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Miami Herald
2 days ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Is Elon Musk misunderstood — or rightfully criticized for his DOGE tenure?
Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. Read what the writers have to say about launching this column. DAVID: So semi-former Trump minion Elon Musk said something true this week and it is making news. Musk said the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill is going to raise the deficit, undoing the work of his Department of Government Efficiency. 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' Musk said. Among Trump staffers, even an obvious truth is controversial, so naturally, as The New York Times reported: 'Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, shot back at Mr. Musk on social media without naming him. Mr. Miller asserted that the bill would reduce the deficit — despite multiple independent analyses saying otherwise.' MELINDA: He did tell the truth about the Big Ugly Bill adding to the deficit. But nearly everything else he's said about DOGE was a LIE. All he accomplished was inflicting pain, which you don't need to be some brilliant man of the future to pull off. DAVID: But he is brilliant. Musk is a truly American character. He's an immigrant, a stellar success and an iconoclast. If he doesn't fit the DSM definition of multiple-personality disorder, he should. I like all of him — environmental visionary, space explorer, digital media baron, disrupter of government business as usual. The only one I am not so fond of is exploiter of more baby mommas than … well, anyone I have ever heard of. MELINDA: Oh my friend, on that last point, Elon Musk is no old-school exploiter, and I'm not about to hurry past that point, either. I'm not at all surprised that he, as a devoted eugenicist, is essentially running a baby farm, turning out as many little Elons 2.0 as possible. An April piece in the religion magazine First Things, headlined 'Elon's Family Values,' warns your fellow conservatives of the growing challenges to the traditional family, not just from 'the anti-judgmental left with its rainbow of 'family types,' but from new voices on the right who regard genes as the be-all and end-all.' Musk, the piece goes on to say, 'embodies the values of the genetic-determinist right.' He's got either 12 or 13 kids — with either three or four women, 'including, most recently, a colleague with whom he had no intention of forming a family.' That colleague, Shivon Zilis, an executive at his neurotechnology firm, told his biographer Walter Isaacson, 'He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,' and generously volunteered to donate his sperm. 'I can't possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children,' she said. Their child was reportedly conceived through 'polygenic screening to produce children with the characteristics he desires.' In fact, all but the first of the children we know about were conceived with advanced reproductive technology so as to get the 'best' results. This is not just creepy, but alarming. The last time people in this country got all excited about eugenics, the Nazis took notice. DAVID: I hadn't read about the eugenics, which seems more than a little extreme, but smart, conscientious, stable men have been seeking out smart, conscientious, stable women for a looooong time. (I know I am leaving myself open here: Stable, Elon? No way. He thinks he's going to Mars. I mean stable in the income provider sense.) I don't think your Nazi parallel works though, because their eugenics was based on racial pseudoscience. Musk isn't claiming white babies are the ubermenschen — he is claiming that with careful genetic screening, we can create babies that are smarter and healthier than the traditional point-and-shoot method of reproduction. I won't be leaping into this new science myself. There's still plenty of room for unintended consequences. But I believe in the march of science and if we can wipe out diseases, like my depression (which I am sure has hereditary component), I welcome the progress. Maybe my grandkids won't suffer what I have. And if a little coterie of Elons 2.0 can advance the cause of mankind half as much as their father has, the world will be better off having them. What I am worried about is the fact that he isn't really raising all those kids like a father should. It is my experience that the more brilliant the kid, the more parenting they need to not go over the rails. My bet is his fatherless kids will disappoint. MELINDA: This is very much the old-time eugenics. You think Musk's love of the R-word and of far-right parties in Europe are out of nowhere? There is nothing benign about Elon Musk. His vision is as cold and dark as that trip to Mars he wants to take. DAVID: Elon's vision of the future isn't dark — it is practical. When electric cars were a vegetable, you could only sell them to the Birkenstock crowd. Musk made them sexy. Everybody wants one. The first time my son rode in one, he was hooked. That is the genius that the global warming clerisy lacked as they tried to shove electric cars down unwilling consumers' throats. Elon has made getting to orbit vastly cheaper, and he is going to do more to make space travel practical. If you want mankind to survive, we need to become an interplanetary species. There is something fundamentally human