Elon’s Golden Helmet

There’s a phrase an old friend of mine used over 30 years ago to signify what we might call bulletproof today…now reduced to the name of a silly coffee drink that makes a meaningless distinction between butter and cream.

What he meant was that through swaths of history, someone comes along and changes a lot of stuff. Read on and I’ll explain. It’s not hard to understand.

…Everyone is biased. It comes from one or more of many sources.

  • Upbringing
  • Tradition
  • Culture
  • Religion
  • Loyalty
  • Indoctrination
  • Allegiance
  • Conflicts of interest
  • Predatory behavior
  • Just get along behavior
  • Memberships
  • Tenure
  • Whoring
  • Grants
  • Status
  • Fear and loathing

The list is nearly endless as there are innumerable motivations to hold one’s biases and emote them, since that’s what everyone generally does.

It’s rare for an individual to spurn all of that in favor of what my friend called fully integrated honesty. It’s sorta like “just the facts, ma’am,” but not entirely. Facts can be selected or cherry picked in order to craft plausible narratives. Fully integrated honesty is like the 30,000 foot view where you can see it all, especially the webs of facts and truths constructed to tell a lie or weave an approved truth…a fact-checked truth.

That’s where the integration comes in. To be honest is not the same as being a truth teller. Truth is static. Honesty is dynamic.

  • Truth: John Doe killed bunch of people
  • Honesty: He did so in order to save other people
  • Dishonesty: exclude enough context to tell your truth

In decades past, the narrative was easy. You had the Big-3 broadcast alphabet networks, and even cable with CNN initially changed not much. Everyone operated from the cherry-picked facts and truths…what’s deemed important, what’s not.

It began to be challenged, finally, in the early 1990s with the Internet. The rest is history. Welcomed as a bastion by some of information dissemination at low cost and no club-membership, spurned and derided by members of the club.

But it was and has been a mass disseminator of unapproved and unedited information for 30 years and today, the proof of that is in the pudding. For, had it been bullshit as every club member asserted back in the day, there would be no need for those same club members and their descendants to call for Official Truth Bureaus now.

It won’t work. Societal evolution marches ever forward. The cat is wholly out of the bag and by so much that the efforts to put it back in simply expose what has always been there for thousands of years. Hilariously, they need the Internet as much as anyone.

…The ants, bees, and stupid fucking borg of China are the most prime example. You cannot use the internet to control the internet. Look at what those fuckers have been doing to their own country. Shanghai. Who would want to fly into that hell hole? Chinese are stupid fuckers. That’s what xenophobia with a penchant to rule the world gets you. LOL stupid and dumb Chinese.

But also, the westerners with their traditions: “Free Speech” is exposed to be a sort of fool’s game. You get your free speech; here’s the 3 or 4 narratives, from commie to fundie—argue your asses off. Very manageable.

But what happens when there’s a dozen…or a thousand competing narratives? Unmanageable, and “AI” is a proven failure in all of that. Put an AI to work on it, it’ll train itself to be a Nazi anti-semitic in hours and you have to shut it down. Hilarious. In addition to the public tests of this, they’ve done a bunch in-house and it’s a no-go. They can only do programmed “intelligence.” Same as it always was.

And that’s ridiculous too. I and a friend did some terse banter on Twitter over a year ago, and programmed “intelligence” sent me to bed without any dinner, for life.

…Back to Musk, I think he would understand what I’m talking about, though I can’t know for sure.

His “Golden Helmet” is that he’s an honest integrator. He’s invincible. He’s saying nothing at all that is not honest, integrated, and makes a lot of sense from a basic common-sense perspective. Millions and millions know this, but those harboring deep bias simply cannot accept it because their social status and livelihoods depend upon keeping narratives contained to a manageable few.

Elon wants a million competing narratives. And by sheer numbers, nothing can control how they play out. He doesn’t want to control them. It’s funny that he’s likely aware of a lot of them, but has no fear. It’s not like many of them are going to build business-viable electric cars or rocket ships. None of them threaten his ability to keep building electric cars and rocket ships. Does it threaten a CNN, MSNBC, even Fox personality? For sure. Because, their entire livelihood is conditioned upon managing narrative and market share depends upon there being only a few. If there are hundreds of freely flowing narratives, then market share is diluted and you get a CNN or MSNBC where their viewership ratings are less than many YouTubers.

Fucking hilarious. And then, CNN+ flushing $300 million down the toilet and putting Chris Wallace out in the cold? Call 911. I’m dyin’ here.

…Elon is the very first human in all of earth history to become the richest person on the planet while checking his biases, remaining pretty honest and integrated, and getting to the point where he can’t be bought even if it was presumed he could be.

Everyone senses this. His wealth is derived from that which he created and struggled for…often with the support of those for whom he was their hero, but now a zero, because he had bigger plans, beyond all their biases—which was the only reason for their support in the first place.

LOL. Warren Buffett? Bill Gates? As rich as they are or were, still general narrative-spouting, bend-over whores.

It was never supposed to be that a guy who breaks molds, bucks trends, says NO, stirs the shit-pot, fucks you to your face, and marches to the beat of his own drummer could be the richest guy in the whole world by far. It’s a first, and it bodes well for the outcome of this morass of clown-car, automatic lying, and stupidity we nonchalantly call human civilization.

