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Thanks for the A2A, Tonka!I’d best preface this by saying that I have loved Bob Dylan almost as long as I can remember being alive; my parents only owned his first Greatest Hits collection on vinyl, but once I started buying music on my own, I made it my business to buy anything of his that I could get my grubby mitts on. I will never forget buying my first copy of John Wesley Harding for some inconceivably low, bargain-basement price, taking it home, and having it more or less take over my life. Decades later I still find it haunting. And like every Dylan album, it is distinctive, and the performer is wearing a specific mask: that album is uniquely spare, small-sounding, an anti-Sgt. Pepper to make the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request look like a messy pinch loaf, with the acoustic guitar spectral in the mix and the harmonica cranked up, so that when the winds begin to howl, they howl. I know of no greater cover version in music than Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” and yet I find it no better — only different — from the ghostly original. And of course, that one album finds Dylan repeatedly and incorrectly using the word “whom”; it’s as much a John Wesley Harding tic as that winning cornpone version of his voice that issues, in what must have been a truly unsettling manner, from Nashville Skyline. I am one of the few people on earth who believes Self-Portrait is deeply underrated. So suffice it to say, this is a hero of mine, and not just for that old stuff: I think songs like “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” and “Red River Shore” and “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Not Dark Yet” and “Spirit on the Water” and “Ain’t Talkin’” and “’Cross the Green Mountain” and “Pay in Blood” and “Duquesne Whistle,” and, well, everything on Love & Theft, are wonders of the world, by turns poignant, vatic, funny, traditional and yet new under the sun, and evergreen: I just can’t wear them out. Infidels is a pretty miserable record, but imagine the kidney it requires to leave off that record no less a thing than “Blind Willie McTell,” a song to shake the pillars of the earth. That Dylan, along with greats who only look smaller in his light, like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, will soon pass into eternity is painful for me to contemplate. As George Jones once asked, “Who’s gonna fill their shoes?” (Jones himself was worrying about what a world without Willie Nelson, another titan, would be like — and yet Willie still lives, and makes great stuff, while Jones moulders. The caprices of fate.)Dylan is a supreme songwriter in the folk-blues tradition, with a deep and rich appreciation of American roots music, all the way down to its earliest recorded instances.Let me hasten to add that he’s also a poet, at least sometimes. I wouldn’t exactly put “Wiggle Wiggle” in an anthology alongside Donne and Keats, but others have rightly cited passages from his lyrics that are unmistakably poetry. Other lyricists, even some very good ones, cannot really say that: Elvis Costello is a lyricist of no mean talent, yet “I speak double dutch to a real double duchess” is just a pun, not a line of poetry. Dylan, and perhaps also Leonard Cohen, seem to have transcended “lyrics” to reach the truly lyrical on many occasions.That’s not a knock on Costello or Tom Waits, who is godlike, or many a gifted rapper. The point I’m stressing here is one that applies no more or less to these folks than it does to Richard Wagner. Wagner thought he was a poet, but his “poems” (libretti) do not withstand scrutiny as poems because they cannot express the full brunt of what they signify without being colored and infused with the unspoken power of the music.And that, generally, even for Dylan, is the salient difference between libretti or “lyrics” and poetry. The latter is its own self-substantial thing; it is its own music, and its potency is not bound up with the way in which it is woven into a texture of notes, chords, sounds. It is music and lyrics together, typically, that produce the most powerful effects.Dylan himself knows this, I believe. He will sometimes actively de-poeticize a phrase he’s borrowing to make it better suit its musical context. The detestable but sometimes wry and eloquent Robert Christgau, self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics” and me-proclaimed pretentious prick, keenly observes this in his (I admit) pretty great capsule review of Modern Times:Modern Times [Columbia, 2006]It took Dylan five years to create this conservative album even if he laid it down in a week, and I doubt he could have gotten it done at all without cribbing rhetoric from a shallower conservative, Confederate poet Henry Timrod. When not calling his new nation to arms or locating Satan's domicile north of the Mason-Dixon line, Timrod had a gift for genteel sentiment that's essential to the old-fashioned tone here, and Dylan grabbed what he needed. But note the intrusion of his old friend deliberate barbarism when, for instance, Timrod's "logic frailer than the flowers" produces Dylan's "more frailer than the flowers." Without such touches, the conservatism would be stultifying. The blues tropes help, too. Then again, without the '30s pop, the blues grooves would be stultifying. Instead, the entire construction is a thing of grace--conservative, and new under the sun. A+The allusive transaction with Timrod is very much to my point, and not just because “the conservatism” of the album “would be stultifying” “without such touches,” but also because Dylan has the best kind of ear for making language suit the idiom, whichever version of it he’s using at the moment, of his music. Christgau is right that the interdependency of the generic elements are what allow Dylan to make all of them seem old and yet “new under the sun,” “a thing of grace.”You’ve probably felt a “but” coming for some time now.The Nobel Prize for Literature is for — as advertised — literature, which refers to lettered things, not lettered things set to music. The total artistic effect of Dylan’s music, even in those cases when his lyrics ascend to the level of poetry (which is less often than not: “Slow Train” ain’t poetry, folks, and neither is “Country Pie,” much as I love that country pie), relies for its overall aesthetic effect on music. And since his music is not only written but arranged, and often arranged multiple ways before a final version is reached, its total “poetic” effect is often quite different across different versions: consider the evolution of his masterful “Mississippi.” Those three different versions lend greater and less power to different lines. All of them are powerful, but none of them inflect the lyric in the same way, and that shows the dependency of the lyric on musical context, on the grain of the voice, on diction and inflection and phrasing and delivery and pacing and all sorts of performative variables utterly alien to the marmoreal fixity of a Faulkner novel or of a great poem. In Memoriam A.H.H. is always the self-same thing. Of course, any attempt to read it aloud creates an interaction between text and reader that nudges the auditor toward one interpretation of sound and sense rather than another, but the text itself exists outside of this or that reading, and does not rely on recitation for its power. I am more moved by Tennyson’s poem in the quiet of my room, alone in the silence with those silently-speaking words, than I could ever be when listening to someone read it to me.So:If any musician of the “rock” era deserves this award, it’s Bob Dylan. He is an American treasure, and a titan of American music. I’m thrilled for him.But! Whether or not his lyrics sometimes read as pure poetry, even divorced from their musical context, they are never complete without musical embedment and the unique performance Dylan gives them.This is why I, and anyone, must speak of Dylan foremost as a titan of American music.As a pure, non-musical poet, Dylan’s oeuvre is slender. As a maker of music whose combination of music and words rises, at its best, to the extreme verge of what popular music can do, it is astonishingly vast.Vocal music does conflate two genres, but it is music, in most cases, Dylan’s included, that provides the sine qua non for the particular effects the words have. This is true even of purely vocal music: we might like this Josquin mass more than that Palestrina one, or vice versa, even though the sung text is identical, and that can only be because the settings of those words in rhythm, melody, harmony, etc., are different.So we run the risk of distending the category of literature by stuffing into it those works of art that rely as much or more on music than on words. Parsifal and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan are both great works of art. But neither attains that status just because the words are good. Those words are sung to music. “Where black is the color, where none is the number”: “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” seems to me a pretty grand folk poem, but no one can tell me that the total effect of that line, and the unconscionably powerful larger verse it comes from, is not bound up with how Dylan sings it, or with the plain folk-ballad accompaniment of acoustic guitar.The argument that emerges is twofold. If music is literature, then other artists worthy of this accolade, Dylan’s true peers — Holiday, Armstrong, Ellington, Sinatra, Miles, Bird — were passed by. All but one of these was black; no doubt this is not an accident. But it is also true that these folks were primarily musicians. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man reminds us, if we somehow didn’t notice, that Satchmo’s “Black and Blue” rises to the level of poetry — it reminds me of Langston Hughes, honestly. But will anyone say that the pathos of that song does not emerge fully only in performance? And if this is true of them, is it not also true of Dylan?Meanwhile, some New York Times coverage of the award quoted various people touting the collapse of the highbrow/lowbrow distinction. This is, on their view, good. But why is it better if we make the mountain and the valley identical? Don’t both lose their peculiar value? Dylan, I think, lives on the mountain, or many floors up in Cohen’s “tower of song” — but while I won’t vilify a great bubblegum pop song (I’m certainly not immune to the early Beatles singles, or to many catchy or otherwise enjoyable not-great-art tunes in the decades since), I won’t conflate the delights of a killer tune with one that rises to the level of high art. Lemmy singing “Ace of Spades” still thrills me, but “Ace of Spades” exists in a different space, and perhaps has different emotional and psychological uses, than something like “Tears of Rage.” Dylan wrote lowbrow tunes and he wrote some things that could never, in good conscience, be called any such thing. The variety of his work shows that the two are not necessarily inimical to one another, and can coexist, but it also bears witness to the fact that they’re different, and that “Blowin’ in the Wind” occupies a kind of higher ground than “Peggy Day.” I love both of those songs, but anyone with ears, a brain, and a heart will concede the difference right away. This doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes, perhaps often, in the mood to hear “Peggy Day,” not “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But that is, in part, because art takes more out of us: great art is exhausting, cathartic. That is essential to the experience of it: it makes demands.And if we forget this, we are on a road that could lead to the judges on The Voice receiving the Nobel instead of some great, struggling novelist. I want a Nobel for Cormac McCarthy before I see one in the hands of Blake Shelton.Meanwhile, if we want to honor music with a Nobel Prize, how about a Nobel Prize for Music?In short, yay for Dylan! But it’s kind of a dangerous precedent, I think.I’d like to end with a demonstration of a point I was making about interdependency of lyrics and music in Dylan’s work. Out of so many moments in his music that cut through me like a knife, let me choose this, from “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.” This verse kills me:Everybody got all the moneyEverybody got all the beautiful clothesEverybody got all the flowersI don't have one single roseThat, dear reader, is not poetry — not in the same world in which this also exists:The second day I stood and sawThe osprey plunge with triggered claw,Feathering blood along the shore,To lay the living sinew bare.And the third day I cried: ‘BewareThe soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,Forever bent upon the kill.I was reminded of these latter lines, excerpted from Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis,” just yesterday, when I read Stanley Chin's answer to What is the meaning of the poem Genesis by Geoffrey Hill? Stanley and I discussed that shock of recognition one gets when one encounters the Real Thing: that undeniable sense that one is in the presence of Poetry.But back to those demotic lines from Dylan’s song. All by themselves, they seem a mixture of envy, bitterness, and self-pity. Perhaps that’s what they are. It’s interesting, of course, that they follow a verse that does something completely different:I'm listening to Billy Joe ShaverAnd I'm reading James JoyceSome people they tell meI've got the blood of the land in my voiceWhat does this do? It tells us what the artiste is listening to and reading. He’s listening to a terrific, but not “Genesis”-level folkie, and he’s reading one of the mighty edifices of literature. And then he turns to himself, the entity doing the reading and listening, and says that some people — the blushing violet won’t aver that this is the case, but you know, he’s heard it — hear “the blood of the land in [his] voice.” The blood of the land. The blood of the land. So familiar. Maybe because it sounds like Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, talking about “the terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land.” So we have some intertextual buzzing here, and we’ve moved from Ireland to the mythic America of Yoknapatawpha County if we have ears to hear it.But when we move on to the ensuing “everybody got all the money” verse, how should we take the transition? In his later years, Dylan has certainly written lyrics which flout direct connection from one verse to the next — a kind of hallucinatory webwork of unassociated things that achieve miraculous coherence from the way he inhabits and unifies them as a singer. But here perhaps we could say that Dylan is the old folk-rock icon listening to a contemporary and fellow-traveler, but one infinitely less iconic and less great than himself; that the folk-rock poet is also reading Joyce, a wellspring of linguistic marvels; and that the synthesis of these, in a particularly American incarnation (the Faulkner nod is crucial), is to be found in himself — and that somehow, for all that, he finds himself without all the money, the clothes, the flowers, without so much as a single rose.Taken as a biographical comment, this is just false. Dylan has all the cowboy hats he likes, and plenty of money, unless he’s somehow managed to reduce himself to poverty in spite of showbiz success spanning decades. And surely the countless millions who have loved him, love him now, will continue loving him as long as he lives, and come to love him even after he is gone, would each give him so paltry a thing as “one single rose,” right? Surely.But what we have here, of course, is an expression not so much of real state of affairs — I owe the IRS big time, and all the haberdashers and florists are dead — but rather the expression of a mood, as sense of a more refined aloneness, a sense of not having received the comfort a life of achievement, of interacting with and embodying art, should perhaps give so great a figure. We see some chasm between the man recognizing the public face of his greatness, what “some people” say, and how stripped down and unloved he feels in spite of that. Is that self-pity? The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called a sonnet “a moment’s monument,” and this moment, and this song, are much the same; they’re not pure poetry as Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” or Rossetti’s work are, but they are the monument to a moment. And how we perceive the real valence of that moment depends on the fact that the lyrics are not, by themselves, pure poetry, but tied to a song, a performance, an interpretation that tells us in more than words what this mood is.Thing is, when I heard those lyrics about the money, the clothes, and the rose for the first time, my eyes filled with tears, and that was because I heard Bob Fucking Dylan sing them. The fact that it was this — to repeat the phrase one last time — total effect of words and music that fell on me like a hammer and wrung tears from my eyes is my point: this is not literature, but it is certainly art — all I’m saying is that generic terms exist to create taxonomies of art, and conflating them overmuch reduces order to what Ovid, a Nobel-worthy poet if one ever lived, would call a rudis indigestaque moles, a “rude, ill-digested mass.” (Ovid is referring the the state of chaos that preceded the separation of the elements and the formation of cosmos [which happens to be a Greek word meaning “order”] by a some god, or by kinder nature).I’m not reading literature, but experiencing an American branch of the art of music — I am tasting the blood of the land — when I hear it all together, in a genre for which no Nobel Prize, for better or worse, exists.