Musk was not bred for domestic tranquility. Most of his romantic relationships involve psychological turmoil. The most agonizing of them all was with the actress Amber Heard, who drew him into a dark vortex that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. “It was brutal,” he says.
His brother and friends hated her with a passion that made their distaste for Justine pale. “She was just so toxic,” Kimbal says. “A nightmare.” Musk’s chief of staff Sam Teller compares her to a comic-book villain. “She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” She and Musk would stay up all night fighting, and then he would not be able to get up until the afternoon.
The end finally came after a wild trip to Rio de Janeiro that December with Kimbal and his wife and some of the kids. When they got to the hotel, Elon and Amber had another of their flamethrowing fights. She locked herself in the room and started yelling that she was afraid she would be attacked and that Elon had taken her passport. The security guards and Kimbal’s wife all tried to convince her that she was safe, her passport was in her bag, and she could and should leave whenever she wanted. “She really is a very good actress, so she will say things that you’re like, ‘Wow, maybe she’s telling you the truth,’ but she isn’t,” Kimbal says.
Stanford University almost killed him via misdiagnosis of a severe form of malaria (“falciparum”). Musk walked in, freshly back from a safari in South Africa, and the medical geniuses at Stanford diagnosed viral meningitis and sent him home without treatment. Eventually, he found his way to Sequoia Hospital, a community hospital, where a non-academic doc diagnosed the often-lethal form of malaria and parked him in the ICU. Musk got treated just a few hours before he would have likely died (according to the author). What are the Stanford geniuses who almost killed Musk concentrating on right now? Forcing patients to put on masks before their misdiagnoses:
Another attack by a parasite that Musk survived was in the California family court system. Justine Musk had repeatedly demanded that Musk change and suggested divorce if he wouldn’t become a different person. He chose divorce. She rejected an $80 million settlement offer (Business Insider). According to the book, Elon’s legal fees were $170,000 per month despite the theoretically simplifying factor of a prenuptial agreement between the litigants (it was actually signed two weeks after the wedding, which his friends and family had begged him to call off due to their negative impressions of Justine). In the above-cited Business Insider piece by Elon himself, he wrote “What caught me by surprise, and forced me to seek emergency loans from friends, were the enormous legal fees I had to pay my ex-wife’s divorce lawyers. … The legal and accounting bills for the divorce total four million dollars so far, which is an average of roughly $170,000 per month for the past 24 months. … In addition to paying all of her household expenses and anything related to the children, I send Justine $20,000 (after tax) per month for clothing, shoes and other discretionary items. … There is also no dispute about her receiving the family residence in Bel Air, in which she currently lives.”
From Marie Claire (I worked on their web infrastructure at Hearst in 1995):
(Note that a fight over cash, presumably cash far beyond what is spelled out in the prenuptial agreement, is described by the editor as “messiest”, with the implication that emotions are involved beyond the emotional desire for cash.) What does GPT-4 have to say about this?
(it didn’t catch the typo as Google would have; a query for “Justine Musk” does yield a sensible answer; if GPT-4 is smarter than Google, why isn’t it robust to a single incorrect letter? In a world of autocorrect, sussing out the user’s intention is a required skill!)
Elon Musk learned to fly and earned a Private certificate in an intensive two-week program. Isaacson and the editors at Simon & Schuster once again fail to do any basic fact-checking. They incorrectly state that 50 hours are the minimum experience before getting a Private. In fact, it is easy to learn via Google that the minimum is 40 hours (the FAA page, though that doesn’t cover the situation of a FAR 141 school, in which case the minimum can be slightly lower). Even ChatGPT can get this right:
Walter Isaacson is a Harvard graduate who later went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was CEO of CNN. The Simon & Schuster editors presumably have similarly elite educations. This team quotes Elon Musk saying that the “engine” in a Tesla S weighs 4000 lbs.
When SpaceX began producing its first Merlin engines, Musk asked Mueller how much they weighed. About a thousand pounds, Mueller responded. The Tesla Model S engine, Musk said, weighed about four thousand pounds and cost about $30,000 to make. “So if the Tesla engine is four times as heavy as your engine, why does yours cost so fucking much?”
