Facts by #JoeHansenFacts# In Pretoria, South Africa, during the apartheid era, the Musk family(@mayemusk) raised visionaries amid challenges. Elon Musk, born June 28, 1971, his brother Kimbal, born 1972, and his sister Tosca, born 1974, shared a childhood fueled by curiosity and limited technology. Their engineer father Errol provided access to early computers. At age 10, Elon received the Commodore VIC-20, one of the first affordable home computers. Lacking teachers or resources, the brothers taught themselves coding using the BASIC programming manual. Elon mastered it in three days instead of six months, igniting a passion that led to his first video game, Blastar, coded at 12 and sold for $500. This self-taught ingenuity on outdated machines in their South African home laid the foundation for their later success, including co-founding Zip2. The Musk brothers' early experiments with old computers exemplified determination, turning isolation and scarcity into skills that would revolutionize technology worldwide.

I wasn’t supposed to share this. But after months of discussions, the Agarthan delegation finally approved Bread. Their feedback was surprisingly simple: “Stop building economies where leaving is the optimal strategy.” So we did. See you next week.

Eskom killed your power because the ANC spent two decades stuffing the utility with politically connected cadres who couldn't operate a kettle without a instruction manual. Apartheid-era infrastructure didn't collapse under its own age. The numbers destroy the apartheid-infrastructure excuse. Eskom managed 95% availability on its fleet through the 1990s. By 2022 it was producing stage 6 load-shedding, meaning 6,000 megawatts of capacity offline at any given moment. The plants didn't age that fast, they got wrecked by incompetance and neglect. Brian Molefe, Matshela Koko, Ben Ngubane: these are actual humans who made actual decisions that stripped maintenance budgets, awarded contracts to Gupta-linked suppliers, and placed loyalty over competence across Eskom's entire technical division. The Zondo Commission documented this in excruciating detail. Directed looting, not systemic drift. State-owned enterprises destroy capital because their managers face no profit-and-loss discipline. When Eskom bleeds, you pay higher tariffs while Treasury absorbs bailout after bailout, R254 billion in debt relief announced in 2023 alone. No private operator survives that mismanagement. Eskom survives because the government forces you to fund it regardless. Privatize generation, strip Eskom of its monopoly, and competitive suppliers face actual consequences for keeping you in the dark. Until that happens, cadre deployment keeps the lights off and you keep paying for it. Eskom killed your power because the ANC spent two decades stuffing the utility with politically connected cadres who couldn't operate a kettle without an instruction manual. Apartheid-era infrastructure didn't collapse under its own age. The numbers destroy the apartheid-infrastructure excuse. Eskom managed 95% availability on its fleet through the 1990s. By 2022 it was producing stage 6 load-shedding, meaning 6,000 megawatts of capacity offline at any given moment. The plants didn't age that fast; they got wrecked by incompetence and neglect. Brian Molefe, Matshela Koko, Ben Ngubane: these are actual humans who made actual decisions that stripped maintenance budgets, awarded contracts to Gupta-linked suppliers, and placed loyalty over competence across Eskom's entire technical division. The Zondo Commission documented this in excruciating detail. Directed looting, not systemic drift. State-owned enterprises destroy capital because their managers face no profit-and-loss discipline. When Eskom bleeds, you pay higher tariffs while Treasury absorbs bailout after bailout, R254 billion in debt relief announced in 2023 alone. No private operator survives that mismanagement. Eskom survives because the government forces you to fund it regardless. Privatize generation, strip Eskom of its monopoly, and competitive suppliers face actual consequences for keeping you in the dark. Until that happens, cadre deployment keeps the lights off, and you keep paying for it.

A mother of 3 was handcuffed and taken to a police station in Cape Town. An hour later, she was dead. Cebisa Silwana’s death exposes police failures that continue to affect communities once targeted by apartheid.

Elon Musk left South Africa at 17 partly to avoid being conscripted into the South African military. At the time South Africa still enforced mandatory military service for white males. Elon would have been required to serve in an army enforcing apartheid, a system he wanted no part of. He didn't have a plan. He had a Canadian passport through his mother who was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He booked a flight. He landed in Montreal with approximately $2,500. He had no contacts. No job. No accommodation arranged. He called a great uncle who wasn't home. He spent his first nights finding his way across a country he had never visited. He eventually showed up unannounced on a second cousin's doorstep in Waldeck, Saskatchewan. A farming village so small it barely appears on maps. He worked on the farm. He moved west. He cut logs. He cleaned boiler rooms. He enrolled at Queen's University. He transferred to Penn. He dropped out of Stanford after two days. He started Zip2. The rest is history. But the origin of the entire trajectory was a 17-year-old deciding he would rather show up alone in a foreign country with no plan and no money than serve in an army enforcing a system he found morally bankrupt. The decision to leave was not entrepreneurial. It was ethical. The entrepreneurship was what happened after the escape. Every biography frames his departure as the beginning of an ambition story. It was first an escape story. A teenager fleeing a country that would have forced him to carry a gun for a government he despised. The empire was built by a refugee. Not in the legal sense. In the moral sense. He left because staying meant becoming something he refused to be.

A mother of 3 was handcuffed and taken to a police station in Cape Town. An hour later, she was dead. Cebisa Silwana’s death exposes police failures that continue to affect communities once targeted by apartheid.

It's so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories. They regard today's genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It's like if someone took over New Zealand and named it "Middle Earth" and started calling all the Kiwis "hobbits", and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of "Gondor" (formerly Wellington). And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn't been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the "shekel" in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation. It's so fucking insane. "Ooh, we've got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magical Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!" Fucking freaks. Stop doing this.