[Here your humble but verbose author discovers Dylan’s tremendous studio version isn’t available anywhere on YouTube and is deeply dismayed by the many dreadful covers that are to be found there instead. Indeed, it seems Dylan has gotten much, perhaps all, of his intellectual property off the interwebs. Damn it.]The song’s on this album: Amazon.com: Together Through Life: Bob Dylan: MP3 Downloads. It may also be on Spotify or Pandora. Anyway, go listen it, and listen for that moment I just wrote about.Let me pick a poignant moment from another great artist that makes the same point about interdependence of words, music, performance. This is not great poetry, though it’s witty in the way it tropes two common rock topoi, first the one which (typically) complains of insufficient sex, and the overarching one about not being able to get no satisfaction:I don't smoke no cigaretteI don't drink no alcoholI ain't had much loving yetBut that's always been your callHey I don't miss it babyI got no taste for anything at allIts affected demotic negatives (“I got no taste”) are obviously a kind of rock pose adopted ironically by this most literate of singer-songwriters. The sentiment is brutal, both in its suggestion of the singer’s real-life age and within the dramatic situation of the song, in which the speaker has “caught the darkness” from his addressee, a vampiric darkness which one “drink[s]. . . up” from another, and which sucks the color and life out of the world. Bitter, hard, ugly sentiment, to be sure. And yet it, too, sounds like pique and complaint until you hear the desiccated stylishness of Leonard Cohen’s delivery — a delivery that makes those words’ meaning refract variously through any number of prisms, or levels of metacommentary:Pretty effective, unless you can’t get past the fact that his voice “isn’t good,” a grievously mistaken judgment that I reserve for another day.Incidentally, much as I love Cohen’s “Darkness,” Dylan’s “I Feel a Change Comin’ On,” to which I am incredibly annoyed I can’t provide a link, is considerably better.He’s a genius. I’m happy to see him recognized. Not sure about “literature,” since his art isn’t exactly literature, and “literature” seems at once too grandiose and too limiting a term for the particular sorts of effect Dylan’s art has. Color me ambivalent.But for Dylan — to quote someone who does belong wholly to literature — “more life into a time without boundaries.”EDIT 11.10.16: More life into a time without boundaries: a fine line by a dead poet, Wallace Stevens. Not a month after I wrote these words, Leonard Cohen, whose song I use as an example of something in this answer, is dead at 82. The necrology of 2016 is breathtaking. This is the mother of all shitty years. It may claim Dylan yet. Let’s hope not.

Are You One of Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages 3 Million Descendants?10 Incredible Mysteries Of Ancient Ireland - ListverseMillions of Irish Americans, especially those in New York, may be directly descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, the most prolific warrior in Irish history. A team of geneticists at Trinity College Dublin led by Professor Dan Bradley discovered that as many as 3 million men worldwide ay be descendants of the Irish warlord, who was who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405.[1]Niall of the Nine Hostages was the greatest king that Ireland ever knew. His reign was epochal, and was the Irish equivalent of Alexander the Great in Macedonia.[2] He not only ruled Ireland greatly and strongly, but carried the name and the fame, and the power and the fear, of Ireland into all neighbouring nations. He was, moreover, founder of the longest, most important, and most powerful Irish royal dynasty.[3] Almost without interruption his descendants were the High Kings of Ireland for 600 years.[4] Under him the spirit of pagan Ireland leaped up in its last great flame of military glory. In later generations, this was to be superseded by another great flame, less fierce but just as powerful; which spread to the bounds of neighbouring nations to the uttermost ends of Europe. That was the flame kindled by Patrick, which was to expand and grow for centuries.Niall Noígíallach or Niall of the Nine Hostages in English, was an Irish king believed to have lived during the 4th / 5th century.[5] The Uí Néill dynasties, which dominated the northern part of ‘33Ireland between the 6th and 10th centuries, claim descent from Ireland.[6] It is assumed that Niall was a real person, though much of the information preserved about him is legendary in nature, thus blurring the lines between fact and fiction.The Annals of the Four Masters dates his accession to 378 and death to 405.[7] The chronology of Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn broadly agrees, dating his reign from 368-395, and associating his raiding activities in Britain with the kidnapping of Saint Patrick (ca. 390-460).[8]Niall is placed in the traditional list of High Kings of Ireland. However, the traditional roll of kings and its chronology is now recognised as artificial. The High Kingship did not become a reality until the 9th century, and Niall's status has been inflated in line with the political importance of the dynasty he founded.[9] Perhaps the most tangible evidence of Niall’s existence is his estimated two or three million descendants who live around the world today, a figure obtained from genetic research.[10]Folio 53 from the Book of Leinster. Lebor Gabála Érenn is recorded in more than a dozen medieval manuscripts and the Book of Leinster is just one of the primary sources of text. Image: Dublin, TCD, MS 1339 (olim MS H 2.18) (Lebor Gabála Érenn - Wikipedia).A biography of Niall can be constructed from sources such as the "Roll of Kings" section of the 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn,[11] the Annals of the Four Masters,[12] compiled in the 17th-century, chronicles such as Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634)[13] , and legendary tales like the 11th-century "The Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon" [14] and "The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages". These sources date from long after Niall's time and they have little to no value as history.The supposedly fearless leader battled the English, the Scots, the French and even the Romans, and struck fear into the heart of his enemies. His dynasty lasted for centuries, continuing up until the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland at the end of the 16th century.The Irish annals and chronicles date Niall Noígíallach’s reign to between the late 4th and early 5th centuries. Modern scholars, on the other hand, have suggested that Niall actually reigned about half a century later than the sources report. [15] In any case, Niall is recorded to have been the son of Eochaid Mugmedón, the High King of Ireland (this title, however, is anachronistic, as the High Kingship only became a reality much later during the 9th century).[16] The Irish king’s first wife was Mongfind and together they had four sons. Niall’s mother was the king’s second wife, Cairenn Chasdub, the daughter of Sachell Balb a Saxon king.[17]Kingdoms of Ireland. (ZyMOS / Public Domain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kingdom_of_Leinster-900.svg))Abandoned At BirthWhen Cairenn was pregnant with Niall, she was forced by Mongfind to carry water from the well, hoping that the heavy work would cause her to miscarry. Mongfind’s plan, however, did not work and Cairenn gave birth while on her way to the well. She left the baby on the grass and continued her chore, drawing the water and bringing the filled buckets back home. Cairenn did not return for her child, nor did anyone dare to pick it up, for fear of the queen. Eventually, a poet by the name of Torna came along, recognized that the baby would become a great king and took the child. Torna named the baby Niall and raised him in secret.When Niall was old enough, Torna brought him back to Tara, the seat of the High Kingship, so as to reclaim his heritage. After all these years Cairenn was still forced to carry water. When her son saw this, he told her to drop the buckets, took her inside, dressed her in purple robes, and placed her on a high seat. No doubt, Mongfind was furious when she heard this, but the king was delighted to hear of his son’s return. Mongfind tried to ensure that one of her sons would be heir to the throne, but she failed to do so, and Niall eventually succeeded his father as king.