Ouch. It hurts even to watch when a hot brand hits the bare flesh of an exposed ass.
The Kansas farmers who enthusiastically voted for Trump are being conveniently and fraudulently branded as “far-left radicals” in order to crash their lives. Did you guess who would be experiencing firsthand the tragic consequences of their misplaced ballot-box decisions? The same rural counties that delivered soul crushing 85-90% margins for Trump (Wallace, Sheridan, and Ness) are watching signed contracts invalidated, promised funds vanished, by a pack of political liars.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been ordered to freeze payments for falsely branded “far-left programs,” stupidly reclassifying mainstream agricultural work as radicalism overnight.
I’m sure the brains behind this operation are tweedle dumb and tweedle dumber in Silicon Valley (Vance and Musk) who hope to totally collapse the agricultural sector, creating an inflationary crisis to literally kill off farmers… just to force federal funds redirected to an army of defective Tesla robots, which are guaranteed to fail harder than the Ellison-Musk Hawaii farming disaster.
In case you missed it, these geniuses put a cancer doctor in charge of a Tesla solar-powered farm on an extremely windy island. The Tesla tech failed, leading to a massive dirty diesel dependency, while the farm was destroyed by…wind. Wind! They literally burned through $500 million for nothing, instead of using a windmill. $500 million! Nuts.
Decades of death and destruction lay ahead for Kansas now, just like Tesla announcing in 2016 they would have driverless solved by 2017, or SpaceX declaring in 2016 they would be landing on Mars by 2018. None of that came true but Elon Musk used the fraud (leaving a trail of deaths and debris) to sponge up taxpayer money for a decade, enough to fund Trump’s hostile takeover of federal government.
Let’s be clear about what’s happening: a president convicted of 34 felony counts who campaigned on hate and destruction of relationships is now breaking government contracts with his most loyal supporters, while trying to enrich a few elites even more racist than him.
The poor, victimized farmers, having voted overwhelmingly for a big city slick con artist who built his reputation on abuse, stiffing contractors and refusing to pay his debts, say they didn’t realize MAGA’s platform of cruel destruction of American lives included them.
Bill Shaw of Ashland, who deployed some of Elon Musk’s favorite tech under a $600,000 federal contract, now faces financial disaster after the White House labelled the very concept of paying government debts as “far-left” and therefore cancelled. “I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Shaw told reporters, as if Trump’s decades-long history of breaking the law and defrauding partners wouldn’t continue.
The likelihood of farmers receiving accountability or restitution, like anyone else victimized by the fraud of Trump, is virtually non-existent. The same administration they voted for has systematically stacked the courts, appointed loyalists to oversight positions, and gutted government watchdogs. You think Elon Musk keeps his job because he has any merit? It’s fraud all the way down. Tyranny by foreign-born coastal elites never looked so clear in the American heartland.
This isn’t just politics as usual—it’s a stark lesson in the lack of American consequences for gross deliberate fraud against loyal and hard-working voters.
We’re witness to one of the biggest integrity breaches in American history. Rural Kansas farmers have been totally swindled by a racist and mysogynist convicted criminal given the reins of federal programs. They tied their fortunes to a flashy big hat foreign-backed long-time enemy of America, and are now expressing surprise that their money is all gone in an instant.
Related: Trump, Vance and Musk are really big into the crypto scams like this one that rip-off Americans.
…Kansas bank CEO Shan Hanes was sentenced to 24 years after stealing $47 million from customer accounts and wiring the money to cryptocurrency accounts run by scammers.
Were those accounts being run by Trump? The FBI now likely wouldn’t even dare to find out.
As the Kansan loyalists to Trump struggle under abruptly politicized contracts cancelled and destroyed futures, perhaps the hardest pill to swallow will be that they enthusiastically voted for this giant bag of dicks assaulting them with total agricultural industry destruction.
In 2011 I led a series of presentations and engagements about security as human survival infrastructure related to advanced farming concepts, based on the encryption and virtualization principles I was enmeshed in at the time (e.g. cloud).
Source: “A Cloud Odyssey”, BSidesLV 2011
To be fair, vertical farming was being heavily (deceptively) promoted as a new concept around then, so I was just pulling it into the tech industry as a natural confluence. The ideas go back, way back. Egypt’s Nile Valley was farming without soil at least 4,000 years ago. And we all know, hopefully, about Babylon’s famous hanging gardens in 600 BCE. But it was 1937 when the University of California, Berkeley proudly announced that a farm boy from Nebraska had grown up to make plants (including tobacco!) grow vertically, setting off a huge modern investment buzz not seen since 1859.
