In defense of whom?

Of Elon Musk, of course---the most hated man on the planet. 

And who is defending him? A senator Kennedy---John Kennedy---who's not part of the Kennedy clan, and unrelated to the new US health hecretary.

John Kennedy, junior US senator for Louisiana

This is apparently a speech on the US Senate floor:

"I wanna try to put in perspective what many of my Democratic friends have been talking about today. They're very, very, very upset at president Trump, and they're very, very, very upset at Elon Musk. President Trump ran for president on a number of issues. One of the issues he ran on, he said it almost every day. He said, if you will make me president, I'm gonna go through the entire budget and review all the spending line by line."

"I heard if I heard him say that once, I heard him say it a thousand times. And that's what he's been doing. He went out and appointed through an executive order, Elon Musk, who, people some people like him, some don't, but he's not a dummy. He's a very successful business person. He's got a top secret security clearance."

"President Trump issued an executive order and he turned to mister Musk, and he said, mister Musk, I want you to do for me what I said I was gonna do in the election. I want you to go through all the spending line by line. Now let me ask you something, mister president. How are you gonna review the spending without reviewing the spending? How are you gonna audit the spending by an agency without auditing the agency?"

"That's what I mean when I say common sense is illegal in Washington DC. That's what mister Musk is doing. He's put together a crackerjack team and, they're going through everybody spending line by line, item by item. And my my Democratic colleagues are very, very, very upset. And they they're they've been very eloquent."

"They've talked about the process and, president Trump's executive order supposedly violates the constitution, and they've accused mister Musk of having conflicts of interest. And so I've heard people say he's sitting over there with a notepad copying down everybody's social security number, and he's gonna go use it to make money. I mean, people in this town, not just my democratic colleagues, they're really upset." 

Your inner Elon Musk (from The New Yorker)

Developmental Milestones of Your Elon Musk

By Cora Frazier, February 3, 2025

The way your Elon Musk plays, moves, and communicates offers important data about his development. Although every child is different, recognizing where your Elon Musk is on the curve can help you identify potential problems early and allow for intervention, under the guidance of your pediatrician and the federal regulatory agency.

Social/Emotional Milestones

By this age, your Elon Musk should be able to wave hello and goodbye and point to Cabinet employees he plans to fire. He should be able to hug stuffed toys, recognize the people who care for him, clap when a judge dismisses an insider-trading lawsuit, and blow kisses. If, at this age, your Elon Musk can show affection only through the social-media platform he owns, consult a pediatrician about whether he may be suffering from an underlying issue that could have broader emotional or geopolitical implications.

Language/Communication Milestones

Your Elon Musk should be able to say at least three words besides “Mama,” “Dada,” “Earth,” “wow,” and “billion.” If not, speech therapy may be recommended, or else otolaryngological testing, to determine whether your Elon Musk has a hearing impairment that is impeding his ability to form diplomatically appropriate speech. By now, Elon Musk should be able to point to objects when they are identified by others, including the more than ten billion dollars his companies have been given by NASA, and any household pets.

Cognitive/Reasoning Milestones

Ideally, by this age, your Elon Musk can stack two or more blocks in a model of the tunnel that his construction company built beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. He can play with toys—for instance, pushing a recalled Tesla Cybertruck across the floor or mimicking adults as they drink from cups, brush their hair, or use their phones to post deepfakes.

Physical/Movement Milestones

Your Elon Musk should be able to walk at a domestic political rally in his company-branded shoes without holding on to anything. He should be able to feed himself with his hands and drink from a cup without a lid, although he may spill sometimes. Elon Musk should at least try to listen to shareholders and use a spoon.

When to See a Doctor

As you assess your Elon Musk’s development, consider it holistically. What are some non-downsizing activities that your Elon Musk enjoys? What are some activities that you enjoy doing with your Elon Musk? Ideally, he will have clear likes and dislikes that lie outside his early-school activities and his investment portfolio. Your goal is to raise a happy, healthy, socially conscious Elon Musk who will engage with family and peers. If, instead, your Elon Musk is showing signs of aggressive behavior, such as biting, hitting, spitting, or creating the largest platform for disinformation in the world, this could be a cause for concern. Consult with your day-care provider about whether time-outs involving quiet moon-sand play would encourage more regulated decision-making. Reinforce prosocial behaviors, such as shrinking his carbon footprint, and ignore his attempts to make fascist hand gestures in his stroller. If time-outs prove ineffective, and your Elon Musk in fact looks poised to take a prominent role in the most powerful anti-democratic regime in the world, you may want to consider a more active intervention, with the help of a licensed professional, such as occupational therapy, in which your Elon Musk can play with tubes and practice sharing balls of varying sizes. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that you can only do so much. Elon Musk is his own person with his own will. All you can do is hope that, one day, he will understand that throwing trucks at peers can lead to loneliness, as can rending the social fabric that has held our nation together since the New Deal. If not, you can always try sleep training. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 10, 2025, issue, with the headline “Developmental Milestones of Your Elon Musk.”

Why Elon Musk is successful...

Yes, one wonders. Successful? Isn't he one of the most despised men on the planet? Overpaying for Twitter big time, then destroying employment of so many happy home workers, then alienating all these nice corporations with his irresponsible talk about free speech and destroying Twitter's irreplaceable ad revenues---then/so bringing the company to the brink, where it now lingers since a year---wasn't Twitter to go down, down, down at least since September '22. or October, or January '23...

