For all the news about Trump wiping out the branches of government, destroying checks and balances (literally, as federal financial systems are breached by DOGE), apparently American adults don’t understand social studies well enough to grasp the dangers.

People actually need critical literacy — and critical media literacy. It is not enough to simply be able to decode words at a high school or college level. People have to also be able to evaluate those words, spotting the half-truths, hyperbole, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and values behind those words — and those skills go back to social studies.

[…]

Less than half of adults can name all three branches of government. Only a third can pass the U.S. Citizenship test. Similarly, small percentages can “identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land,” the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office, or the “number of justices on the Supreme Court.”

Ouch. But wait, it gets worse according to the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina. He explains that gross integrity breaches aren’t being measured in America, let alone reported. Read this to the tune of “I’m just a bill…”

We are literally in a place where people struggle to sort fact from fiction, legal from illegal, democratic from authoritarian. As a result, a president can unilaterally seize control of nearly the entire federal budget, and make arbitrary decisions about what should or should not be funded, and a large chunk of the American public thinks that is good policy. They don’t understand that every single dollar that is being spent has been signed off on by a majority in both houses of Congress and the president. At that point, it became law. If there was some defect in that law, it would have been the role of the judiciary to strike it down. But no one claimed that. To allow the president to wake up one morning and override those duly enacted laws turns the balance of power upon which our democracy rests upside down.

Upside down.

Experts are stepping up to assure anyone who had thought Trump would follow the law, that they are in for a surprise.

President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Germany has issued a travel warning to its citizens after several cases showed US border patrol denying entry based on biological markers (stripped naked for genitalia audit). And France has said one of its scientists was detained at the US border and denied entry after having said… scientific things.

Meanwhile, the US says Ukrainians will have asylum status revoked despite loss from war with Russia. Instead America says it will declare asylum status for white South Africans due to the loss of racist apartheid.

How could such illogic be developed? Criticism of education and the arts as too partisan-by not being partial enough-was foreshadowing. The dictatorship signs are here and clear.

A pillar of our democracy, our schools, is being targeted in a way that seeds and reinforces autocratic populism…, the common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet.

A new “catalysts” PR push by Tesla fails basic engineering and market reality tests. I can’t believe “Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald led by Andres Sheppard” are really this bad at their job, but here we are:

“We believe the recent selloff represents an attractive entry point for investors with >12-month investment horizon (and who are comfortable with volatility)….” Sheppard wrote that his bullishness on Tesla was crystallized after he visited the company’s Gigafactory and AI data centers in Austin, Texas.

I’m not even talking about the alleged fraud and cooked books going on right now at Tesla. Where’s that missing $1.4B in cash?

These analysts do deserve criticism for seemingly ignoring documented technical limitations and safety concerns in favor of optimistic market projections. Their assessment appears to overlook some obvious crucial engineering realities. Let’s go through the flawed points, as given to us by someone who admits they just came out of a Potemkin tour of a Tesla factory.