[18]When Niall returned his mother was still forced to carry water. He dressed her in purple robes and placed her on a high seat. ( cindygoff / Adobe)Of Niall's youth there are many legends, but one in particular show the working of his destiny. One day, the five brothers being in the smith's forge when it took fire, they were commanded to run and save what they could. Their father, who was looking on (and who, say some, designedly caused the fire, to test his sons), observed with interest Neill's distinctiveness of character, his good sense and good judgment. While Brian saved the cariots from the fire, Ailill a shield and a sword, Fiachra the old forge trough, and Fergus only a bundle of firewood, Niall carried out the bellows, the sledges, the anvil, and anvil block - saved the soul of the forge, and saved the smith from ruin. Then his father said: "It is Niall who should succeed me as Ard Righ of Eirinn".Niall As KingNiall was famed and feared for his raids on Britain along with his brothers and sons. He eventually came to control most of the Northern half of Ireland. He conquered the Uliad aristocracy[19] , which ruled in Ulster, and by this victory and subsequent consolidation of power was able to found a dynasty, the Uí Neill, which gave rise to the O'Neill clan.[20] Three of his sons founded kingdoms in Ulster (collectively the Northern Uí Neill), other sons founded kingdom in the Irish midlands (the Southern Uí Neill). His children included Conall macNéill, after whom Donegal was names Tír Conaill; Eóghan (Owen) macNéill, after whom the Inishowen peninsula is named; Coirpre macNéill, who went on to also become King of Ireland; Laoghaire (Leary) macNéill, another to succeed as King of Ireland; and Conall Cremthainne macNéill.[21] His own brother Brian established the dynasty which provided the kingship, nobility and the aristocracy of Connacht for 600 years, and through that kingship, the frequent high-kingship of Ireland right up to the 12th century.[22]In Niall's time, Ireland was governed in a loose federal arrangement of four large provinces (Ulster, Munster, Leinster & Connacht). A fifth province, known as Meath (the centre) bordering all four of the other provinces, and joining the sea to the Shannon river, was set aside as the central governing area ruled from Uisneach at first, and later from Tara.[23] The four provinces each had their own King, and central control fell to the most powerful of these, who would become High King. [24] The four provincial Kings would, at least nominally, be subservient to the High King.Illustration of Niall of the Nine Hostages - renowned for his exploits on the battlefield and the bedroom (Niall of the Nine Hostages, King of the Connachta)Niall fought many wars against his neighbors, defeated them, and brought them under his control. In order to ensure peace, Niall took hostages from each of the areas he conquered. According to the saga "The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages" says that he received five hostages from the five provinces of Ireland (Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Meath), and one each from Scotland, the Saxons, the Britons and the Franks.[25] As the number of hostages was nine, Niall earned the epithet ‘of the Nine Hostages’.Another version of the story states that Saint Patrick was one of Niall’s hostages. It is said that Niall was responsible for having captured the young boy, later to be St. Patrick, along with his 2 sisters during a raid along the coast of Britain.[26] In 405, the 27th year of his reign, Niall led an expedition against Britain, where it is thought that he may have captured the young Romano-British boy named Succat but becoming known as Patricus,son of Calpurnius, a local magistrate, from somewhere in the region of the modern Milford Haven.[27] Patrick was first brought into Ireland at the age of 16 years, among 200 children brought by the army out of Britain. A son of Niall, who later followed his father as High-King at Tara circa 427-430, welcomed St. Patrick to his court in 432.[28]St.Patrick (St. Patrick - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online)Niall was said to have ruled over Tara, but modern historians think it more likely that Niall’s descendants founded Tara, and that Niall himself actually set up his kingdom at Uisnech[29], another "royal hill" in Meath.DeathNiall’s story becomes rather confusing towards the end. His death in a foreign land was to be brought about, not by the strategy or might of the foreign enemy, but by the treachery of one of his own. Niall was killed by Eochaidh, Prince of Leinster while in Gaul (France) in a ford of the river Leon (now called Lianne) that spot is now called the Ford of Niall near Boulogue-sur-mer.[30] He fell by the hand of Eochaidh in revenge for some ancient wrong.In the saga "The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages", Eochaid's enmity with Niall begins when he is refused hospitality by Niall's poet, Laidcenn mac Bairchid. He makes war and destroys the poet's stronghold, killing his son Leat[11] (Keating has it that Laidchenn was a druid, and that Eochaid killed his son after he used defamatory language towards him). Laidchenn responds by satirising Leinster so that no corn, grass or leaves grow there for a year. Then Niall makes war against Leinster, and peace is concluded on the condition that Eochaid is handed over. Niall chains Eochaid to a standing stone, and sends nine warriors to execute him, but Eochaid breaks his chain and kills all nine of them with it. He then kills Laidchenn by throwing a stone which lodges in his forehead. Niall exiles him to Scotland. The story then becomes confused. Niall makes war in Europe as far as the Alps, and the Romans send an ambassador to parlay with him. Abruptly, the tale then has Niall appearing before an assembly of Pictish bards in Scotland, where he is killed by an arrow shot by Eochaid from the other side of the valley. Keating has Eochaid shoot Niall from the opposite bank of the river Loire during his European campaign. His men carry his body home, fighting seven battles on the way, and his foster-father Torna dies of grief. His body is said to have been buried at Ochann, now known as Faughan Hill in County Meath.[31]Although there is much disagreement between the various sources, they all agree that Niall died outside of Ireland in 405, and that he was killed by Eochaid, the son of Énnae Cennsalach, King of Leinster.[32] In one version of the tale, Niall was fighting against the Romans. His campaign brought him as far as the Alps and the Romans sent an ambassador to negotiate for peace.[33] In the next instance, however, Niall was in Scotland before an assembly of Pictish bards, where he was killed by an arrow fired from across the valley by Eochaid.[34]For nearly 700 years, the Uí Néill stronghold was the Grianan Aileach[35] , a massive ring fort still standing atop Greenan Mountain, five miles west of modern day Londonderry (Derry):For nearly 700 years, the Uí Néill stronghold Grianan Aileach, a massive ring fort still standing atop Greenan Mountain, five miles west of modern day Londonderry (Derry) for nearly 700 years, the Uí Néill stronghold. (Are you a descendant of Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages?)The ambiguity between fact and fiction has certainly cast doubts on the existence of Niall. It is likely that he was a historical figure, though various legends were added to his story by those who wrote about his life. A genetic study done in recent times has provided support for the existence of Niall.A very common Irish surname is O’Neill (Ui Neill in Gaelic), meaning ‘descendant son of Niall’. A team of geneticists at Trinity College, Dublin surveyed the DNA, in particular the Y-chromosome of 60 Irishmen.[36] The researchers found that a small number of Y-chromosome types predominate in Ireland. One of these types was found to be very common, i.e. one in five men, in the northwest, an area which coincides with the ancestral seat of the Ui Neill family.[37] By extrapolating the data, the researchers estimated that there are two or three million men in the world today with the same Y-chromosome. The researchers also found that as many as one in 12 men in Ireland have the same DNA as the Irish king and in Ireland’s northwest, that figure rises to one in five.[38] It seems that all these people are the descendants of a single male ancestor, Niall of the Nine Hostages being a plausible candidate.The “Niall” chromosome has also been found in 16.7% of men in western and central Scotland[39] and has turned up in multiple North American population samples, including 2% of European-American New Yorkers. “Given historically high rates of Irish emigration to North America and other parts of the world, it seems likely that the number of descendants worldwide runs to perhaps two to three million males,” said the study.