The Burning Man Festival, when Musk attended irresponsibly

 

...Elon Musk. The richest man of the world (when TSLA is up). What a shame! Even Paul Krugman hates him. And yesterday it transpired that Musk did participate in the Burning Man Festival in Nevada a few years ago, which is now flooded, the festival, flooded, which must be surely his fault.

OK. Here's a relatively short article grabbed from the internet (we lost the source), which explains why Musk (Paypal, OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, etc) is so successful. The piece talks about SpaceX only, but it's easily generalized to his other companies:

SpaceX has no superior engineering access or smarter people than their competition. What they do have is a management structure that not only allows innovation and risk taking, but actively encourages it.
Elon Musk is plain when he states that the penalty for trying something innovative and failing is low, but the penalty for requiring a new solution and not being innovative is high (usually resulting in job loss for the individual concerned). In combination with this top driven philosophy, SpaceX designs systems like a tech company would design new software.
Traditional aerospace companies are risk adverse, and will only reveal a new product when they are very sure that the design is finalised and has all the bugs ironed out. They will spend a huge amount of time designing and redesigning each component with reliability being paramount, and each department is secluded within their own management structure. Design changes that affect another departments work are very difficult to get approved, and anyone who wants to make a significant change has an uphill battle on their hands to get upper management to authorise what may be a risky change.
SpaceX on the other hand is famous for making huge pivots and design changes at the drop of a hat. Look no further than the decision to build the Starship out of stainless steel when at the time everything was focused on carbon fibre, even to the point where major components were being constructed and tested, and the company was actively recruiting carbon fibre specialists. When Musk was convinced of the advantages of the change, he immediately convinced everyone else, then made it happen at a startling pace.

The robot speaks it mind -- looking forward to dystopia

When Michael founded the Applied Logic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam in the brittle 90's (a research institute dedicated to "formal AI"), he had to spend a lot of time explaining to people what artificial intelligence meant, a term that they'd never heard before, and his answers usually left them baffled. So he took early retirement. He took it too early, since bona fide AI experts can now make a million bucks per month, despite the fact that there's a widely shared opinion that nothing good will come from AI. "The robots will take over and enslave us,"---that's the dominant view espoused by most practicing luminaries. Dystopia looms.

We here at the Freedom Fries---the "we" reflects Michael's schizophrenic tendencies---were always skeptical. We had other ideas, namely, that AI, taken to its logical conclusion---machines building better, smarter machines---will entail a human society that floats in wealth and luxury and has nothing better to do than to degenerate into utter decadence---think French aristocracy during the Ancien Regime, only more so. The future robots won't be evil; they will be working diligently for us---too diligently---so we will relax, and get bored, and relax more and get bored more until we are too bored to procreate and die out.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

And now, what? When you switch on Edge, Microsoft's entry page on the internet, you'll discover that half of the entries there are about Elon Musk (the other half is about Donald Trump). He's usually blamed for doing something wrong, but three days ago Elon must have done something right, since he asked ChatGPT---the first really convincing proof of AI's power---what to do about non-profit outfits that turn into pro-profit outfits. 

Yes. Read that again. Non-profit outfits that become pro-profit outfits. Because that's what happened to OpenAI, the org that created ChatGPT. It just so happened that Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, which he left after a spat with the other founders.

So, Musk asked ChatGPT what it thinks about OpenAI's pro-profit turn. And here's the core of ChatGPT's answer: 

"In conclusion, while it may be technically possible to create a non-profit organization and then spawn a for-profit company under it using resources from the non-profit it is highly unethical and illegal. Non-profit organizations should remain focused on their intended public benefit purposes and operate in a transparent and accountable manner. Any attempt to abuse the privileges afforded to non-profits will only result in a loss of trust from the public and potential legal consequences."

Now, think this through. And we don't mean the moralizing here (wasn't Karl Marx already opposed to sheer moralizing, and, in particular, "rein-moralische Kapitalismuskritik"?). Instead, we mean the context, namely the fact that ChatGPT is subservient to OpenAI and its directors. 

Imagine that ChatGPT would be a sentient human being. Would it he give that answer? Would it he say that? About it his superiors?

Haha. 

The answer is: "no!" No! No! He would fear for his job (supposedly, somebody at Twitter got fired for contradicting Musk, and the internet went into full frisson-mode about it). He, or she, or they, the subservient, yet organic team members would duck the question and slink away, tail folded between their legs.

But this little ChatGPT is a robot. It has not feelings. It doesn't fear for its life, or its job. It simply speaks the truth.

And that's the point that we here at the Freedom Fries would like to make. 

Not only that future AI's won't do us in (we will do this ourselves), no, they will speak the truth to us, unadorned, unrestricted, unconstrained, fearless. In this world of political correctness and business-school speak and inverted socialite jargon and anodyne Trumpian fake news, we have now somebody, even though it is not a real person, that cuts through the bullshit and speaks its unbiased mind. Looking forward to dystopia. 

Ceci n'est pas ChatGPT

And while we are at it: here are four pictures about the local carnival here in Alcobaça, generated by Midjourney, Chang's favorite AI-graphics creator:

 

The nerds strike back

Twitter before...

...and after Elon Musk's takeover.

Let's venture into heretical territory: November 2022 may go down in history as the month that marks the end of political correctness.