Any numerate reader would immediately have known that this could not be true and that Musk could not have said it. (The average car should weigh about 3,000 lbs. and does weigh about 4000 lbs.; a 2024 Honda Accord is 3,300 lbs.) Had Isaacson used Google, he would have discovered that the entire Tesla S weighs about 4,700 lbs., of which the battery pack is 1,200 lbs. The motor itself (“engine”) is about 100 lbs. Can we have confidence in what CNN reports and what Simon & Schuster publishes if they aren’t skeptical enough to question the accuracy of this quote?
Given Isaacson’s innumeracy, I’m hesitant to credit these numbers, but the book says that Tesla paid -$8 million for the Fremont, California factory that was its center of gravity prior to the Gigafactories coming online in Nevada (batteries), Shanghai, Texas, and Germany. Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla and Tesla turned around to pay $42 million for the plant, a $1 billion asset prior to the GM bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout in 2009.
The copy editors at Simon & Schuster fail to catch problems that Google can easily spot. Here’s a passage regarding Musk’s first wedding to Talulah Riley:
They wed in September 2010 at Dornoch Cathedral, a thirteenth-century church in the Scottish Highlands. “I’m Christian, and Elon is not, but he very kindly agreed to get married in a cathedral,” Riley says. She wore a “full-on princess dress from Vera Wang,” and she gave Musk a top hat and cane so he could dance around like Fred Astaire, whose movies she had turned him on to. His five boys, dressed in tailor-made tuxedos, were supposed to share the duties of ring bearer and attendants, but Saxon, his autistic son, bowed out, the other boys began fighting, and only Griffin actually made it to the end of the aisle. But the drama added to the fun, Riley recalled. The party afterward was at nearby Skibo Castle, also built in the thirteenth century. When Riley asked Musk what he wanted, he replied, “There shall be hovercraft and eels.” It was a reference to a Monty Python skit in which John Cleese plays a Hungarian who tries to speak English using a flawed phrasebook and tells a shopkeeper, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (It’s actually funnier than I’ve made it sound.) “It was quite difficult,” Riley says, “because you need permits to transport eels between England and Scotland, but in the end we did have an amphibious little hovercraft and eels.” There was also an armed personnel carrier that Musk and his friends used to crush three junked cars. “We all got to be young boys again,” Navaid Farooq says.
If you enter “armed personnel carrier” as a Google search, it says “Including results for armored personnel carrier”.
If this is as good as it gets from America’s best and brightest, I’m glad that we have Chinese people to sweat the details of building most of what we depend on!
I have begun to listen to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. A few interesting points so far…
Musk, born in 1971, had three big passions in the early 1990s: electric cars, rockets to Mars, and solar power. Thus, he is today working on the same things that he thought were important when he was 20-22. The author explains that Musk’s interest in solar power was due to a belief that the world was going to run out of fossil fuel in the medium-term. In fact, oil production today is higher than it was in 1990 (source):
Musk didn’t count on fracking, apparently!
The book lays to rest the myth that Musk was born into wealth and privilege. His father had some fleeting financial success when Musk was young, but he had minimal resources by the time Musk needed seed capital.
All of Musk’s friends and family begged him not to marry Justine Musk (originally “Jennifer Wilson”; a friend is fond of saying that only women and insane people change their names). Musk’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Musk went ahead against this advice and the 6-year marriage produced 6 children (sadly, one died of SIDS after 10 weeks and one changed gender ID, which may be the motivation for Musk’s current opposition to elite ideology).
In a previous book, Isaacson wrongly credited Apple with the invention of the switched-mode power supply (“switching power supply”), which this history says is properly dated to the 1950s. Musk is plagued by confusing descriptions of tech challenges and inaccurate historical context. Isaacson describes the World Wide Web as having been opened up to commercial use in 1994-5 when, in fact, it was open to commercial use from its inception in late 1990. Isaacson also describes this period as one when venture capitalists were throwing huge money at any kind of dotcom startup, which a visit to Wikipedia would have shown did not happen until 1998 or 1999.
Isaacson wrongly credits Musk with having the idea to combine maps with business Yellow Pages-style information in a company that he co-founded, Zip2. Had Isaacson or the editor/publisher been willing to visit the Wikipedia page on geographic information systems, they would have discovered that this idea goes back to the 1960s (all of the Web-based mapping services are essentially Web front-ends to a GIS) and was widely available to consumers in 1994. “Navigating Automobiles By Computer” (NYT, February 8, 1994):
What do you add to a car after you’ve installed a CD player and a cellular telephone? A computerized navigation system, of course.