[40]Then there is Scotland and New York where the particular chromosome is revealed in reasonable frequency in New Yorkers of European descent. That means that around one in 50 New Yorkers who have European roots – with surnames such as O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn – have the same genetic signature as Niall of the Nine Hostages.[41]Peter Quinn, renowned Irish-American author from the Bronx and descendant of Niall, told the New York Times, "I hope this means that I inherit a castle in Ireland."[42]Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who made headlines when he was arrested by an Irish police officer while trying to break into his own locked home, is also a descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages and is related to the cop who booked him.[43]The study also confirmed the genealogical and oral traditions of Gaelic Ireland, and is a “powerful illustration of the potential link between prolificacy and power.” Though medieval Ireland was Christian, divorce was allowed, people married early and concubinage was practiced. Illegitimate sons were claimed by their fathers and their rights were protected by law. “As in other polygamous societies, the siring of offspring was related to power and prestige.” The study points out that one Uí Néill chieftain, who died in 1423, had 18 sons with 10 different women and counted 59 grandsons in his male line alone.[44]Irish Gaels, possibly descendants of Niall. (Иван Дулин / Public Domain )Niall joins Thomas Jefferson and Genghis Khan as one of the major historical figures when it comes to DNA fertility.Jefferson, the third president of the U.S., slept with one of his slaves, a woman called Sally Hemings and fathered a child with her. A 1998 study found that Jefferson has an extremely rare DNA type, his Y chromosome belonging to just 1 percent of the population.[45]A 2003 study found that 8 percent of all Mongolian males are the descendants of Genghis Khan, sharing with him the same Y chromosome.[46] His son had as many as 40 sons, and his grandson, as many as 22. The Khan family may have as many as 16 million descendants in Asia today.[47]Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan was renowned for his domination of ancient Asia, and genetic studies have indicated that his powerful reach extends into modern times, as his DNA is thought to be present in approximately 16 million men living today.[48] A 2003 study found that 8 percent of all Mongolian males are the descendants of Genghis Khan, sharing with him the same Y chromosome.[49] His son had as many as 40 sons, and his grandson, as many as 22. The name “Temujin”, the title “Genghis Khan” was later bestowed upon him by tribal leaders after battle victories. It meant “universal ruler,” and such a title remains fitting, considering his suspected prolific genetic contribution to descendants centuries later.The importance of Niall for succeeding generations, apart from the heroic exploits which give him legendary status, has been in the way his conquests are reflected not only in place-names across all of Ireland, but also in the clann names which preceded the present-day surnames or family names of so many Irish families of Gaelic origin, as well as a great many of the proper-names/first-names too. Literally hundreds of Gaelic forenames & surnames derive directly from this extraordinary king and his immediate family, siblings, successors and descendants.Footnotes[1] The genetic imprint of Niall of the Nine Hostages [2] Niall of the Nine Hostages[3] How ancient DNA is transforming history[4] Millions descended from one Irish High King[5] Niall of the Nine Hostages - Wikipedia[6] Grianan of Aileach: Hillfort of a Legendary Kingdom Which Lies on 5000-Year-Old Sacred Ground[7] Full text of "Annals of the kingdom of Ireland"[8] Full text of "Foras feasa ar Éirinn = The history of Ireland"[9] The Kings of Pagan Ireland - Concise History of Ireland[10] The genetic imprint of Niall of the Nine Hostages [11] Lebor Gabála Érenn - Wikipedia[12] Annals of the Four Masters - Wikipedia[13] Geoffrey Keating - Wikipedia[14] Echtra mac nEchach Muigmedóin[15] http://Kathleen Hughes, "The church in Irish society, 400–800, in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), A New History of Ireland Vol I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, Oxford University Press, 2005, [16] Eochaid Muigh Meadhoin (Eochaid Mugnedon King of Ireland) mac Muiredach 122nd Ard-rí na h'Éireann (± 326-± 357) » Stamboom Homs » Genealogie Online[17] Cairenn - Wikipedia[18] Niall of the Nine Hostages[19] Uliad dynasty - irishedition.com[20] Are you a descendant of Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages?[21] Medieval Irish warlord boasts three million descendants[22] Connaught | historical kingdom, Ireland[23] Navan Historical Society - Meath History[24] History of Ireland (400–800) - Wikipedia[25] Aghade Holed Stone (Cloghaphoill) - Voices from the Dawn[26] Niall of the Nine Hostages - HIstory of Ireland - Irish Kings[27] The Day of St Patrick and the myth of snakes being cast out of Ireland[28] St. Patrick's Arrival in Ireland[29] Hill of Uisneach - Wikipedia[30] King Niall of the Nine Hostages - Expedia Irish Kings and Queens[31] Orgain Néill Noígiallaig[32] Text: The Violent Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages[33] The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages[34] Niall of the Nine Hostages, King of the Connachta[35] Grianan of Aileach: Hillfort of a Legendary Kingdom Which Lies on 5000-Year-Old Sacred Ground[36] Page on uchicago.edu[37] The genetic imprint of Niall of the Nine Hostages [38] Famous DNA Review, Part III - Niall of the Nine Hostages - The Genetic Genealogist[39] Irish and Scottish linked by High King Niall of the nine hostages[40] Famous DNA Review, Part III - Niall of the Nine Hostages - The Genetic Genealogist[41] The Descendants of Niall[42] If Irish Claim Nobility,Science May Approve[43] Gates Is Half-Irish, Related to Arresting Cop [44] Are you a descendant of Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages?[45] Thomas Jefferson's Monticello[46] 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan - Gene Expression[47] Genghis Khan's genetic legacy has competition[48] The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols[49] Genghis Khan's genetic legacy has competition

You decide:In his earlier years he said he was motivated to significantly better the world and go into business doing it. He identified the key areas that needed improvement and said he would focus on those. Musk has no interest in going the easy route. He is brilliant, intense, known to be cold in person, and persistent as hell once he sets a goal. Most people would be content with focusing on one area, like green automotibles. No Musk, he runs several highly innovative, “moonshot” type companies. Musk himself is not an inventor. He is more like Steve Jobs, although vastly more important. iPhones are cute, but going to Mars is quite another.Elon Musk used to be kind of an asshole, too. But with his success, so has his assholeishness. He went from slightly asshole to Bond villain with the following Tweet:His sense of entitlement has reached the megalomaniac level. Who believes he has the right to literally overthrow a government because it serves his business interests? This guy.But it doesn’t end there. Oh no.Let me define “asshole” (a technical term in this case) as in the book Assholes, a Theory by philosopher Aaron James. In this work, he defines an “asshole” as someone who:Allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;Does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement;Is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.Now I’m going to allow for the possibility that someone of extraordinary intelligence and originality like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs (deceased) may, in fact, deserve special advantages and may even be entitled to them. What makes the brilliant and creative person at this level cross the line into being an “asshole” is the completely unnecessary (except psychologically perhaps) and in fact dangerous self-immunization against the complaints of other people. To my mind, this reflects a weakness of character, not the entitlement of brilliance. What’s the weakness and what’s the price they pay?The weakness is that “assholes” self-identify with their brilliance, defining themselves as different and better than all others, out of fear that everything else about them is somehow inferior, unlovable or unacceptable. If you