Mired in Muskland, Edition 4

 

Mired in Muskland

Edition 4

by Hal Brown

Edition 5 is here

If you liked 4 you'll like 5, maybe

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There is no longer a "We the People of The United States"

Click above to enlarge.

Lyrics to Watch the Throne

Getting Ye back on Twitter would bring along his zillions of followers but it would also benefit him because  a sequel "Watch the Throne 2" album has just been announced.

This is Musk's new personal Twitter page illustration. Gone is his photo of carrying a sink into headquarters.

The photo can be found here with other early photos of Musk.

Note he has dubbed himself Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator. I assume this is a reference to him as a child on a toy telephone. I give him credit for his attempts at humor though they sometimes fail dismally. "If at first you don't succeed," I'd tell him, "learn from what went wrong and try try again." As far as I know there is no Twitter hotline though if he wants to share his number with me that's fine. He has a photo tweeted from Halloween:

 

Mired in Muskland, Third Edition

 Mired In Muskland

by Hal Brown

Click to enlarge

Twitter got off to a rocky start that Musk caused himself when he retweeted a horrible lie about Paul Pelosi and didn't delete it for hours. He could have anticipated the five-fold increase in racist  tweets and done something to remove them too.

I am still recovering from pneumonia and find that I don't have the mental energy to write anything about politics. I'm trying to amuse myself by developing a comic series about Elon Musk. Who knows, maybe it will get his attention. Through the character Head Twit Bot (really me trying to be both his conscience and his therapist - I was a therapist for 40 years) I am trying to send Chief Twit (below right) a message. 

Although the comic has only two characters at present if I keep this up I anticipate adding new ones either as guests or regulars. For example, this guy:

I thought of today's comic strip when I went to sleep last night and put it together when I woke at 2 AM with an intense pain under my ribs so to divert my attention. I spent more than two hours making it. Of course I posted it on Twitter. It will be interesting if I'm banned because of it.

Two examples of Musk doing what I assume is his best to be funny:

This is just too, too weird:

Excerpts from Musk's letter to advertisers

The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is

important to the future of civilization to have

a common digital town square, where a wide

range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy

manner, without resorting to violence. There

is currently great danger that social media

will splinter into far right wing and far left

wing echo chambers that generate more

hate and divide our society.

In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of

traditional media has fueled and catered to

those polarized extremes, as they believe

that is what brings in the money, but, in doing

so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.

That is why I bought Twitter. I didn't do it

because it would be easy. I didn't do it to

make more money. I did it to try to help

humanity, whom I love. And I do so with

humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing

this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very

real possibility.

That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a

free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be

said with no consequences!

Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the

most respected advertising platform in the

world that strengthens your brand and grows

your enterprise. To everyone who has

partnered with us, I thank you. Let us build

something extraordinary together.

It all sounds great, which rhymes with hate, which apparently will have no place on the new Twitter according to Chief Twit. 

It is more than a cliche since this is a both legal and a generally accepted exception to free speech:

When there actually is a fire, shouting fire could cause a panic, so properly notifying theater management is the appropriate way to handle it if you are the first to smell smoke.

Neither I nor my alter ego, Head Twit Bot, should have to explain to Elon how hate speech, conspiracy theories, and lies which can incite people to act violently is an exception to free speech. 

Obama's quote for the day and my comment (not about Elon Musk):

During a weekend campaign rally in Georgia, Obama acknowledged Walker's status as a great football player but questioned what other qualities he had that made him worthy of being a United States senator.

"Some of you may not remember, but Herschel Walker was a heck of a football player... does that make him the best person to represent you?" Obama asked the crowd. "Let's say you're at the airport and you see Walker and you say, 'Hey, there's Herschel, Heisman winner. Let's have him fly the plane!'"

I wouldn't be so sure that one of Walker's alter personalities - he's admitted to having had about a dozen - has developed so he can actually fly an airplane. Either that of he has an honorary pilot license. 

Recent archives (entire archives are in right column)

• Mired in Muskland : An Ongoing Series of Hilarious...
• Elon Musk and his Twitter free-for-all hellscape
• Trump's weirdest, most stupid, and cruelest idea m...
• I'm still sick, being treated at home for pneumoni...
• I have no idea wha I'm going to write today, if an...
• I was wrong, no chance Trump will testify live, bu...
• Congress's Crazy Caucus: Let's call it what it is

• • Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?
  • Will Trump comply with J6 subpoena? Don't be surpr...
  • Blowhard Bannon's belligerent bluster begs bighous...
  • Trump supposedly had a bad day yesterday, but did ...
  • The vicious "art" of political photoshopping
  • Investigation: The mystery of how Trump got Judge ...
  • Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? It may be up t...
  • Trump Junior praises conspiracy theorists for patt...

