Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Did Ukraine Violate The Terms Of Service?*

Or is our country’s foreign policy being run by third-rate supervillains from the “Batman” TeeVee show, with various chowder heads playing supporting roles?
The SpaceX founder personally ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink that Ukrainian forces rely on, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter. The speed cap rendered some of Ukraine's attack and interceptor drones close to useless, according to the report.

That account clashes with what Musk told the public. Hours after the slowdown came to light, he posted on X that "any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."

Some U.S. officials told The Journal that Musk acted on his own and that Trump never specifically ordered any retribution against Kyiv. But one person familiar with the situation said Musk spoke with several senior Trump administration officials, including the president, before imposing the cap. Ukrainian officials said the restriction allowed Russian missiles to slip past their defenses.

Two people said Musk and Trump discussed the decision by phone shortly after it became public, while the president was on the campaign trail. One of them claimed the pair had also talked it over before the cap went into effect.

As the uproar grew, SpaceX representatives reached out to their White House counterparts hoping to settle on a shared message that the company and the Trump administration had worked together before Musk gave the order, according to the report. Trump, meanwhile, told reporters Monday that he didn't know who was behind the slowdown, "but I would like to find out."
I do appreciate Trump and Elmo in the hot dog suits, doing their dead-level best to fool everybody..


I understand (put that in air quotes) that Trump spits down on the ground every time Ukraine gets mentioned. It was his first impeachment, and he’s a petulant child. But Elmo just craves power; and this is an excellent example of why he shouldn’t have it. And another fine example of science fiction “predictions” failing wholly to deal with the evil of the human heart. We don’t need monsters bred from radioactivity or rogue AI to kill us all. Good old human greed and selfishness will do the job in ways we never seem to anticipate. It’s not the technology that’s moving too fast for us; it’s our plodding, blinkered, and starved imaginations. We’re not headed for a cyberpunk world. We never were. Nor are cyborgs going to get us. We need to start with the dumbest, most senseless acts possible; and then imagine technology amplifying those acts to the point populations are at risk.

When I was a child, the risk was nuclear annihilation; but that power was in the hands of governments. Turns out we could control that. Now we are literally putting governing in the hands of children who’ve never outgrown the narcissism of infancy. This is something nobody ever tried to foresee, but the results are perfectly predictable. Now it’s up to government to take that power back, for the people, not the narcissists (their name is “Legion,” because there are so many of them). But until that happens, and for the moment, Vonnegut’s observation from the ‘70’s still holds:

“The winners are at war with the losers, and the fix is in. The prospects for peace are awful.”

*Apparently they did:
(Bradbury and Harlan Ellison came closest to consistently expecting the problem with the future would be us, not the technology. H.G. Ballard saw it, too. But nobody came close to seeing this.
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