find this painfully close to the truth, then chances are you’re NOT an asshole, because a true asshole wouldn’t recognize himself in this paragraph. A true asshole probably wouldn’t even read this blog. If you recognize some truth in this statement, there’s hope for you and you may be a jerk, not an asshole.The price that true assholes pay is that, as said above, they don’t get the benefit of feedback from others, even other brilliant types. Out of fear of weakness, they’re closed off to it, shielded from it. They just can’t hear it. If for example, Elon Musk is an asshole and not just brilliant or even just a jerk, then he will not hear the advice given by others, even by others who admire or love him, that he needs management help. I don’t know Musk well enough (having had one conversation at a dinner party once) to say for sure that he is or isn’t a true “asshole.” His behavior does hint at it. Let’s take a look at his behavior and how others advise him:At Tesla, my earlier statement that Chairperson Robyn Denholm is not Elon Musk’s “adult supervision” in any meaningful way was confirmed by Musk himself in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minute’s Lesley Stahl last week. The subject came up in conversation about Musk’s tweets, specifically with the SEC requirement that tweets be pre-approved (by an internal oversight person or group) if they contain, or reasonably could contain, information material to the Company or its shareholders. Musk claimed “The only tweets that would have to be, say, ‘reviewed’ would be if a tweet had a probability of causing a movement in the stock [price],” Musk told Stahl. “Otherwise, it’s, ‘hello, first amendment.’ Like, freedom of speech is fundamental.”Stahl missed the opportunity to catch Musk on the main point that it’s not just stock movement that the SEC is concerned about, but went ahead and tried to catch him on a more subtle point, which did lead to an interesting response from Musk:STAHL: “But how do they know if it’s going to move the market if they’re not reading all of them before you send them?”MUSK: “Well, I guess we might make some mistakes. Who knows?”STAHL: “Are you serious?”MUSK: “Nobody’s perfect.” [Laughs.]STAHL: “Look at you.”MUSK: “I want to be clear, I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them”STAHL: “But you’re abiding by the settlement, aren’t you?”MUSK: “Because I respect the justice system.”Later in the interview, Musk was asked about his company’s new chairperson, Robyn Denholm, who replaced him as part of the settlement. The “impression was that [Denholm] was put into kind of watch over you,” Stahl said. Typically, the job of the chairperson of a board of directors is to serve as the CEO’s boss.“That’s not realistic, in the sense that I’m the largest shareholder in the company, and I can just call for a shareholder vote and get anything done that I want,” Musk replied.This is exactly what I claimed a few weeks ago in this blog, that no one should expect Denholm to “check” or “supervise” Musk. I wasn’t surprised at all that he would confirm this. But does this make Musk an “asshole”, or will Musk in fact be open to a true partnership with someone like Denholm.As you may know from my writings (e.g. this blog and Born to Star), I’m a fan of Elon Musk as a heroic “vision master” though I don’t defend some aspects of his public persona, and wanting the best for him and his ventures, call for partnering with professional Execution Masters like Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX. The nature of such a wonderful partnership at its best is not to “check” or “supervise” the Vision Master but to compliment him or her out of mutual respect.Many other business commentators and investors seem to agree with me. See for example see Elon Musk Need to Bring in a Strong Number 2 at Tesla (Elon Musk needs to recognize his limitations and bring in a strong No. 2 to help run Tesla: Analysts)“We think he’s going through a founder’s dilemma. He’s clearly stretched too thin,” Consumer Edge Research analyst James Albertine said on “Squawk Box.” “I think this is Elon going through personal issues, having his own struggles with the bears, very publicly.”“The board needs to bring in a chief operating officer or co-CEO to take some of the pressures off of Musk and allow him to concentrate on being a ‘brilliant leader as a visionary,'” contended Albertine.Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch, interviewed on CNBC along with Albertine, also believes Musk needs help.“I think it’s really going to have to come from Elon,” he said. “If he can grow up enough to recognize where his limits are, I think, it would be tremendous for the stock and actually very good for the company … I think they need another presence that can actually counterbalance Elon’s capabilities in terms of visualizing a new reality for an industry with someone who can really mine the pennies and nickels and the details of an operation in a way he can’t,” Rusch concluded.Musk’s willingness and ability to work so well with Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX give me hope that he will eventually listen to advisors such as myself, Albertine and Rusch, as well as a near-peer Sir Richard Branson. Branson’s advice is found at Richard Branson gives Elon Musk some advice: Learn to delegate and get some sleep. If he’ll eventually listen to advisors, or at least consider his own success at SpaceX, then we could safely conclude that Elon Musk is not an “asshole” and might be a good example for you as a Vision Master yourself.[1]Musk’s newfound assholishness knows no bounds:The people who do the actual work of building the cars at Tesla are trying to unionize. Tesla’s response to that, they say, has been to fire union supporters. Last year, Elon Musk personally urged workers not to unionize, and promised to provide them with free frozen yogurt if they listened to him.One of the reasons that Musk’s factory employees want a union is that they say that the intense pace of the production “hell” the company forces them to work in is wearing them down and causing them physical injuries. They are sacrificing their health because Tesla cannot produce a well-functioning auto production system that operates at a safe and reasonable pace. Elon Musk, the golden futurist wizard, promotes his cars; demand grows; investors bid up the value of the company; Elon Musk grows richer; and, as a result, his factory workers’ lives become more miserable. And when they try to organize to protect themselves, they are shunned.So that’s the context. Got it? Here we are in present day. You’ll never guess how Tesla executives have decided to solve their stubborn production problems. Bloomberg reports:In a pair of internal memos last week, the heads of engineering and production spelled out measures to free up workers for the Model 3 line and challenged them to reach production goals. Doug Field, the engineering chief, told staff that if they can exceed 300 Model 3s a day, it would be an “incredible victory” at a time when short-sellers and critics are increasingly doubting the company’s ability to fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s vision of building a mass-production electric-vehicle manufacturer.“I find that personally insulting, and you should too,” Field wrote in the March 23 email. “Let’s make them regret ever betting against us. You will prove a bunch of haters wrong.”Work faster! Work harder! Prove the haters wrong! It will be an incredible victory, for Elon Musk, whose multibillion-dollar pay package depends on it! Also, if you try to unionize, you’re fired. But feel free to take some frogurt with you when you go to the chiropractor for your broken body.Fuck off![2]Even the fantastic Monthly Review weighed in:Musk, you might say, is Donald Trump for the kind of unbearable people who upgrade to the latest model smartphone every year. Both have carefully cultivated the idea that they are mavericks bravely battling the forces of conservatism in business and lethargy in politics. Both are known for their incessant tweeting–dishing up a steady stream of commentary swinging wildly from the mundane to the inane and, frequently, the completely unhinged. Both, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been firmly in the capitalist death-cult camp, downplaying the threat early, and now pushing for a rapid reopening of the U.S. economy despite warnings from scientists that doing so risks hundreds of thousands more lives.