The new product, which will be announced today by Sony Mobile Electronics and Etak Inc., is designed especially for tourists, traveling salesmen and delivery people. It uses a network of satellites launched by the Pentagon, called the Global Positioning System, and a detailed road map, which includes street names, to display a car’s location on a 5-inch color computer screen. Push a button and little knife-and-fork symbols appear to designate the locations of nearby restaurants, with descriptions from a Fodor’s travel guide. Parks, shops, nightspots, museums and other attractions are also included.
A slightly simpler version called City Streets, also using Etak’s data, goes on sale this month for laptop computers. Sony’s version comes on two compact disks and covers only California, with more disks to come later; City Streets, produced by Road Scholar Software of Houston, covers 170 American cities and 80 more in Europe, but does not give advice on where to eat or visit.
General Motors and Zexel Inc. introduced a similar system early this year at the Detroit Auto Show as a $2,000 option on some Oldsmobiles. That system’s data base was more equivalent to the yellow pages than a travel guide.
Sony also plans a version that can be carried around, like a laptop. Road Scholar, meanwhile, suggests that its program could be useful in a desktop computer without the satellite data; it could be used, for example, to print customized maps to take along on a trip. In addition, if running on a laptop in a vehicle, it can keep a moment-by-moment log of where a vehicle has been, a feature that a delivery company might use.
Zip2 was founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in November 1995 (Wikipedia). That’s more than 1.5 years after the above NYT article. It’s ten years after Etak, which likely had all of these features in the 1980s (would require a bit of research to find out when Etak added a points of interest database, but I think that it was by 1988 or 1989 at the latest) but wasn’t available to every consumer as an off-the-shelf item.
This book will no doubt be referenced by historians and will be considered authoritative, well-researched, and fact-checked. Thus, it serves as a good example of how easily history can be rewritten. I recognize that the history of GIS is not as critical as, for example, the history of the state of Israel, but I think the same process can work to rewrite history on more important topics. American schoolkids, for example, are taught that American colonists were subject to a crushing tax burden, justifying rebellion, when, in fact, they paid some of the world’s lowest tax rates (about 2 percent of total income when residents of England were paying closer to 20 percent) and not a penny of tax revenue collected in the colonies was ever taken back to Britain (the country lost money on what would become the U.S., due to the expense of providing military protection from hostile Native Americans). Nobody challenges this victim narrative.
I subjected 7- and 9-year-old boys to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as an audio book recently. It wasn’t as big a hit as I expected. I enjoyed it, though! I didn’t realize how topical the 1895 book was.
*** spoiler alert ***
I wonder if it is time to update this book for a modern audience. Wells’s prediction of industrial robots needs no tweaking, but he has the Martians being killed by an unknown bacterial enemy. In an updated version, the Martians will reject a bivalent vaccine offered by Pfizer and the director of the CDC. Due to this rejection, which happened because Martians had tuned into Fox News from afar, SARS-CoV-2 kills them all.
The book has a powerful description of humans panicking in the face of a threat and a prescient description of how Californians and New Yorkers might react to Martians wanting to cage and breed them so that they could harvest human blood.
All these—the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.
In the updated version, this will be developed further. Wells’s character envisioned a human resistance living on in the sewers. In the update, the resistance will be in Sweden and Florida because Martians can’t tolerate Surströmming and are afraid of alligators. SARS-CoV-2 will take a year to kill the aliens, which will give governors in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, etc. time to work with federal officials and the Martians to set up the human farms for their respective meek and compliant populations.
Dr. Fauci will leave his portrait-filled study and return to work organizing the development of ventilators powerful enough to treat Martians suffering from COVID-19. The Fauci Protocol will be to put a Martian on vent after 10 “ullas”.
One of our greatest modern writers, Martin Amis, died recently (New York Times). Cancer got him at age 73. I didn’t know this until I saw his obituary, but he was our neighbor here in Palm Beach County, Florida.
“DILFs, Des. All divorcees. The lot of them! You know how they do it? First they— first they get theyselves hitched to some old banker for ten minutes. Then they independent for life! And oh, they in gorgeous nick, Des. Superb. And I said to her, I said to this DILF, How old are you anyway? And guess what she said.” “What.”“Thirty-seven! Which means she’s probably forty-three! Think. She’s almost Gran’s age— and there’s not a mark on her. Pampered all they lives, they are. Beauty treatments . Massage. Yoga.”
