yard
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And an Exxon credit card
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Hey man where ya headed?
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I don’t want unleaded
“Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen, released on their debut album “Big Lizard in My Backyard” (1985).
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