“The coronavirus panic is dumb”, tweeted Musk on 7 March, just when the scale of the health crisis was becoming clear. “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in U.S. too by end of April”, he predicted on 20 March. In the two months since, he has been among the most vocal critics of social distancing–lining up with Trump and giving encouragement to the anti-lockdown protests of the extreme right.On 29 April, a day when, according to the New York Times, 2,514 Americans died from COVID-19, and more than 26,000 new infections were recorded, Musk tweeted “FREE AMERICA NOW” and, in response to plans for reopening in the state of Texas, “Bravo Texas!” On 12 May, he announced:Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.Despite being true to his word and ordering Tesla workers back amid the lockdown in California, Musk wasn’t arrested. A group of Tesla workers and supporters protested Musk’s decision outside the plant. One worker, Carlos Gabriel, told reporters he was refusing to go back to work. “I’m worried for my health”, he said.I’m very disappointed in Elon Musk putting profits over the health of his workers.Musk’s lack of concern for the health of his workers in the context of COVID-19 should come as no surprise. Tesla is known for its appalling health and safety record. “Ambulances have been called [to Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory] more than 100 times since 2014 for workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains”, Julia Carrie Wong, a technology reporter for the Guardian wrote in 2017. Jonathan Galescu, a production technician at the factory, told her:I’ve seen people pass out, hit the floor like a pancake and smash their face open. They just send us to work around him while he’s still lying on the floor.A 2017 blog post by Tesla employee Jose Moran, titled “Time for Tesla to listen”, detailed the low pay and poor conditions. “Most Tesla production workers earn between $17 and $21 hourly”, he wrote.The average auto worker in the nation earns $25.58 an hour, and lives in a much less expensive region … Many of my coworkers are commuting one or two hours before and after those long shifts because they can’t afford to live closer to the plant.Musk is viciously anti-union. Unionisation attempts by Tesla workers have been dealt with harshly. Several workers have been sacked after management uncovered organising efforts. Others have been threatened into silence. According to Moran, in response to workers’ initial 2017 organising drive, “Every worker was required to sign a confidentiality policy that threatens consequences if we exercise our right to speak out about wages and working conditions”. Based on this, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla had violated workers’ rights. To this day, however, efforts to unionise Tesla’s 40,000 workers have failed.Musk’s supporters might respond that, in contrast to most other members of his class, he is a “self-made” man, who built his US$36 billion fortune through hard work and a visionary entrepreneurial spirit. This is bullshit. Musk, like Trump, comes from a highly privileged background. His father Errol was a wealthy South African businessman–a consultant and property developer who, according to a 2018 report in the South African edition of Business Insider, bought a half-share in a Zambian emerald mine on a whim to “help fund his family’s lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers”.Musk was a computer enthusiast from an early age and, following his move to Canada with his mother in 1989, quickly developed into a skilled programmer. This trajectory, however, is no different to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world, very few of whom end up as members of the billionaire class. What made Musk special wasn’t his hard work, talent or vision. He was simply in the right place, at the right time, with the right connections.Carnivals of the damned: the U.S. far right fights the lockdownMusk founded his first company, Zip2–a city guide software for local newspapers–in 1995, with the help of US$28,000 (equivalent to US$48,000 today) from his father. This was at the start of the dotcom boom, when investors poured money into any and every computer or internet start-up that happened to emerge. In 1999, at the peak of the boom, Zip2 sold for US$307 million, out of which Musk took home US$22 million. He then used around half of this money to found an online banking service, http://X.com, which merged with rival Confinity to become PayPal. When, in 2002, PayPal was bought by eBay, Musk walked away with US$180 million.Musk’s status, among his fans, as a visionary devoted only to making the world a better place, is largely derived from what he did next. In 2002, he founded SpaceX, a company that aims to become a major player in the aerospace industry, enable affordable space travel and, ultimately, lay the basis for the colonisation of Mars. In 2003, he contributed US$30 million towards the foundation of Tesla Motors. In 2004, he took the role of Tesla chair and, in 2008, when the company’s founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning walked, he became CEO.Musk’s current immense wealth derives largely from his success in turning Tesla cars into a status symbol for the more environmentally conscious among the global elite. A new Tesla Model S costs between $125,000 and $165,000–not the kind of money that your average climate activist is likely to have on hand. The sale of these cars makes up by far the biggest portion of the company’s revenue–almost US$20 billion out of US$24.5 billion in 2019. By comparison, its “energy generation and storage” section is a side hustle, bringing in just $1.5 billion, or 6 percent, of company revenue last year.If Musk’s goal were really to assist with reducing greenhouse gas emissions and halting our slide towards catastrophic runaway warming, you could think of many things he’d be better off doing than producing electric cars for the wealthy few. It’s very likely, in fact, that any reductions in emissions resulting from Tesla’s operations would be more than wiped out by the contribution Musk’s company makes to maintaining and fostering a car culture rather than promoting a shift to mass public transport.But Musk is a car man through and through. At a 2017 conference, in response to a question from the audience about his attitude to public transport and urban sprawl, he said:I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? … It’s a pain in the ass.In her authorised Musk biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance claims the initial purpose of Musk’s California transport “Hyperloop” proposal was to stymie plans for a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train”, wrote Vance. “He didn’t intend to build the thing … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be cancelled. Musk said as much to me during a series of emails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.” The strategy worked. Plans for the rail link, first flagged in 2008 and overwhelmingly supported by California voters, are currently on hold.If you think the environmental crisis is going to be solved by people buying Teslas, or even the construction of a few more giant batteries, you need your head checked and will have your wallet confiscated. Electric cars and batteries are, at best, a very small part of the solution. Much more important are the kind of things to which Musk is hostile, such as massively expanding public transport networks, or radically reshaping cities to allow for more sustainable, higher density living.As for SpaceX, it’s best described as an expensive, and potentially highly destructive, vanity project. Far from enabling affordable space travel, the company is currently mainly concerned with its Starlink project, which aims to launch more than 40,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide broadband internet around the world.Sounds good in theory, but scientists have pointed to some significant drawbacks. If Musk’s vision is achieved, the project will put eight times as many satellites into orbit as there are currently. And this is likely just the start. Musk’s initiative has inspired several other companies, including Amazon, to pursue their own satellite broadband networks. The result will be a very crowded sky. So crowded, in fact, that it may threaten the science of astronomy (“it will look as if the whole sky is crawling with stars”, astronomer James Lowenthal told the New York Times). Collisions between these private satellites will enrich whole layers of lawyers. Ultimately, the massive increase in space junk may threaten our ability to safely leave Earth at all.Musk’s goal of colonising Mars can’t be taken seriously. As with Trump’s justly ridiculed “Space Force”, it’s more an ego-driven promotional exercise than anything else, something Musk can wheel out whenever he feels starved of media attention. In 2015, for instance, he declared, in an interview with the Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, that