Young people use a computer like they would a paper tablet. They know they can't break it.
Young people use a computer like they would a paper tablet. They know they can't break it.
Elon Musk is breaking the United States Military to see what happens. While possibly being an asset of the Communist China’s Government.
It looks to me that the DOOMSDAY CLOCK IS 10 SECONDS TO HUMAN EXTINCTION.
“Mar 23, 2025 The Intersection with Popok
If Musk was NOT given top secret briefings about Trump's war plans against China at the Pentagon last week, then why are they doing a "mole hunt" to find the leakers about the debriefing, and using lie detectors to catch people who may have spoken to the press on Musk's demand? Popok takes a hard look at why the Trump Administration reversed course and is now claiming Musk would never receive such a briefing because of his conflicts of interest.”
PRESS RELEASE: Doomsday Clock set at 89 seconds to midnight, closest ever to human extinction
By Adam Dombovari | January 28, 2025
“In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.:
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday…
It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China…
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.
The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth’s office — where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.
Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear…
Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.
Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose…
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make any access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China…
In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
MORE AT:
The New York Times
Pentagon Set Up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With China
The access would be a major expansion of Elon Musk’s government role and highlight his conflicts of interest
By Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan Mac and Maggie Haberman
March 20, 2025
***
Our family has had the good fortune of a friendship with Norman Jones.
We met Norman through another friend, John Hamilton. I met John running up and down Lemon Hill. We were going to join a rowing club. John got a bad back. The Fairmont Rowing Association was desperate for members and I began in a gig on the Schuylkill. John taught string instruments in the Philadelphia School District and played the viola professionally. Norman was a tenant at one of John’s rental homes.
When Norm graduated from Drexel University, he fulfilled his army, ROTC at Fort Benning, Georgia. After his basic training, the army told him they had too many officers and he would need to enroll in the National Guard.
We got a call from Norman saying he needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks until he, his wife Mary and his daughter Suzi could find a home of their own. That two weeks stretched out into three months. We became very close friends during the three month period of living basically as one family.
Norm is a microwave engineer but he’s inclined to repairing automobiles and he helped me get my Saab 96 running smoothly. At a time when all cars used mechanical points to distribute a spark to each spark, plug norm help me install and electronic distributor. I remember Norm saying don’t touch the car you’ll be electrocuted when he briefly reversed the polarity of the battery, making the car body positive. The electronic distributor was successfully installed and my Saab 96 no longer stopped and needed new points.
Norm got a job working for Philco Ford and was enrolled in the Air Force National guard at Willow Grove, Naval Air Station. The Air Force Reserve had Cessna O-2s at Willow Grove Naval Air Station. Norm had command of the modified jeeps that carried the ground component of the forward air control.
Betsy & me brought Suzi to the Air Station swimming pool. I played racquet ball at the Air Station court. I sometimes drove Norms car and the guards saluted me. Security was limited at the time.
Norm was working at Philco Ford which designed radios that went into Ford vehicles. Norm designed a radio that would work well in their vehicles. Ford told him to modify them to make them less costly. Norm said the radios would only work for a few months if they were designed that way. Didn’t matter to Ford.
Norm said he couldn’t work for a company like that.
Norm began a long career designing satellite communications for the Department of Defense leading a small number of engineers in Reston, Virginia.
Norm, divorced Mary and married Janet. Janet was a colonel at the NIH Clinical Center.
He was concerned Janet could be kidnapped and used to gain information about Norm's work. Norm was away often at Palo Alto CA and Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. He designed a complete hard wired security system for their Reston home. His computer recorded in detail every person that came near their home.
Betsy, Julia, Jeff and me visited Norm and Janet at their home in Reston and were greeted by speaker on their security system as we walked to the front door.
Desktop computers were a new thing in the early 1990s. Norm taught Jeff and Julia how to use them. This is his office in Norm & Janets home in Reston.
In the photos below Norm is instructing Julia & Jeff on how to use computers. Norm is an excellent and very patient instructor. At the time the photos below were taken Norm could not tell us what he did for the DOD.
The military satellite communications system his team in Reston designed is still in use. Norm placed a ground unit in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. For a time it was the only communication system connecting New Orleans with the rest of the world.
Over the years Norm's original designs were modified and used by Google Maps, Skype and other commercial systems.
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