BLOG STATS:

Last week Canada was in second place with over 100. This week it has been Russia.

Second Edition Mired in Muskand Comic Series

By Hal Brown 

The first edition is here.

Pictoon Number One for Oct. 30 (click images to enlarge)

Updated based on this:

Update based on this:

These are the images I used to put this together:

This is where I found the gold Lexus. It was made for a sheik.

I'm still recovering from pneumonia and woke abut four times over the night coughing. At 3 AM  I also managed to knock a glass of water off my bedside table and got my pillows and sheets soaked. By then I was pretty much awake and got the idea for my first pictoon. By 4 AM I couldn't wait to find and put the images I needed together so I made myself a cup of coffee and the result is what you see above. 

Created with love from my sickbed

The more I learn about Musk and his life the more fascinated I am by him. For example, what he finds amusing, or perhaps downright hysterically hilarious isn't exactly what I'd call adult humor. I added the image below:

The most famous quotes from "Apocalypse Now" are Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore's saying "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and  Col. Kurtz's last words, "the horror, the horror," but then there's this:

Will Twitter turn into the Chief Twit's version of Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival? Beware the merry-go-round.

Full disclosure: Depending on the terms and scope of authority and I'd consider being put on the Twitter Moderation Council.

Mired in Muskland : An Ongoing Series of Hilarious Pictoons: First Edition

 Elon says "comedy is now legal" on Twitter, so I figure since I am hilarious, and even though I am not a cartoonist I can put together what I call pictoons by manipulating images, so why not? All you can do is mock me and throw cyber rotten vegetables at me and boo me off the stage.

As I come up with new pictoons about Elon Musk I will also post them on Twitter. The first one is here.

By Hal Brown

Halloween background Amazon, Cartoon vulture Dragon-Queen01456 Deviant Art

Hall\ ,

I developed a strange forgiving affection for Elon Musk when I learned he was on the autism spectrum disorder. As a therapist I never had a patient with this disorder but from his early childghood to his early 20's I did interact with a friend's son who did. He was an engaging young man who struggled to read family and friend's emotions and to express appropriate affect himself. He was something of a savant who could quickly name every Vice President and knew the names every Major League Baseball player going back many years.

By chance my partner and I are currently enjoying the Korean series now on Netflix "The Extraordinary Attorney Wu." The hero is on the autism spectrum in her fictional world and at reported IQ of 164 even beats Musk's reported IQ of 155.

Review link above

The series title is already taken, but "The Extraordinary Entrepreneur Elon" certainly rings true for the Chief Twit.

When I first saw the video Elon tweeted of hm happily carrying a bathroom sink into Twitter headquarters, he meant it as a visual pun “Entering HQ – let that sink in!” 

The image now adorns his own Twitter page: 

I thought how insensitive this was since he was about to fire the majority of the staff. Then I realized how typical this was of many people on what shortened to being referred to simply as "the spectrum." They simply have trouble grasping the effects their words and behaviors have on other people's feelings. This isn't like the lack of empathy we see in malignant (sociopathic) narcissists like Donald Trump who are sadistic and sometimes revel in causing their rivals and enemies emotional pain. 

Elon may also behave impulsively without thinking through the possible range of consequences of his words and actions. For example, his initial announcement implied Twitter would be an anything goes free speech zone and this led to a rapid fallback from him when there were early signs major advertisers would bolt the platform if it became riff with hateful and violence promoting account.

He denies he had a conversation with Putin happened, but we do know that soon after it was reported he echoed Putin's claims about Ukraine and called for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia. 

His comments about fighting Putin on pay-per-view, and fighting the N. Korean may have been his version of a joke.  Moderately amusing perhaps, but he's no Will Rogers or Mark Twain even if he aspires to be ensconced in the pantheon of American humorists.

I do like Musk's new title. It his to declare since he owns the company. He could have called himself Chief Tweeter but calling himself a "twit" shows a willingness to engage in self-mockery by turning a mild insult into a complement.

Genius that he is it's possible he didn't think of this himself but borrowed it from The Ecological Society of Australia. The twit isn't a bird, however a twite is.

Without further ado, here is the first edition of My Magnificent Comic Mocking Musk. (You can click each mage to enlarge it.)

I made the first image below for a story I wrote here:

Elon Musk put a Tesla in space, now he wants to end a war, and other stories

 Elon Musk put a Tesla in space, now he wants to end a war, and other stories

by Hal Brown

You've probably been keeping up with this story:

I don't have any particular insights into his motivations for advocating for this plan in a series of tweets (here).