about his drive to colonize and explore. It is something people of all cultures have always done. MELINDA: His buddy the anti-enviro president is busy making sure we'll need to be an interplanetary species sooner rather than later, but what about the lives on this planet, right here and right now? Though DOGE did not cut nearly as much as Musk said it would, or as he said that it did, he can take a bow for causing many deaths across the world by taking his trusty chainsaw to USAID. DAVID: Wait a minute, DOGE claimed $55 billion in savings on its website according to The Post, and journalists there were only able to find $9 billion worth of lies. That means the DOGE claims were better than 80% true. I'd give real money if we could get that level of veracity across the rest of the Trump administration. MELINDA: I'm saying look behind the numbers. That he justified vaporizing USAID, again dishonestly, by pointing to a bunch of subscriptions to Politico and The New York Times that he tried to pretend were payoffs was the perfect encapsulation of the whole DOGE effort. Could he really not go to the trouble of canceling the subscriptions without canceling lifesaving efforts across the planet? No matter what percentage of cuts promised were actually achieved, the human devastation caused by the USAID cuts alone were unforgivable. This was what you'd expect from someone who equates empathy with weakness. And just what you like about him mystifies me. I mean, he fired thousands of civil servants, sometimes by accident, without even bothering to find out what they did, or caring about the consequences. Those were my neighbors when I lived outside D.C., and they must have been yours, too. The sight of those dedicated, hard working people, who could have been making much more money in the private sector but were there because they wanted to serve, carrying their little boxes of plants of family photos out of federal buildings was a shameful one. The big other thing that DOGE accomplished was invading our privacy. Remember when Republicans were against that? Excuse me if I think he just wanted to mine the data for his own business interests, but yes, that is what I think. His tenure was short but the damage he's done will last. And he's disillusioned, at having learned that you can't destroy lives, fire those who had been investigating your companies and jump around with cheese on your head without some reputational damage? He got more than his money's worth as Donald Trump's top campaign donor just in making so many threats to his businesses go away. Readers who disagree with me regularly tell me that I hate the president when no, the truth is that I pity him, even if I'm a lot sorrier about what he's done to our country and our world. If you know much about the family he grew up in, then you know he got everything except what he really needed. I always think it must be terrible never to have had anything but completely transactional relationships. So when he's nattering about trophy wives to West Point graduates, I'm not even sure he knows that not all of us would trade our families for more decorative ones if only we could afford it. Maybe because I know less about how the world's richest man got the way he is, I have less sympathy for him.
Miami Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Trump's new attack on DEI: Erasing history or a needed shakeup?
Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. MELINDA: I'm calling the weekend I just spent at my Notre Dame class reunion a Mary-thon, because I got to catch up with so many Marys — Mary Virginia, Mary Ann, Mary Meg and Mary Pat, plus that outlier Kathleen Marie. But while we were closing down the dance floor, Donald Trump did not take a minute off from trying to close down free expression, distort history and put the arts in a headlock. Oh wait, did I say that wrong? A news story I read about his possibly illegal Friday firing of the director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery said he was 'continuing his aggressive moves to reshape the federal government's cultural institutions.' You say 'reshape,' I say 'deform.' Art that is told what to be and do isn't art anymore. DAVID: I spent some time recently in Omaha's fabulous art museum, the Joslyn. Like the Smithsonian museums, it is free and a place of beauty and inspiration. At the same time, if you spend any of your visit reading the descriptions of the works, the monotony of the standard-issue Marxism from the artists is tedious. I've felt the same from the National Portrait Gallery and other Smithsonian art museums. It wouldn't hurt them to have some fresh blood from outside the usual suspects. MELINDA: Fresh blood? Trump said Kim Sajet is out as director of the Portrait Gallery because she's a 'highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.' An inappropriately partisan person is just someone who doesn't agree with him. I mean, would he ever throw out one of his own supporters on that basis? On the contrary, he makes no secret of filling positions based not on expertise but on loyalty to him and on the way they look on television. And isn't DEI just fairness by another name? This president has got things so upside down that any job not held by a white man is now assumed to be held by a know-nothing 'DEI hire,' instead of by someone who had to work even harder to get where he or she is. DAVID: No, DEI