Quote of the Week...fron Neil deGrasse Tyson

While casting shade on Elon Musk for what he's done, is doing, or will do, try to pause and remember that he made electric cars a normal thing in society and he commercialized space...for cargo, satellites & people. Count him among those who are inventing civilization's future.   ---Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may know that I'm a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, science popularizer and astrophysicist, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, the narrator of the Cosmos TV series after the death of its originator, Carl Sagan, and a strong advocate for space exploration, both manned and unmanned. I think he hit just the right chord with the above Tweet (I'm a follower of his) about the exorbitantly wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk, recently much praised and maligned after buying and taking over this social media site. Tyson's politics are clearly far to the left of Musk's, who has signaled with some of his Tweets a willingness to pander to the Trump crowd and their conspiracy theories and agendas. Yet Musk has indeed pioneered the mass production of electric cars with his Tesla and worked with liberal president Barack Obama to develop a future manned Mars project under his SpaceX company...breaking the multi-year dependence on Russia to launch our own astronauts into space. There are two chief points I'd like to make. One, the very nature of being a public figure/leader, be it in any field like politics, business, sports, academics, or entertainment, jettisons one into public scrutiny and there will always be something objectionable about their behavior or views that comes out, either with their own consent or not. Two, we seem to be suffering lately from what I term the "Fonzie Syndrome" where just because someone is thought of as "cool" or thinks himself or herself cool then whatever they say is supposedly Infallible Wisdom and Truth...millions of Trump worshippers are totally into this fallacy: for them the Orange Man IS the Fonz. And I suppose super-rich folk can get a swollen head about themselves and pretend expertise in areas beyond their specialties...Elon's foray into Twitter I believe betrays this very human frailty. I wish he would focus his attention more on the transformational technology for which he will ultimately be honored in history instead of this current misguided detour.  The latest breaking news is that he just resigned as the company's CEO, although since he's still the owner I don't know how much that's going to change things...