Tag Archives: news

Tesla’s Downfall/Musty Musk

The news about Elon Musk, the trillion dollar employee, discontinuing the Model S and X got me thinking. Is this a brilliant decision or simply another poorly conceived Musk intervention.

Medicynical Note: I’m inclined to think that the market for personal robots is very very limited and that this decision opens the door to an empty room.

Musk through the years has indeed been a brilliant business guy, affiliating himself with several very successful companies that seem to have been in the right place at the right time. In the last couple of years though his thinking has seemed muddled and delusional and not well considered.

For example, this quick reversal of course reminds me of the incident with the trapped Korean kids in a cave. Elon in what seemed a grandiose delusion, with no experience and few facts at hand, decided that a small submarine was the only way to save the kids. So he sent a tiny “submarine,” obviously unfit for the purpose of the rescue, meanwhile fortunately, experienced divers saved the kids. Then in a fit of jealousy Musk viciously libeled one of the rescuers. Elon sometimes just can’t help himself.

In a similar vein, Musk insisted that his early autonomous driving solution was the best but it kept killing people and proved not perfect enough for prime time. And while he is still working on a reliable safe solution, Waymo using a simpler more economical safer solution was first to field such vehicles.

And finally, in another brilliant CEO move he supported Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars for the Presidency. Yes the Trump who in his splendid ignorance denies climate change, and has cut the ground out from under Tesla and e-cars by vocally and through legislation opposing e-cars in the United States, i.e. Tesla.

And by supporting a luddite, racist,President and by being, himself, an entitled racist dope, Musk has alienated the folks most likely to buy a Tesla. Brilliant.

In the future Space X will be interesting to watch. If we ever have a Democrat elected I’m sure there will be attention given to Musk’s government subsidies. I can’t wait.

The CDC, Africa, Lassa Fever

1972 CDC Team in Panguma Sierra Leone investigating outbreak of Lassa Fever. Carlos Campbell, Panguma Mission Hospital doctors, Verne Newhouse, Tom Monath, David Fraser and Graham Kemp

53 years ago I worked in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps doctor. On my first trip around the country I visited a hospital in Panguma where there had been deaths from what appeared to be a serious infectious disease. I wrote a letter to the CDC simply addressed to head of infectious diseases. This was before Facetime or even being able to direct dial from Africa. I asked whether the deaths and symptoms were consistent with Lassa Fever. I had read an article in the New York Times about the disease in Liberia a few months before our departure for S.L.

A couple of months later in the fall of 1972 I was notified that the CDC had confirmed the disease and were sending a team to study it. The CDC team was there for a month, and studied the disease and how it spread. They discovered the vector the manner of exposure to the virus and advised the mission doctors on how avoid and control the spread of the infection.

Their experience was later used to study Hanta virus in the U.S. (a close relative of Lassa) and helped in figuring out how that disease was spread.

Today, if I sent the letter from Africa to the CDC,with a Trump appointee head of HHS who doubts the germ theory and a political appointee heading CDC, I doubt that it would be read.

Medicynical Note: America is unilaterally disarming. Under Trump our military is policing the streets of D.C. Our intelligence organizations have decapitated themselves with firings of experienced knowledgeable operatives and replacement with inept inexperienced politicos and real estate barons.

And with Kennedy at HHS we’re removing knowledgeable medical leadership and replacing them with political commissars. We are undermining effective preventive disease strategies, vaccinations, and replacing it with old wives tales, rumors, and treatments proven to be ineffective……….effectively nothing.