1. Robotaxi (Release announced for 2024 on 8/8 — an obvious Elon Musk reference to 88 or “Heil Hitler”): Technically unfeasible in any timeframe. Tesla’s autonomous systems have been linked to over 50 deaths already, with fatalities increasing dramatically year over year. The system still fails at basic object recognition and navigation tasks that it has struggled with for years, showing decline instead of improvements. Additionally, with repeated Tesla CEO promotions of Hitler and Nazism these vehicles would be the face of violent hate, yet lack any proven security countermeasures to those being targeted by them.
2. FSD anywhere but unregulated America: This is an engineering impossibility given basic regulatory frameworks. Tesla’s current system doesn’t meet technical requirements for any real market’s autonomous vehicle standards. China requires local data storage and processing that Tesla’s architecture was never designed for — can’t out-surveillance the surveillance experts. And EU safety standards demand respect for quality of engineering and value of human life that Tesla management and vehicles don’t have. There is no other car with the death toll of a Tesla, Cybertruck is literally 17X more dangerous than a Ford Pinto.
3. Lower-priced vehicle (Promised since forever, even before the Model S, never delivered): A Model 2 was announced in 2020 for $25K if you remember, and the Model 3 was supposed to be released with a $35K price, and the Cybertruck was supposed to be $39,900 (released at over $60K instead). So much failure. This is still a manufacturing and market impossibility on multiple fronts:
   • The used Tesla market is already flooded with vehicles at rapidly depreciating prices, cannibalizing any market for new budget models. Tesla apparently now sees its vehicles depreciating at 3X the market average. Think about that versus a guy who visited the factory and thinks there will be a lift from a low cost new vehicle; that’s a future not only impossible to imagine, it’s crazy
   • Competitors (BYD, Hyundai/Kia, VW) offer superior quality, features, and reliability at similar price points
   • Battery material costs alone prevent a profitable $30,000 Tesla without significant breakthroughs, which they have literally none to speak about compared with revolutionary announcements made by Nissan, Honda, Toyota…
   • Tesla’s existing quality issues would likely worsen at lower price points to maintain margins. A used yet low cost Tesla could likely be significantly less likely to kill the owner than new untested lower-quality technology. And on that note, Tesla has no production line currently capable of producing anything other than the same overpriced poorly made stuff they always have (recalls over 15X higher than industry average). Have you read about all the dangerous design and manufacturing defects in the Cybertruck computers, frame, panels, suspension…? An even lesser model seems like it would be even more dangerous if it worked at all.

   

4. Optimus Bot production: What a horrible, sad and cruel joke. It violates fundamental robotics engineering limitations. Current prototypes lack the actuator efficiency, power density, and sensory processing capabilities required for commercial applications. The hardware simply doesn’t exist to fulfill this promise. It’s been little more than a marketing ploy to convince people not to hire non-white women, nothing more. This is a sick apartheid teenage white boy fantasy fiction.
5. Semi Truck (Promised to be delivered in 2019… still a mess): Outdated before production. While Tesla delayed for years, competitors have deployed thousands of electric commercial vehicles. The Semi’s battery architecture and charging requirements aren’t compatible with existing commercial transport infrastructure.

All of those huge problems are not going to go away anytime soon. Taxis, Semis, FSD, robots are all long overdue and long away from anything happening of substance. In fact, taxis happening could created a serious loss, so the more Tesla tries to deliver the worse their financials. That’s an engineering fact. When the financial analysis substitutes baseless future fiction of technical marketing for an engineering assessment, they deserve public ridicule.

The fatal flaw of their analysis, literally, is assuming technology with no evidence of anything but failure will suddenly flip into a magic new world of success at scale. And that’s been the tragedy we’ve seen for over a decade already from Tesla. More cars, more deaths, no closer to any of the promises made. The demonstrated pattern of increasing casualties as deployment expands, proves all of the financial analysis dead, very dead, wrong.

The correlation between Tesla deployments and rise in fatalities isn’t speculative, it has been well documented in the data by many people many times over. Expanding defective technology with careless “volatility” investments (for profit!) without resolving fundamental engineering limitations isn’t a catalyst; it’s a predictable tragedy.

The fundamental disconnect between Tesla’s engineering realities and Cantor Fitzgerald’s financial projections highlights a dangerous gap of market analysis. Financial forecasts built on technological fantasies rather than engineering fundamentals aren’t just misleading, they’re directly harmful to investors and the public alike.

When analysts substitute factory tours and executive promises for legitimate technical due diligence, they betray both their professional responsibility and public trust. Real financial analysis must account for documented technical limitations, regulatory hurdles, and safety data, especially when lives are literally at stake.

Without this foundation, investment recommendations like these represent nothing more than expensive gambling on technological miracles that engineering evidence suggests will never materialize.

Let’s see if this gets reported appropriately, as yet another case of Tesla being a unique threat to public safety.

Seven people were injured after a Tesla struck pedestrians near a Sainsbury’s in Mile End.

Paramedics were called shortly before 5.30pm on Sunday to the crash on Mile End road, the London Ambulance Service (LAS) said.

[…]

The car’s crumpled chassis can be seen left stuck on the pavement, while shards of glass and broken bits of plastic can be seen scattered across the junction of Mile End Road and Harford Street.

No other car company results in these numbers of death and destruction. The public is not wrong to see the Tesla badge and wonder about its many software and hardware defects causing a clear and present danger to them.