It’s amazing how the left invented and now believe the myth that Elon Musk reneged on his promise to end world hunger. It always leaves out that he said “it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent.”
▪️He was calling the World Food Program’s (WFP’s) bluff, while responding to a tweet pointing out that the WFP already raised $8.4B in 2020 yet didn’t solve hunger! He literally says if the WFP could show how $6B would end hunger he’d sell Tesla stock and do it.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454809318356750337?s=20&t=HS0-NSrVF8EwW80k_Xgpag
▪️Musk highlighted what should be obvious, that $6B given to the UN wouldn’t solve world hunger. The US alone gives $11B to the UN every year. Michael Shellenberger wrote a piece at the time showing it was hopelessly naive to believe $6B would help 42M starving people.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/13/elon-musk-is-right-world-hunger-cant-be-solved-with-6-billion/
▪️The most obvious reason UN food aid doesn’t solve hunger is that it gets stolen, usually by local warlords/govts to buy arms. Starving people are almost exclusively found in war zones or areas with hostile political turmoil. How would the UN get food to those in Afghanistan or Yemen?! This is why Musk asked for open source accounting.
▪️Notice that there is never a similar objection to something like the student loan forgiveness plan, which will likely cost well over $500B. This could supposedly solve world hunger 100 times over according to the same logic, but the “logic” is only reserved for ammunition against billionaires.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