The business of growing plants in water is centuries old. Long before the Christian era it was believed that plants got all their sustenance from water. In 1699 a natural historian named John Woodward grew spearmint, potatoes and vetch in water from springs and rivers. First experiments which involved adding nutrient chemicals to the water are credited to a German named Knop (1859). Growing commercial crops in water is another matter. At Berkeley, Dr. Gericke aimed at producing tank crops which would economically compete with or surpass soil-grown crops. So successful washe that several California vegetable and flower growers have changed to water culture, more than a dozen branch experiment stations have been opened, and Dr. Gericke enjoys a “fan mail” of some 500 letters a week. […] When newshawks ask him whether he expects to make a lot of money out of hydroponics, he just smiles, shows two gold teeth.
That’s a lot of letters! If only he had invented databases instead, just imagine the plastic surgery and penis enlargements he could have achieved.
Speaking of shallow and selfish, in 2012 the Oracle founder and evil tech oligarch Larry Ellison bought Hawaii’s Lāna’i Island for $300 million to make the saddest attempt at industrial farming in history.
Eight years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering. …constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.
Ellison’s failure illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of place-based knowledge systems. How can someone who claims to understand technology fail at even the most basic farming, one of the oldest technology-rich industries? How he got started gives a HUGE hint. He didn’t give two cents about farming, he just wanted better eating. But gross unsustainable consumption is the opposite of cultivation, and appetite for destruction isn’t agriculture.
It all started right after the Oracle founder bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012. Ellison took his wife to a hotel restaurant and they found the food to be “inedible.”
“We had to drive to the grocery store in town and buy Snickers bars and Coke,” he told Departures magazine. “We decided that is ridiculous — we need to grow our food.”
Ellison floated the notion to his partner, a medical doctor and scientist with expertise in advanced cancer, David Agus.
Dumbest story ever. Billionaire doesn’t like one meal at one hotel restaurant and he decides to put a cancer doctor in charge of turning an entire island into a farming experiment? This approach exemplifies the extractive mindset that prioritizes abuse and control over ecological understanding and sustenance. Food sovereignty movements in Hawaii like Hoʻokuaʻāina were revitalizing traditional agricultural knowledge, but Ellison’s immediate reaction was to walk past coconut trees, past pineapple plants, through banana groves yelling “I’m hungry, help, get me a Snickers and Coke!”
Of course he can’t farm. Can a database peel a banana?
Hawaiian ahupuaʻa systems used traditional land management that sustainably divided resources from mountain to sea. Small groups maintaining loʻi (wetland taro patches) sustained island populations for centuries without external inputs. This isn’t hard to understand. It’s like Ellison and his army of wealthy white men landing with a colonial belief of “terra nullius“, staring at two rocks next to two others and saying “from this point forward we tell everyone 2+2 = 10, priced ten dollars each” and then they wonder why the fraud so effective on people doesn’t work for nature.
“The ahupua’a is the guide map to looking at Hawaii from a completely traditional Hawaiian point of view, taking you back thousands of years and offering you the thoughts of the people who have lived there and been stewards of the land all this time,” said Sam ‘Ohu Gon, senior scientist at the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific, a project of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s the doorway to accessing all that past knowledge that is completely applicable today.” In fact, Gon says, the ahupua’a system, also called moku, could model a way to feed and provide for the Earth’s rapidly growing population in the face of climate change. “With these intensively managed farming and fishing systems, Hawaiians were able to maintain a remarkably small ecological footprint, using less than 15% of their terrestrial ecosystem, while supporting several hundreds of thousands of people with no external inputs,” he explained.
Ellison ignored ALL of that.
Instead he pranced around with an open checkbook, built on decades of horrible cheats, to mint a completely dumb 900-pound hammer that only works with expensive rusty nails his buddy makes using federal grants. The Silicon Valley bro culture of government funded vicious attacks and hyper-aggression may work against other humans like in a war, but it doesn’t wash at all with nature. The earth doesn’t play that. Patrick Wolfe famously wrote “invasion is a structure not an event“, which frames perfectly why and how Ellison’s project is a pathetic rehash of failed colonial patterns in land misuse.
In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism… strives for the dissolution of native societies. …it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event…
Gisèle Yasmeen’s “foodscapes” theory also easily predicts the failures from the start, given a total disconnection of food production from cultural and ecological relationships.
But wait, it gets worse. Ellison supplied his colonial aspirations using fraudulent products of a Nazi-loving apartheid guy!
Six hyper-technological and Tesla solar-powered greenhouses sit on a sliver of what was once the U.S.’s largest pineapple plantation, owned by Dole. After pineapple production ended in 1992, decades of soil neglect followed, leaving the red earth dry, nutrient-deficient, eroded and peppered with black plastic…
Sad history fact: Dole cynically convinced the U.S. government to invade Hawaii and seize it in a staged-coup, destroying a sovereign country and their land, just so he could maximize profits. Ellison sounds just like the same kind of American idiot.
Ellison said the greenhouses, totaling 120,000 square feet, would be off the grid, powered by solar panels thanks to its partnership with Tesla. But the panels often didn’t work. The high winds showered them with dirt and debris, and there were questions on whether they were installed properly, according to one of the people. Instead, the greenhouses’ fans, water pumps and other needs were often powered by diesel generators.
Tesla didn’t work? Talk about a redundant phrase. Their top engineers flown from around the world to a tropical paradise didn’t even design for wind, on a very windy island. Why am I not surprised? Elon Musk snake oil is the stuff of true fraud, a failure at every level. Next you’ll be telling me his promise to land regularly on Mars by 2018 and colonize it by 2022 didn’t happen, yet he kept all the billions?
Way to go Elon. SpaceX/Tesla couldn’t design for or around obvious island weather patterns, let alone the centuries-old knowledge about sustainable production of native plants, despite detailed instructions being published since at least the 1990s.
RTFM guys!
Anyone with half a brain could have planned a beautiful Polynesian cuisine farm of pineapples, bananas, sugarcane sweet potatoes, mangoes, taro, yams, breadfruit, coconuts, arrowroot… not to mention William Herbert Purvis’ macadamia nuts!
Try to grow a pair, Ellison.
The island has to import food because it has lost its roots, literally. Extraction and exploitation by unsustainable self-serving fools is proving to be an undoing of the racist white men who tried to pour their ill-gotten wealth into agriculture in an attempt to hedge food (corner the market) and profit on artificial scarcity.
Both Vance and Musk’s startups have largely failed to achieve their aims—AppHarvest, the farming startup that Vance was a major investor in, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Musk’s Square Roots laid off most of its staff the same year. […] Things may ultimately work out for Sensei if Ellison’s friend President Trump manages to wipe out all the migrant farm labor across the country, as he seems hoped to do…
True security, especially food security, comes from relationship with and understanding of land rather than forced technological control over it by men blind to concepts of compassion and care. My 2011 presentations were all about today’s failed tech-farming ventures, which certainly feels weird to reflect upon. They should and could have done much better. Billions wasted on egos and excesses, as millions of people starved, and nobody is better off. Like Dr. Gericke, today’s tech billionaires are fundamentally motivated by profit rather than sustainability or genuine security. Shall we look at those two gold teeth again?
A February 9th investigation reports that since January 2025, numerous critical U.S. government systems have become exposed to the public internet, coinciding with DOGE’s access to federal networks.
Over the past month, an unprecedented number of critical government systems, including those at the nation’s nuclear research labs, have been exposed to the open internet. This exposure jeopardizes both U.S. national security and the privacy of millions of Americans. Notably, this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.
[…]
Between January 14 and February 8, servers belonging to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory have been found with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services exposed to the public internet. This grants malicious actors the opportunity to hack into servers hosting sensitive nuclear research data, a golden egg for spy agencies across the globe.
Alarmingly, a Department of Energy server allowed anonymous login with write access, raising the risk of hackers uploading malicious code or installing backdoors for persistent network access.
The investigation suggests these exposures, attributed to the DOGE skids (script kiddies), may violate multiple federal laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Federal Information Security Management Act, potentially creating significant cybersecurity risks to national security and Americans’ privacy.
Soon after this was report was written exposing the DOGE insider breach of national security, the White House abruptly terminated hundreds of critical systems high-level security experts.
The Energy Department is seeking to bring back nuclear energy specialists after abruptly telling hundreds of workers that their jobs were eliminated, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The employees, responsible for designing and maintaining the nation’s cache of nuclear weapons at the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), were part of a larger wave of workers dismissed from the Energy Department, drawing alarm from national security experts. Between 300 and 400 NNSA workers were terminated, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The agency’s quick reversal was announced Friday in an all-staff meeting. The NNSA is seeking to recall the workers because they deal with sensitive national security secrets, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk about the matter, which is not public.
[…]
The firings — part of a wave of terminations across the federal government this week spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — underscore the chaos…
…some workers who were told they were being fired, received a second message telling them that they weren’t being terminated and that their jobs were safe — only to receive a third message telling them they were, in fact, out of a job.
The NNSA firings were part of a wider swath of dismissals across the Energy Department, which included … the group responsible for preventing cyberattacks against the power grid, and the department’s general counsel office.