My notes on one of Amis’s most famous books, The Information:
MIT kids graduate with a profound sense that the world is and should be a meritocracy. There is always then that horrible moment when they are forced to confront the fact that the best things in life go to the ass-kissers and incompetents with big PR budgets. This book is for them. It is about Richard Tull, a brilliant writer of modern fiction. His books are so great that that they are not only unreadable but actually make readers too ill to finish. He starves while watching his friend Gwyn Barry make millions writing tripe with a sentimental appeal.
(I wrote the above 20 years ago and I don’t think the first sentence is true anymore. Young Americans are constantly reminded that there is nothing meritocratic about U.S. society, in which success is primarily based on privilege. Martin Amis, the famous writer son of famous writer Kingsley Amis, actually reinforces this point (unless we think that writing ability is heritable.))
In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that “The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America’s image in the world”. … Blaming a “deep irrationality of the American people” for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis claimed that the Republicans had swung so far to the right that former President Reagan would be considered a “pariah” by the present party
Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine in 2006, the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims, where he was quoted as saying: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…It’s a huge dereliction on their part”.
It is unclear when, exactly, Martin Amis moved to Lake Worth, Florida (as we are in the middle of Pride Month, it is important to note that this is the site for Palm Beach Pride, “a two-day festival that celebrates the LGBTQ community, equality and respect in a family friendly environment”).
On this Memorial Day I’d like to celebrate the memory of William Lewis Herndon, author of Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon and captain of the SS Central America, a commercial ship with a U.S. Navy captain that sank off the Carolinas during a hurricane in 1857, resulting in a loss of 425 lives, mostly people returning from the California Gold Rush. Herndon could have escaped with his life, but chose to go down with the ship after ensuring that all women and children had been evacuated (including Lucy Dawson, the only black woman on board; we are informed today that Americans in 1857 were irredeemably racist, yet white men gave up their lives so that Ms. Dawson could keep hers).
Married and the father of one daughter, Herndon was slight, and at forty-three balding; a red beard ran the fringe of his jaw from temple to temple. Though he looked like a professor or a banker more than a sea captain, he had been twenty-nine years at sea, in the Mexican War and the Second Seminole War, in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea. He knew sailing ships and steamers and had handled both in all weather. He was also an explorer, internationally known and greatly admired, who had seen things no other American and few white men had ever seen.
Herndon ordered Ashby and his first officer not to let a single man into the boats until all of the women and children were off. “While they were getting into the boats,” observed one man from the bailing lines, “there was the utmost coolness and self-control among the passengers; not a man attempted to get into the boats. Captain Herndon gave orders that none but the ladies and children should get into the boats, and he was obeyed to the letter.”
The ship took 30,000 lbs. of gold 8,000′ underwater, which is what led to the main story of the above book. This cargo was worth $8 million at the time and roughly 1 billion Bidies today (inflation of 125X or 12,500 percent).
If you can tolerate an old-style book in which race, gender ID, and sexual orientation are seldom mentioned, the story of engineering challenges being addressed one after another is fascinating. The hero of the book is Tommy Thompson, a self-motivated engineer who attends Ohio State, works for Key West treasure hunter Mel Fisher, and comes back to work for Batelle. While at Batelle, he comes up with the idea of salvaging wrecks in the deep ocean.
“A galleon drafted about fifteen feet,” Tommy told Bob, “so they generally hit reefs in about fifteen feet of water. It is not like men to leave gold lying in fifteen feet of water.” Most of the artifacts Fisher had found were at twelve feet, and the only reason Spanish salvage divers had not completely stripped the Atocha in 1622 is because a second, far bigger storm had hit the wreck site three weeks later.
During the three centuries following Columbus’s voyages to the New World, much of the gold and silver on earth had been transferred from the New World to the Old World, and 25 percent of it had been lost. But don’t search for it among the thousands of shallow-water shipwrecks in the Caribbean, said Tommy; the odds were too slim. Search for treasure where storms couldn’t buffet the remains, where ships were not piled on top of each other, where the bottom was hard and the currents slow, and where no government could stake a claim. Tommy told Bob he wanted to recover historic shipwrecks in the deep ocean.
A key enabler of the quest for the Central America‘s gold is Martin Klein, the inventor of practical side scan sonar, but this MIT graduate is not credited by the author. Once found, however, there is a question of how to conduct mining operations on the ocean floor with mid-1980s technology.
If you got your submersible safely into the water, your ship at the surface was rising and falling while your submersible was descending; each fall caused the cable to go slack, and each rise snapped the cable taut, like pulling a car with a chain. That load suddenly became ten times heavier than the submersible itself, and the cable often broke and you lost your submersible. That armored cable was filled with electromechanical wires that carried signals down to the sub and back again. If the snap loading didn’t break it, every time that cable passed over a pulley, the wires bent and straightened with the weight of the vehicle, and often ten times the weight of the vehicle, and the wires fatigued and parted. A replacement cable took three months to manufacture, and carrying a spare cable on board meant needing more space on a bigger ship, tended by a larger crew, for much more money. Attempting to land on the seafloor was risky and difficult for two reasons: First, the rocking of the ship would jerk the vehicle—one minute you’d be looking at the bottom, the next minute you’d see nothing, the next minute the camera would be in the mud. Second, hanging something heavy on the end of a cable twisted the cable; if you set that heavy weight on the seafloor and slackened the cable at the same time, the twisted cable tied itself in knots, like the cord on a telephone. When an armored cable with several thousand pounds on the end kinked up, and the bouncing of the ship topside jerked on those kinks, the cable again often broke, which meant you left your vehicle on the bottom and headed back to the beach for the rest of the season.
Everyone who had previously worked in this area was funded by militaries, which had essentially unlimited budgets to look for sunken submarines and similar valuable items. Tommy Thompson needed to do the job for $millions when others had failed with $1 billion budgets. There’s also an interesting legal challenge:
The Central America lay at the far reaches of the Economic Zone, almost two hundred miles offshore. No one had ever tried to recover an historic shipwreck so deep it lay beyond the three-mile boundary. Tommy could bring a piece of the Central America into the courtroom, but no one knew what would happen next.
One of the more unusual challenges was how to bring up gold coins without scratching them, which would reduce their value to collectors. The team of salvors came up with the idea of a silicone injection process that would embed gold objects in a block of the soft substance before it was all brought to the surface.
If you love engineering, I recommend Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Even if you don’t love engineering, I hope that you’ll join me in remember Captain Herndon and his decades of service in what was a hazardous job back then (wooden ships combined with no GPS and no weather forecasts).
(Since 1998, Mr. Thompson’s career has developed some warts. I don’t want to spoil the book for you, but let’s just say that, as in family court, a big pot of gold can lead to accusations of unfairness.)
How about this idea for an Arduino project… a puck that can be quietly stuck to the back of a friend’s TV when you’re visiting. After a 72-hour delay, the puck begins emitting the dialog that Winston Smith heard from the telecreens in 1984. An example:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.
(maybe update the above with reference to Ukraine instead)
Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!
Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade.
THERE, comrades! THAT’S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.
You see MY knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to. Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s MUCH better.
(update the last one to refer to Ukraine and replace “his toes” with “his/her/zir/their toes”?)
Now we can see you. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.
Smith! 6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell’s wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London … Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945 … [1984] was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death. … Sonia was a beauty, and her act of marrying a sick wealthy man, when his death was almost certain, has left many to doubt her intentions.
Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: “Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully.”
Orwell used the homophobic epithets “nancy” and “pansy”, for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the “pansy Left”, and “nancy poets”, i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden.
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The survey also found that more black voters (63%) than whites (45%), Hispanics (55%) or other minorities (32%) support Biden’s vaccine mandate for government workers and employees of large companies.
President Biden’s strongest supporters are most likely to endorse the harshest punishments against those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine. Among voters who have a Very Favorable impression of Biden, 51% are in favor of government putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities,” and 54% favor imposing fines or prison sentences on vaccine critics.
Perhaps the novel could follow two families, since statistics are never as interesting as personal stories. Alyssa and Emily Good have two non-binary children together: Dakota and Zen. All get vaccinated and, whenever recommended by the CDC, boosted. Alyssa works at a reproductive health care clinic providing abortion care to pregnant people. Emily works at a non-profit organization fighting anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ hate. They enjoy a rich life in a COVID-free United States and get together with neighbors in their means-tested affordable housing complex to hang BLM and Rainbow banners.
Gunner and Katelynn Bad breed like rabbits because they reject the Sacrament of Abortion Care and have four kids: Cooper, Mallory, Rhett, and Josie (only 3 months old when the Great Removal begins). Gunner sells pickup trucks and goes hunting on weekends while Katelynn stays at home. The Bad parents, having refused the Sacrament of Fauci, are confined to their exurban house while their kids are taken away by a platoon of National Guard troops who arrive in Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The 3-month-old is allowed 2 Zoom sessions per week with the parents, on account of her young age, while the old kids get 1 Zoom session.
I fed all of the above to ChatGPT. Out came a mushy plot titled “The Great Divide” in which “A common threat or challenge unites the Good and Bad families” and “The families reevaluate their beliefs and values”. My further instruction:
Rewrite this so that the Good and Bad families never come back together and the Bad family is sent to a higher security prison after asserting, contrary to Science, that the COVID-19 vaccines of 2021 did not prevent infection or transmission.
The novel this time was called “Worlds Apart”. Here’s an excerpt:
Then I asked ChatGPT to write the first chapter. Here it is, not in quote style for readability:
Chapter 1: Parallel Lives
The morning sun stretched its golden rays across the suburban landscape, illuminating rows of houses that differed only in minor details. In the means-tested affordable housing complex, the Good family began their day like any other.
Alyssa and Emily Good rose early, setting their alarms to make the most of the limited hours they had to themselves. They were the kind of couple that fit together seamlessly, like puzzle pieces that had found their match. Alyssa, a caring and dedicated nurse, worked at a reproductive health care clinic providing abortion care to pregnant individuals. Emily spent her days at a non-profit organization fighting against anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ hate. Together, they created a home full of love and acceptance for their two non-binary children, Dakota and Zen.
The Goods had eagerly embraced the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, seeing it as their civic duty to protect themselves and others from the pandemic. They kept up with every recommendation by the CDC, receiving boosters as needed, and found solace in the knowledge that they were doing their part to keep their family and community safe.
A few miles away, the Bad family occupied a larger, more secluded home. Gunner and Katelynn Bad, fervent believers in traditional values, had built a life together based on self-reliance and independence. With four children – Cooper, Mallory, Rhett, and baby Josie – the Bads were an ever-growing family. Gunner worked at a local dealership, selling pickup trucks, while Katelynn, a proud stay-at-home mom, nurtured their children.
Unlike the Goods, the Bads rejected the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. They saw it as an infringement on their personal liberties, a belief reinforced by the misinformation they consumed on social media. In their world, the vaccines were an untested, unnecessary risk. And so, as the deadline for vaccination loomed, the Bads chose defiance over compliance.
The tension in the air grew thick as the consequences of this choice settled in. When the government announced the Protection Camps for the unvaccinated, the Bad family scoffed, believing the threat to be little more than a scare tactic. But as more families were forcibly removed from their homes, the reality of their situation became impossible to ignore.
The day the National Guard arrived at the Bad family’s doorstep, it was raining, the sky filled with menacing clouds. Gunner and Katelynn watched in terror as their children were taken from them, the younger ones crying for their parents. Baby Josie, just three months old, was whisked away in a military vehicle, her cries barely audible over the sound of the rain.
The Good family, meanwhile, continued to live in relative peace. They regularly gathered with their neighbors in the housing complex, hanging BLM and Rainbow banners as a show of solidarity. As they shared stories and laughter, the fate of the Bad family seemed like a distant nightmare – something that could never touch their happy, vaccinated existence.
But the fates of the Good and Bad families were more intertwined than they knew. As the Bads were confined to their home, they began a desperate search for any means of reuniting with their children. At the same time, the Goods began to question the harshness of the policies that had forced a family apart.
The world had changed, irrevocably, and the two families found themselves on opposite sides of a deep and unbridgeable divide. Unbeknownst to them, their paths would soon cross, and their beliefs would be challenged in ways they could never have imagined.
NAPOLEON BROWARD declared war on the swamp during his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant multicolored maps of the Everglades at campaign rallies, promising to bust a few holes in the coastal ridge and create an instant Empire of the Everglades. “It would indeed be a sad commentary on the intelligence and energy of the people of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body 21 feet above the level of the sea was beyond their power,” he taunted his audiences.
Broward has been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assault on the Everglades, but he was considered a staunch conservationist in his day. He supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and development. Broward never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Gifford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, but the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”
When a canal-based drainage project did succeed, the projects could be substantial.
Swampland the state had sold to settlers for 25 cents an acre now produced harvests of $600 an acre for tomatoes, $1,000 for lettuce, $1,500 for celery. At a time when farmers were struggling to survive on 160-acre homesteads out west, the farmer Walter Waldin netted $3,400 on six acres in six months in the Everglades—after building a home and feeding a family of five.
One problem, however, was that the canals were temporary:
[James Wright, a former high school math teacher hired by the Feds to study the challenge] also ignored the high cost of maintaining canals, a problem exacerbated by the gentle gradient of the Everglades, which produced currents too slow for the canals to scour themselves out, and by the explosive proliferation of the water hyacinth, an attractive but invasive weed that had clogged almost all the state’s waterways since a well-intentioned gardener named Mrs. Fuller imported it to Florida in 1884.
The setting aside of swamp for parks began in 1916 with a 4,000-acre Royal Palm State Park that became the core of Everglades National Park. Meanwhile, humans were trashing the rest. Regarding the Miami area:
Meanwhile, 34,000 acres of the Everglades had been converted into farms, and much of the rest was parched by ditches, drought, and the Tamiami Trail. “The drying up of the Glades, due to the various canals, is playing havoc with the birds here,” one surveyor wrote. “The finer ones are fast disappearing. They lack feeding grounds.” The water table was dropping fast, drying out springs that once bubbled to the surface on Cape Sable and within Biscayne Bay, reducing the downward hydraulic pressure caused by the weight of fresh water—the “head”—that kept salt water from the region’s estuaries from intruding into its aquifers. By 1920, Miami’s overpumped well fields at the edge of the Everglades were turning salty. The declining water table was also fueling the fires that raged in overdrained Everglades wetlands. Broward had ridiculed the idea that a swamp could catch fire, and Randolph had predicted soil shrinkage of no more than eight inches, but some of the Everglades had already lost three to five feet of the black muck that had inspired so many pioneer dreams. This was not only the result of subterranean fires; it was also caused by “oxidation,” the exposure of historically flooded organic soils to the open air. The aeration of the muck breathed life into long-dormant microbes in the soil, which consumed organic material that had accumulated underwater over thousands of years. The soils then dried into powder and blew away on windy days, kicking up dust storms so violent that pioneers “could hardly get out of the house without wearing goggles.”
Charles Torrey Simpson, an early preservationist, very nearly wondered heretically whether at least some humans should be illegal:
“We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say: Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings.”
Agriculture in the Florida swamp got a huge boost when the state’s research lab figured out that the Everglades soil was deficient in copper, manganese, and some other necessary trace elements.
The idea that the federal government should be in charge of all of the water in Florida got a huge boost from President Herbert Hoover, whose confidence was not shaken in the repeated failures of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi. The dike that surrounds Lake Okeechobee is named after Hoover. The effects of the dike were not all positive…
The Depression years were drought years, and the combination of the new dike, which prevented water from the lake from reaching the Everglades, and the old ditches, which carried water from the sky away from the Everglades, left its wetlands desert dry. Its fresh water table dropped like a boulder, allowing salt water to intrude further into its aquifers every year, contaminating wells and ruining tomato farms along the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, soils that had been accumulating underwater for thousands of years were vanishing with exposure to the air; in Belle Glade—town motto: Her Soil Is Her Fortune—the ground was sinking so quickly that settlers had to add an extra doorstep every few years.