Mars could be transformed into an Earth-like planet by dropping “thermonuclear weapons over the poles”. In August 2019, he was at it again, tweeting “Nuke Mars!”, and then, a few hours later “T-shirt soon”, with a mock-up T-shirt design. Of course, there is no scientific evidence that carrying out this plan would do anything to improve that planet’s habitability.Maybe, despite all this, Musk is just a really nice, well-meaning guy at heart? No. If anything, on a personal level, Musk appears even more repulsive than his business interests might suggest. He has developed a penchant for the language of the alt-right, tweeting on 18 May, for instance, “take the red pill”–a well-known trope from the world of men’s rights activists and incels. He’s convinced “smart people” need to breed more, a eugenicist streak that sits poorly with his background as a member of South Africa’s privileged white elite under apartheid. And if all that wasn’t enough, Musk and his current partner–Canadian singer Grimes–named their recently arrived baby “X Æ A-12 Musk”, an act of basic inhumanity that speaks for itself.Elon Musk, in sum, is a complete shithead–just another piece of billionaire filth helping to drive our planet and the society that depends on it to destruction. The best that can be said for his life’s work, perhaps, is that when the revolution comes, the working class can use SpaceX’s rockets to launch Musk, and the rest of the world’s billionaire class, to Mars, where they will have total freedom to construct the entrepreneurial utopia they long for.[3]Musk recently was caught on surveillance tape riding in an elevator with Amber Heard, whom he was fucking while she was married to Johnny Depp. This doesn’t bother the asshole Musk, who probably fucked her in Johnny’s bed. Oh, and he also had threesomes with Cara Delavigne and Amber Heard, too.[4]Amber Heard had a threesome with Cara Delevingne and Elon Musk, deposition revealsJohnny Depp’s defamation suit against his ex-wife Amber Heard has revealed that Heard once had a threesome with Elon Musk and Cara Delevingne.According to the Daily Mail, the 57-year-old Depp “hasn’t ruled out” serving Delevingne, 27, with a subpoena to see if she has any useful information about Heard.Josh Drew — the ex-husband of Raquel “Rocky” Pennington, Heard’s best friend — contended in a deposition by Depp’s attorney Benjamin Chew that Musk, 48, slept with Heard and Delevingne at Depp’s LA penthouse.Drew was, at the time, living rent-free in one of Depp’s other apartments near the penthouse in downtown LA, and has continued to socialize with Heard as of last year. The “Aquaman” actress is reportedly also paying for his attorney as well.“Cara could also be compelled to give evidence — by either party,” the Mail quotes a source as saying. “It’s definitely a possibility. Almost anything can happen in this case.” Actor James Franco has also been subpoenaed for any materials related to Heard, as has Musk.Drew claims that the affair occurred while Heard and Depp were married; Musk insists the pair only got together after her split from Depp. (Heard filed for divorce in May 2016.) The “Fantastic Beasts” actor, meanwhile, cites building staff who say Musk visited Heard “late at night” while Depp was abroad filming “Pirates of the Caribbean” in 2015.Depp’s $50 million defamation suit against Heard was spurred by her Washington Post op-ed in which she claimed he abused her. His suit denies her claims and frames Heard as the abuser in the relationship. Depp is also suing the UK’s Sun over a 2018 article calling him a “wife-beater,” which he suggests was responsible for the “Pirates” franchise moving on without him, though franchise head Jerry Bruckheimer has remained vague on Depp’s erasure from the series.[5]Asshole Musk Strikes Again:Over the past twenty-four hours, Elon Musk has stirred up controversy on Twitter, sharing a series of social media posts that once again has put the outspoken founder of Tesla and SpaceX in the spotlight. However, it’s his apparently transphobic two-word Tweet from Friday evening that has prompted outrage.Musk, who added a red rose to his Twitter name in an apparently mocking reference to the symbol used by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, first posted, and then pinned, a Tweet suggesting that there isn’t a need for the additional federal stimulus package currently being debated in Congress. That Tweet was followed by a reference to universal basic income, a concept that Musk has tweeted favorably about in the past.Then, eleven hours after posting that “Twitter sucks,” Musk shared what many found to be an offensive and transphobic Tweet commenting that “pronouns suck.” Musk’s Tweet appears to be a mocking criticism of gender-neutral personal pronouns, used by many in an effort to be more inclusive of transgender and non-conforming individuals.The online criticism of Musk was immediate, apparently even drawing the ire of his girlfriend, musical artist Grimes. In a since deleted Tweet, the musician, whose real name is Claire Boucher and who is a co-parent of Musk’s child, tweeted a reply saying “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall [sic]. I cannot support this hate. Please stop this. I know this is not your heart.”Musk’s tweet on Friday isn’t the first time his use of the popular social media medium has sparked outrage — Musk has a long history of taking to Twitter to express his amusement, irritation, and exploration of whatever topic crosses his mind. But his use of Twitter has also landed him in legal trouble. In 2018, Musk was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to a Tweet by Musk that claimed he had secured funding to take his publicly-traded company Tesla private at $420 a share. The lawsuit, which asserted that Musk had misled investors, was settled by Musk later that year, with the entrepreneur paying a $20 million fine and relinquishing his role as Chairman of the Board of Tesla.Musk also got into hot water in 2018 for a subsequently deleted Tweet in which Musk used the term “pedo guy” to describe Vernon Unsworth, a British caver and one of the rescuers of the 12 boys and their soccer coach that were famously trapped in a cave in Thailand in July, 2018. Unsworth sued Musk for defamation in California, but a jury found that Musk was not liable to Unsworth. For his part, Musk answered that his Twitter comment, which seemingly was a reference to pedophilia, was “heated rhetoric” and not meant to state that Unsworth was, in fact, a pedophile.Musk’s newest Tweet comes at a time when America is already mired in a national debate about issues of identity and inclusion, and in particular, inclusion of transgender individuals. In addition to ongoing discrimination of transgender individuals in all aspects of American society, there is also a troubling trend of violence against trans individuals in the United States. According to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), in 2019 at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming people were fatally shot or killed by violence. 91% of the victims were Black women and 81% were under the age of 30. HRC has also counted 22 murders of transgender and non-conforming individuals in 2020, including at least 4 deaths since the start of July.By seemingly mocking the issue of personal pronoun usage, the widely-followed entrepreneur isn’t just sharing the musings of an eccentric businessman, he is also stoking a cultural conflict and diminishing an issue that is an important aspect of the recognition and inclusion of transgender and non-conforming individuals. While likely not intended to be hateful, Musk’s comment nonetheless shows an incredible amount of ignorance by a man seen by many as one of the boldest and most insightful entrepreneurs of our lifetime. Musk’s Tweet, whatever it’s motivation, should not only be followed by clarification, but it demands an apology as well.Of course pronouns matter – so does human dignity. If Elon Musk wants to send people to space, perhaps he should spend a bit more time respecting them here on earth first.Using whatever personal pronoun they prefer.[6]ConclusionElon Musk used to be a decent person. No more. Money sometimes corrupts. Other times it corrupts absolutely.Elon Musk may save us from extinction, but we may want to just die instead if he has power over us.Footnotes[1] Update on Tesla - is Elon Musk an Asshole? | Intelliversity[2] Elon Musk Is an Asshole[3] MR Online | Elon Musk is a shithead[4] Amber Heard cuddles up to Elon Musk in Johnny Depp's private elevator[5] Amber Heard had a threesome with Cara Delevingne and Elon Musk, deposition reveals[6] Pronouns Suck? Tesla Founder Elon Musk Tweets Ugly Comment Mocking Transgender Inclusion