Despite all the news I read every day, solid, factual news, I seemed to have partially missed a thing Elon Musk has kick-started: brain chips.
I’ve seen bits on Twitter about brain chips, sometimes attached to Bill Gates, sometimes to Elon Musk, but most of them to Musk. I didn’t take them seriously.
It’s been a long time since Musk’s genius rep has dissipated, if not entirely disappeared, at least in my mind. I don’t know what he’s done that gained him that rep (did he actually invent Tesla or merely hire the engineers?) but I do know how it’s diminished: Musk says foolish, offensive and absurd things. Advice to obscenely wealthy “geniuses”: stop opinionating publicly about matters of which you are ignorant.
Elon Musk is easy to mock.
So I paid special attention to the May Harper’s Index which brought percentages to bear relating to Muskage. Before I share them with you, though, here is an item also in the Index.
Estimated percentage of Americans who believed the key tenets of QAnon last year: 16.
This is good news. I tag it for my friends, relations and Twitter pals who agonize over how America has gone crazy, and I keep saying, “No, only a small portion of America has gone crazy. The majority of us are sane.” In fact, 16 percent is lower than I was estimating. A lot lower.
OK, enough of that. Now let’s get to Musk:
Number of U.S. cities beneath which Elon Musk’s Boring Company has proposed constructing subterranean tunnels: 6
Portion of monkeys implanted with Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips between 2017 and 2020 that have died: 7/10.
PETA, you’ll want to get on this.
Portion of likely U.S. voters who think microchip implants would improve human lives: 1/10.
Who think they would lead to unprecedented totalitarian control: 3/4
See what I mean? Only a small percentage of this country is nuts.