I think you are right. All authoritarian states hate the hard-to-control Internet Musk will be offering. And they hate Musk since he is too successful.

Being a Computer Scientist, I deeply oppose the marginalisation of the humanities. However, and unfortunately, many (most??) of the humanitarian departments in the North American universities are leftist ideology centers, totally detached from reality and actually extremely harmful. The politically correct garbage, nowadays I think called "wokeness", originates in universities.

"eliminating the most left-leaning professor" sounds like a good idea. Those people have little to do with the Enlightenment. I speak from personal experience when I say they are little more than religious fanatics of the new leftist religion.

Yes. Of course. There is no other way. If a thinker from inside the bubble does not like reality -- I am sorry. In fact, I am not.

Maybe the 21st century will belong to China after all.

Writing in Cyrillic alphabet is a PITA if you are using a computer and have to switch all the time between Cyrillic and Latin. Say, you write a LaTeX doc. The commands are in Latin and there is nothing you can do about it. The text is in Cyrillic. And you have to switch the keyboard layout all the time, assuming the text is Unicode-encoded, which of course it must be.

I hope you are right. Can't see any confirmation though

Did the core of stage 1 land successfully?

Snowden did huge service to the fascist superstate in North Asia. There is a war going on right now, you know. Only a small part of this war is a real war: the war of the fascist superstate against Ukraine. And even against Ukraine, the empire uses a proxy army of thugs under false banners that is formally independent and not under the command of the emperor in Kremlin. Most of the war is subsurface -- an information war that is going on even at this moment in this forum. Mr Snowden chose to side with the fascists and help their war efforts with his info and now he wants a pardon? Go to hell, fool. Your motives might have been noble but your actions did have consequences. The fascists are kinda stuck in the real war against Ukraine but they did score important victories in the info war. Trump, for instance. Likely, you did assist them a bit, Mr Snowden. So stay there. What, you don't like their lunatic society? Tough luck. Should have thought better before chosing their side.

BTW, it will be most ironic if Trump pardons Snowden. Then the lunacy will be complete -- the extreme liberals and the extreme conservative in a hug, much to the delight of the emperor...

The real question is, however, can idea be realised as a reliable spaceplane? For as long as I can remember I have been reading about bold new technologies that would change the world. Few of them turned into successful products though. Controlled nuclear fusion - nope. Supersonic civil airplanes - nope. The space elevator - nope. The electric car - well, maybe, not sure yet. Etc. Clearly, the devil is in the details and to turn a good idea into a reliable product sometimes is horribly complex and expensive.

Of course, Britain cannot possibly have a monopoly over the skylon idea. Even *if* they had made a working skylon spaceplane first (which would imply the idea is realisable) the Chinese would have made a similar thing in short time.

The hypocrisy of the leftists is amazing. Russia is sliding towards a fascist regime with very little personal liberty and state-controlled-everything. Even the orthodox "church" is just another instrument of the all powerful state. Russia waged wars on three of its neighbours (Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine) and tore pieces of them into "independent countries" with feudal pro-Russian regimes. Russia actively supports the medieval barbaric regimes in mid Asia (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, etc.). The warmongering in Russia has reached levels that are incomprehensible for a normal person (but normal for a denizen of a fascist country). And yet Snowden, the liberty guy, finds the putrid fascist atmosphere "free". Reminds me of a leftist Scottish prof I met in Canada back in the 90-ies when the Cold war was still a recent memory. He had visited USSR during communism and the only thing he disliked were the queues in front of the shops. The clown never noticed that he had freedoms like freedom of expression and of travel that were unthinkable for the Soviet proles.

That is agnosticism. Atheism is belief.

Easy. Religion is belief. In the context of this discussion we are talking about very fervent belief, one that gets furious with those who disagree with it. That easily applies to atheism, too.

The combined "score" of Mao and Stalin is tens, if not hundreds, of millions. Both of them were atheists. You don't know what you are talking about.

Snowden, the great whistleblower, the great freedom fighter, ended up in *Russia* - a fascist country that suppresses individual liberties, deprives its citizens of privacy and inculcates patriotic insanity. Right now Russia is in war with one of its neighbours (Ukraine) and has recently stolen parts of two other neighbours by force (Georgia and Moldova) and the official TV threatens with war Poland, Litva, Latvia and Estonia, and even Finland. I wonder how does Snowden reconcile his free spirit with the fascist regime of the country he chose to live in?

Russia has been turning into a fascist state for more than a decade. I am not surprised because they never really understood what is wrong with totalitarianism and have been lamenting the loss of their European colonies that took place in the 1990ies. The majority of Russians are primitive shameless people for whom being feared by the outside world is the ultimate satisfaction.

In contrast to that, the majority of Germans regrets that their country was a totalitarian monster 70-80 years ago. Regardless of the fact that Hitler's Germany was the single strongest country of that time and was undoubtedly feared.

for many years. The writing has been on the wall all the time. Those idiotic threats are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be wrong to downplay them with the arguments like "some idiot lost his nerves". The bellicosity has been on the rise in Russia for many years and no, the reason is not that they were unjustly insulted by the West. The fascist-like regime wants to expand and dominate. It is that simple. The fascizoids can never be stopped by appeasement. The appeasement did not work before WWII and will not work now. The only argument they understand is raw power. For them, politeness and tolerance are signs of weakness and met with derision. Maybe, I hope, one day the Russian people will kick the fascists out of power but for the forseeable future this is wishful thinking.

Well, international relations are heating up again, coffee-break is over and the West should better wake up and start doing something. If raw power is the only thing that can stop the bad guys, raw power we must accumulate.