is not the same as fairness or equality. It is right there in the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' Equity is the idea that people shouldn't be treated equally because they are not equal. It is the very opposite of the imperfectly achieved American creed that so many fought to finally make a reality in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Today, more than 90% of Americans agree on 'equal opportunity.' DEI tears down that hard-won consensus and replaces it with a raw racial spoils system and identity politics. Equity will never enjoy that kind of support. MELINDA: Look, the college friends I was just with and love so much are mostly white Catholic girls who are grandmas now. But we are keenly aware not only of all we were so lucky to have had, but of what a lack of diversity in our classrooms cost not just those who weren't there but us, too. Sajet is out because she once told The New York Times that the portraits in the gallery mostly represent 'the wealthy, the pale and the male.' I would not have put it that way, but no one can say it isn't true. Why not include more portraits of those who should have been there all along but were overlooked? And do you really agree with Trump that museums are hotbeds of anti-American propaganda? A confident country is not afraid to tell its whole story. Knowing more will not make us fall apart, and concealing unpretty parts of the past is what authoritarians do. Though if he succeeds, this current moment will certainly wind up as a blank page. The reason people flock to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is that a lot of us know that what we learned about that history in school was subpar, to put it generously, and we are eager to change that. Unless this administration really is driven by racial animus, what's the problem? DAVID: The DEI-mania in the years since the murder of George Floyd may have sometimes brought needed attention to the darker parts of our history, but more often than not it has turned into fact-free America hatred. The bits of The 1619 Project that turn up in the Smithsonian's generally wonderful Museum of African-American History are particularly rancid. No, modern policing was not borne of the need to recapture escaped slaves. Policing has a history that goes back thousands of years across many cultures. No, American capitalism is not rooted in slavery. The most economically advanced parts of America rejected slavery first. No, the Revolutionary War was not fought to keep British abolitionists at bay. MELINDA: I'd hardly call it a mania, and there have been more police shootings every year since Floyd's murder. You'd rather fact-check the 1619 Project than talk about Trump's determination to stoke white grievance — white genocide, really? You are right about those 1619 errors, which did a lot of damage. Only Trump isn't trying to correct, but to obliterate. Just like DOGE preferred counterproductive mass firings to the more targeted trims that everyone could have supported. And fact-free American hatred, huh-uh. I love this country, which is why a year ago right now I was in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, as proud of all of those veterans who saved the world from the Nazis, and especially of our local recipient of the French Legion of Honor Medal — France's highest honor, civil or military — as I could have been without having my heart burst out of my chest. I also love our people who come from everywhere, and who look and think differently from me, too. Unlike the president, who on every holiday posts pretty much the identical festive message about what scum half of all Americans are. I just want us to tell our whole story, like you'd want for the health of your family. To airbrush is to propagandize, and what does that get us? What's so scary about a museum director trying to make the portraits hanging in our national portrait gallery better represent the whole American story? I can't wait to see what kind of 'improper ideology' JD Vance will uncover at the National Zoo, as he's supposed to be doing across all of the Smithsonian. Maybe he will find that the new pandas or some other immigrant animals are up to no good. DAVID: I love the National Zoo, but it is not the place to go if you want to learn the nuances of environmental policy. You don't get delicate shades of green — you get hit with a moss sledgehammer. We might agree that Trump is not going to add subtlety, but the place is in need of a shakeup. The Smithsonian doesn't do nuance well, but nuance is what we need to showcase our common humanity and common problems. You are right that there have been more police shootings since Floyd's death, but it might be wise to dwell on the fact that every year police kill more unarmed white people than Black people. The police killings are best addressed in ways that bring us together as equality already does. The DEI approach of only looking at Black killings leaves us divided. MELINDA: I took my kids to that zoo all the time and noticed very little environmental policy, nuanced or otherwise, but then I was just trying to keep my son from jumping in with the cheetahs. You'd expect police shootings to kill more white than Black people since the latter make up only about 15% of the population. Trump's DOJ is not even going to look at police misconduct, which is a good way to get more of what you have decided not to see. But it isn't only the abuse of Black people that he wants to ignore. He also mothballed a federal database tracking all misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. How turning a blind eye to wrongdoing might bring us together I don't know. That's never been his goal. And this Portrait Gallery director's firing is only one example of this administration's non-stop efforts to disappear all but MAGA-approved history. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring civil rights icons, starting with assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, a Navy vet himself, and one of the country's first openly gay elected officials. Happy Pride Month! Others on the list include Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Medgar Evers, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. You can call all of this anti-DEI, or you can hear Trump raving about 'dead white farmers' in South Africa and realize that the man's racial views, and our willingness to accept them, are exactly what 1619 was talking about. When only the pale and the male and the straight are acceptable, then that's in-your-face white supremacy. When Trump replaced those who ran the Smithsonian's Kennedy Center, which he sometimes mistakenly calls the Lincoln Center — I sense a cognitive cover-up in the making here — they were replaced by folks who were not at all partisan. You know, because the new KenCen board he put in place had the nonpartisan good taste to immediately elect Trump as chairman. After installing himself to run this cultural gem, he according to The New York Times told his new team that as a kid, he could pick out notes on a piano and impressed someone his father had hired to assess his potential strengths with his inate musicality. 'I have a high aptitude for music. Can you believe that?' Yes! White House communications director Steven Cheung answered a question about this revelation by calling his boss a 'virtuoso' whose musical choices 'represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.' Sadly, the president said, he was never encouraged to develop his talent. But I say it's never too late to pursue a gift like that on a full-time basis. C'mon, Juilliard, help us out here. DAVID: If you keep talking Trump, all we're going to do is agree. Let me just say this: As offensive as the blatherings of the sycophants around Trump obviously are, so is the uniform liberalism of the Smithsonian. It paints America through red-colored glasses when there are so many other colors to see. A few years of Trumpy chaos might just inject some needed diversity of thinking to the place. That's part of DEI, too, right?
Boston Globe
29-05-2025
- Climate
- Boston Globe
30 years ago today, a destructive tornado tore through a small Massachusetts town
Advertisement There wasn't much left of the Great Barrington Fairgrounds after a tornado struck the night of May 29, 1995. RYAN, DAVID STAFF PHOTO The sheer force of the Great Barrington tornado toppled tall trees like matchsticks on May 29, 1995. RYAN, DAVID STAFF PHOTO It was the strongest tornado that the state of Massachusetts had seen since the June 9, 1953, twister that struck Worcester. During that evening of May 29, 1995, which was the observed Memorial Day that year, a cluster of severe thunderstorms had pushed into Berkshire County and triggered a tornado warning from the National Weather Service office out of Albany, N.Y. At first, the supercell that spawned the Greater Barrington tornado actually had produced a prior tornado in Eastern New York, an F2 that traversed 15 miles. As the storms pushed over the Massachusetts state line, huge amounts of moisture and wind shear from neighboring storms helped the supercell restrengthen, spawning the larger, deadly tornado. Advertisement Numerous vehicles and buildings were impaled by flying debris from trees, fences, and other timber. Multiple buildings lost their roofs or flat-out collapsed, including the local fairground, a supermarket, and a gas station. Bud Rodgers takes a breather after helping to clear trees from the yard of his neighbor, who, along with his family, escaped injury when their roof collapsed during the Great Barrington tornado of 1995. CHIN, BARRY GLOBE STAFF PHOTO Radar imagery on the evening of May 29, 1995, shows a supercell (deep red) pushing through Great Barrington. NWS The tornado was designated as F4 strength under the original Fujita scale, which had a strict and only wind threshold to measure tornado strength. An Enhanced Fujita Scale was implemented in 2007, taking into account damages to building structures and wind and there's a good chance that the Great Barrington twister would have been deemed an EF5 tornado by today's standards. The Enhanced Fujita Scale takes into account wind speed as well as building damage. The wind speed threshold is also lower than the original Fujita scale. NOAA Tornadoes form within supercell thunderstorms with wind shear, a change in direction and speed of wind as you move higher into the atmosphere. Ample moisture will make the air light enough and be lifted vertically, which can create a rotating column of air or tornado. Changes in directional wind shear as air rises vertically into the atmosphere will initiate rotation. Boston Globe Strong updrafts will tilt the tube of rotating air upright, forming into a tornado. Boston Globe Ken Mahan can be reached at