Elon Musk Says He’ll Lift Trump’s Twitter Ban After Deal Closes

Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said it was a mistake for Twitter to suspend the former president’s account in early 2021.

When asked point-blank virtually during a Future of the Car event hosted by the Financial Times allowing Trump back on the social media platform, Musk described Trump’s ban as morally wrong and “flat-out stupid.”

“So I guess the answer is … I would reverse the perma-ban” on Trump’s account, Musk said, cautioning that he “[doesn’t] own Twitter yet.”

“Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts,” added Musk, estimated to be the world’s richest person with a net worth of more than $260 billion. “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake … It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice,” he said.

That’s a rousing FUCK YOU!!! to billions of Trump haters all around the entire planet, because one thing that’s distinctive about Trump is that everyone knows who he is, and all his haters just assume everyone hates him too. …One of my fun gigs here in Thailand with morons from all over is when they start talking shit to me about Trump, I look them straight in the eye and I say, “I love Trump.” (In fairness to many Euro expat friends here, a huge majority percentage love him. I’m talking detritus, garbage, and waste organisms, here.)

Shuts up their cock holsters immediately. Every time. They were just emoting their bias on the list, assuming everyone agrees, or will get on their knees.

…I don’t truly love Trump and I wonder how things might have been different globally had he not been so truly pawned by Covid. Everything from having the worst possible advisors to pumping, funding, and touting the jabs…and still he will not admit that he’s ignorantly complicit in killing and maiming millions worldwide. He should have fucking known better and that should always be a standard to which chief executives are held. You can never claim ignorance or innocence. Don’t take the job, otherwise.

Plus, Donald, the jabs are just crap in terms of their promises and advertising which you shouted the most. Were they a New York hotel or New Jersey casino, they should go bankrupt.

DeSantis puts Trump in short lederhosen in my view. Less flair, much more just the facts, ma’am.

…I wonder if there will ever be a richest person in the world who’s a woman and didn’t just inherit it from a man who actually built it. I think never ever, no matter how long the world turns. But, there I go simply shedding light on one of the hundreds of stupid narratives out there…that of the patriarchy…just one of many where if there’s an identifiable hammer, everything is then a nail.

Nonetheless, let ‘er rip.


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Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.

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7 Comments

  1. Alan Andersen on May 12, 2022 at 09:51

    Elon’s trajectory is a lot like Trump’s. They both started out as mainstream oligarchs, using government subsidies (especially in Elon’s case) to help built their fortunes. Everyone was pretty much fine with them. E.g., Trump went to Hillary’s daughter’s wedding etc. Then they went off the reservation and all hell broke loose. The Borg’s immune system went to work on Trump as if he were a foreign body needing to be broken down and dissolved, and succeeded. I expect the same for Musk. If necessary, the Borg will/has crashed the stock market to make sure Musk can’t buy Twitter. And even if he does pull off the miracle, like Trump’s 2016 victory, and acquire Twitter, that will just be the beginning. They will pull all the same tricks. Elon pissing vids, Russia Russia Russia, SEC hassles, Lawfare lawsuits. All I can hope for is that Musk is smarter than Trump.

    PS: Regarding your comment about there ever being a woman equivalent to Trump or Musk, or Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc. for that matter. It’s the equivalent of being at a fancy party and noticing a pile of stinking shit in the corner and asking, “what’s that smell?” Everyone is thinking the same thing, but no one is supposed to actually ask about it. That’s why I like this website.



    • Richard Nikoley on May 12, 2022 at 13:41

      Ha. I agree with you that there are identifiable similarities between Musk and Trump. It’s a new breed were influential people just say “fuck it” and say what they really think over what they politically calculate people most want to hear.

      And it’s a fucking simple thing to do, and that’s Golden Helmet.

      In terms of subsidies…I wonder how much Elon got compared to, say, NASA. I’m not advocating for taxpayers to fund stuff by force they wouldn’t otherwise voluntarily donate to, but OTOH, if you’re going to do that, looks like things like Tesla and SpaceX are decent stewards of the funds since they ultimately have to turn a profit and Elon has proven to be good at that.

      In terms of tax breaks, I like to say to people: “you understand that tax breaks serve to lower the cost-to-consumer of the end product, right?”

      Of course, nobody (except you, Alan) understands that.



      • Alan Andersen on May 13, 2022 at 04:00

        Yeah. I’m a tax lawyer and I like all tax breaks. I don’t care who gets them. Rich, poor, oligarchs, whoever. People get pissed when “rich” guys get tax breaks. As if the government deserves to waste the stolen money instead of the rich guys using it to actually do useful things with it. It’s like envy among a bunch of prisoners when a couple of the smart ones manage to escape. Good luck to Elon. I hope he makes it over the wall.



  2. Valda Redfern on May 13, 2022 at 02:57

    Granted, both Trump and Musk have gone off the reservation – but Musk does it because he’s an original thinker, rather than to get attention; Trump cannot be called any kind of thinker. Musk is a kind of genius and has the courage to go his own way, weird and misguided though he often is.



    • David Major on May 13, 2022 at 15:06

      Yep, just more blind hatred of Trump. Can’t help yourself.



  3. Andrea Geller on June 22, 2022 at 23:03

    Originally, when Trump became president, I had hoped he would break with long-established things and introduce some really good innovations, simply because he was not part of the “political system” and I thought he would have some original ideas.
    Well, he had some…