Here are a few replies to the tweets (click to enlarge image):

While it prompted lots of replies on Musk's Twitter feed, it also led Zelenskyy to post his reaction in a tweet of his own:

Other Ukrainian officials also responded on Twitter:

I don't think it's an outlandish assumption to think Musk believes that being the world's richest person he may have the world's biggest brain (we've heard that before).

Why not, then, shouldn't he be able to come up with an idea that will end the war of Russian aggression in Ukraine?

No dummy, 

Linus Pauling duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds...

and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry  had no background in medicine or medical research.

I suppose in a world where on one extreme we have a former game show host and rule breaking real estate developer becoming a mentally imbalanced woefully uniformed president and on the other extreme we have a comedian becoming a heroic  president of another country everyone's idea should be judged on their merits.

 Other news of the day 

This story is also related to Ukraine though in a very different way:

Deleted tweet proves the GOP’s Putin propaganda knows no bounds

The Conservative Political Action Conference parroted pro-Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine in a since-deleted tweet, fitting a disturbing pattern in the GOP.

Below: Let's hope dog lovers in Pennsylvania not supporting Walker, where some people may still decide to shoot their dogs when they are unable to hunt anymore, decide that they can't vote for someone who tortures dogs and other animals. They may be able to say let bygones be bygones for paying for his girlfriends abortions or not be bothered by reports that he was a wife beater but hopefully they draw the line at cruelty to animals.

Salon image augmented by Hal Brown

While on the subject of totally unqualified Senate candidates, how about the breaking news about Hershel Walker denying he ever paid for a girlfriend's about claiming this is a total lie? As you may have read in his book he revealed he suffered from multiple personality disorder:

He may be telling the truth as he knows it, or more specifically as he remembers it. In my 40 year career as a psychotherapist I treated five clients with this disorder, currently called dissociative identity disorder. A hallmark of this disorder is that among the various personalities, called alters, there are various kinds of amnesia. In many if not most cases certain personalities can take over with other personalities not having and awareness of what they are doing.

A true cure for this disorder come about when all the identities or alters are integrated into one and there are no amnesiac experiences when one personality is in control and the others aren't and in fact are totally unaware of what is happening. 

Walker claims he's been cured but there's no way to prove this. It is an exceeding difficult disorder to treat let alone achieve cure. In my experience the best a therapist can do is try to keep the self-destructive or dangerous personalities from acting on their impulses or desires.

It is quite possible that the personality or personalities that arranged for and funded the abortion blocked the memory from the other personalities. Unless all the personalities are now integrated along with all of their memories, there is a chance Walker is telling the truth as he knows it about the abortion.

RawStory paraphrases profanity in this title of this story:

Click below to enlarge:

Excerpt:

Trump, who plainly did not want to lose his top economic adviser, told Cohn he should feel free to publicly voice his disagreement, and encouraged him to go to the briefing-room podium and say whatever he needed to."

"You’ll do the right thing," Haberman writes that Vice President Mike Pence said, while putting an arm around Cohn like some kind of mafia movie. 

"Cohn said he would complete his efforts to pass a tax bill, which had been his passion throughout the year, and not stay much longer," the book continues. "'But you should assume I’m done,' Cohn said. He still had his resignation letter in hand, undelivered and unaccepted. As Cohn left the Oval Office, Kelly whispered to him, 'If I were you I’d have shoved that paper up his f*cking ass.'"

Another excuse to make an illustration:

Excerpt:

"Increasingly core to a lot of people in the Christian faith, and particularly in the white evangelical world, is politics and culture," Wehner said, "and in a sense, faith is engrafted. It’s a secondary issue. A friend of mine uses the term 'hood ornament — that faith becomes a hood ornament: It validates these pre-existing attitudes and ideologies. But the way it’s being done is that people are unaware of it, because they’re going through and, in my experience and in my observations, is they’re proof-texting their preordained political, cultural, sociological beliefs, and then saying this is what the Bible says."

Totally out of left-field...

 ... because Portland is my adopted hometown I thought I'd share a lesson learned by some crooked strip club owners here. You may know that Portland is known for it's many strip clubs, some of which vie for the title of the quirkiest:

I suspect that these businesses take in a lot of cash, not only because patrons stuff greenbacks into the performers g-strings, but because men don't like to pay using credit cards for obvious reasons. Since I've never been to one I can't say I observed this in person.

Here's the local story about how trying to avoid paying taxes on cash can come with serious consequences: