In A.D. 68, on the Ninth of June, Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus quoted the Aeneid (by Publius Vergilius Maro, known as Virgil), and then committed suicide (with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus). With this act, Nero ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty and started the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which concluded under the rule of Vespasian.
While there was nothing unexpected about Elon Musk leaving DOGE and going back into the ersatz private sector of corporations receiving government contracts, and X (that is, ex-Twitter), the manner of the disemployment is a bit startling.
Paul Jacob covered the first hints of the schism in late May. It was something Elon Musk said in an interview, here reproduced as one of this site’s Thoughts of the day:
But then things got weird. As summarized by The New York Times, the schism played out first at the White House, as “Mr. Trump said that Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, was ‘upset’ that the pending legislation would roll back subsidies for electric vehicles. Then he got in a particularly sharp jab, asserting he would have won the 2024 election without the millions of dollars Mr. Musk spent to support him.” Then it went mostly to social media (X and Truth Social):
But Trump “also maintained that Mr. Musk knew ‘every aspect of the bill,’ saying that the tech executive did not have a problem with the measure until he left his government post.”
Then Elon pulled out all the stops:
Responses to the schism have been all over the map. Here are two dissimilar takes, from comedians Steven Crowder and Dave Smith:
Why conclude with comedians? It could be that comedians tend to be much clearer than other commentators.
Or it could be that this is all really funny.
You really don’t understand. We don’t worry about individuals. What counts is that many millions of people have the knowledge that they can go to a weapon shop if they want to protect themselves and their families. And, even more important, the forces that would normally try to& enslave them are restrained by the conviction that it is dangerous to press people too far. And so a great balance has been struck between those who govern and those who are governed.
Lucy Rail, a character in A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951).
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
“FBI Director Kash Patel claimed Friday that there was a recent ‘breakthrough’ in the COVID-19 origins probe,” explains a Daily Mail article, repeating information divulged on a Joe Rogan Experience episode.
Fauci, one of the primary medical leaders during the deadly pandemic, is being investigated as part of the larger inquiry into how COVID started and America’s response.
Patel told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI originally couldn’t locate any of the [cellular telephony] devices Fauci used during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 — but they apparently turned up just days ago.
Though this is good news for advancing some transparency on wayward/malign behavior by the country’s former top-paid bureaucrat, the FBI Director cautions not to “jump to the conclusion [that] everything’s in there. Maybe it’s deleted, maybe it’s not, but at least we found it, and at least now we can tell people that we have been looking because it is of public importance.”
Further, Patel admitted that President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon places additional difficulties upon prosecution.
The Daily Mail article concludes with a background discussion of SARS-CoV-2 origins:
The FBI and the CIA both asserted that COVID likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, which had been conducting different experiments on coronaviruses in the years preceding the disastrous pandemic.
The lab leak theory was previously denounced as a conspiracy theory during the height of the pandemic. Fauci has been accused of suppressing information indicating the veracity of the lab leak, which he denied before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year.
Paul Jacob has written extensively about this subject, from fairly early on in the pandemic story.
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield” (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851).
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.
During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.
That’s the tagline of a video featuring the late President Lee Kuan Yew, described as the “founding father of Singapore,” elsewhere affectionately referred to as LKY.
The social media account responsible runs under the moniker Office of the Director of Intelligence & Strategy, which sounds like a propaganda bureau. It’s an excerpt from a 25-year-old hour-long interview with Charlie Rose.
Entitled “Not Every Culture Believes Success Starts with One Person,” the clip goes on to say that LKY “shares his understanding of a key divide between the West and many Asian societies: Where the West centers the individual and leading your own path, many Asian systems prioritize the group — family, obligation, cohesion, survival together.”
The familial and communal aspects of traditional Chinese society are not in doubt. But LKY makes two crucial errors.
“You believe in the individual as the creator of all things,” he says of Americans.
That is not even close to how American individualism views the world. For starters, most Americans continue to believe in a capitalized Creator “of all things,” and it’s not the individual. Furthermore, even the most rugged individualist understands the role of families in raising children and communities in helping humans flourish.
American liberty, as imperfect and diluted as it is, can accommodate family-values traditions and communitarian folkways as well as free radicals. The point of individualism is not that The Individual creates success ex nihilo, but that government must make no exceptions for some individuals over others based on group membership.
Which is why Chinese-Americans do so well: they are helped by their family orientation as well as freedom. They do much better here than in China, but Chinese do even better in Singapore, which sports a lower tax burden.
The kind of tax burden individualists prefer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world [the worst] is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house — if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a man’s words or a man’s thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends.
Auberon Herbert, Westminster Gazette (1893), as quoted in Theodore Schroeder, Free Speech for Radicals: Seven Essays (1912), p. 43.
On June 6, 2002, a high-energy upper atmosphere explosion over the Mediterranean Sea (c. 34°N 21°E) occurred. Similar in power to a small atomic bomb, the cause of the fireball has been determined to be a small, undetected asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning out without hitting the surface, though no meteorite fragments were recovered. One of the several meanings of the word “bolide” is this, an atmospheric explosion of a meteor.
General Simon Worden of the U.S. Air Force opined that, had the explosion occurred closer to Pakistan or India — which were at war at the time — it could have sparked a nuclear exchange.*
* “Near-Earth Objects Pose Threat, General Says,” Space Daily (2002-09-17).