Failure and unintended consequences always motivated the experts to go bigger. The late 1940s:
The Army Corps plan for the Central and Southern Florida project called for the most elaborate water control system ever built, the largest earthmoving effort since the Panama Canal. It envisioned 2,000 miles of levees and canals, along with hundreds of spillways, floodgates, and pumps so powerful they would be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The C&SF project was designed to control just about every drop of rain that landed on the region, in order to end the cycle of not-enough-water and too-much-water that had destabilized the frontier and stifled its growth…
The plan’s first big innovation was its strict separation of the usable Everglades from the unusable Everglades, a concept that first appeared in Captain Rose’s drainage proposal for Henry Flagler. The plan also adopted Rose’s call for piece-by-piece as opposed to all-at-once drainage. The work began with a 100-mile-long “perimeter levee” running more or less parallel to the coastal ridge, walling off the Gold Coast and a wide slice of the eastern Glades from the rest of the marsh. Next, the Corps encircled and reclaimed the rich soils of the upper Glades with more levees and drainage canals, creating an Everglades Agricultural Area the size of Rhode Island. The Corps then built more levees to divide a swath of the central Glades even larger than Rhode Island into three gargantuan “water conservation areas,” a more recent plan devised by the Belle Glade research station. The station’s scientists had suggested that “rewatering” the central Glades could restore the region’s hydraulic head and mimic the natural storage capacity of the Everglades, preventing salt intrusion, soil subsidence, muck fires, and water shortages all at once. The conservation areas would still look like the Everglades, but they would hold onto needed water for farms and cities during droughts, absorb excess water from farms and cities during storms, and recharge the region’s aquifers to keep salt out of its groundwater.
In the mid-1950s, the Army Corps made a movie about their plans and achievements, Waters of Destiny:
One the Corps was on the job, people felt confident that dry land was around the corner and, therefore, real estate could be purchased without much thought regarding whether it was buildable.
The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:
THE C&SF PROJECT did not extend the glories of flood control to southwest Florida, but that did not stop two Baltimore brothers named Leonard and Julius Rosen from selling nearly half a million acres of swampland there during the boom. The Rosens had gotten rich selling an anti-baldness tonic called Formula Number Nine, featuring the miracle ingredient of lanolin—and the immortal tagline, “Have you ever seen a bald sheep?” The brothers could see that shivering northerners yearned for a piece of Florida the way bald men yearned for hair. Their Gulf American Corporation offered “a rich man’s paradise, within the financial reach of everyone,” the ultimate miracle elixir. Gulf American’s most ambitious venture was Golden Gate Estates, where the Rosens platted the world’s largest subdivision in the middle of Big Cypress Swamp. … The Rosens sold tens of thousands of lots in Golden Gate, parlaying their $125,000 investment in Florida swampland into a $115 million payout, but only a few dozen homes were built there.
The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas had expected the C&SF project to save the Everglades, but it turned out to be an ecological menace. It did a terrific job of draining wetlands and promoting growth, but its expanded canals carried more water out of the Everglades at a time when south Florida’s expanding cities and farms were increasingly dependent on water in the Everglades. Its flood protection prompted additional development in the Everglades floodplain, which prompted demands for additional flood protection. And the Corps and its like-minded partners in the flood control district—often run by former Corps engineers—refused to release water to the park, except when it was already inundated. They manipulated water levels to accommodate irrigation schedules and development schemes, discombobulating the natural water regime to which flora and fauna had adapted over the millennia. “What a liar I turned out to be!” Douglas cried.
Nobody benefitted more from this than the sugar industry:
Big Sugar received no direct subsidies, as its army of spokesmen constantly pointed out, but it depended on federal import quotas, tariffs, and price supports that cost American consumers as much as $2 billion a year. Florida’s growers also relied on a federal program to import their labor pool of 10,000 impoverished West Indian cane-cutters; the industry was notorious for mistreating them, withholding their wages, and deporting any who dared complain. The growers also reaped the benefits of the C&SF project, which irrigated their fields in the dry season and drained their fields in the rainy season. They received more than half the project’s water releases, while paying less than one percent of the district’s taxes.
But that runoff [from sugar cane fields] wasn’t harmless to the Everglades, because the things that extra phosphorus made grow generally didn’t belong in the marsh. The Everglades was “phosphorus-limited,” with flora and fauna peculiarly adapted to a nutrient-starved environment, and ill-suited to compete when even minute amounts of phosphorus became available. And those thimbles added up; the agricultural area pumped 100 tons of phosphorus a year into the Loxahatchee refuge, fertilizing the march of the cattails.
President Nixon began to reverse some of the damage that the 1950s hubris had caused, with the help of Florida’s first Republican governor (voters in the former slave state had previously been loyal Democrats):
The other tectonic shift in Florida politics in 1967 was the ascension of Claude Roy Kirk Jr., a little-known insurance salesman who looked like a mob boss, partied like a frat boy, and stunned the state’s political establishment by becoming its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Kirk only received the GOP
