Category Archives: Security

Security

Seeking Alpha Says Pour Money Into Unsinkable TSLA Titanic

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Update March 14: as soon as $260 was “upgraded to buy” by Seeking Alpha, the stock dropped to $222.

In more than four decades of watching Wall Street hi-jinks, I’ve seen more bogus “buy” recommendations than I’ve had hot egg breakfasts. That crazy Tesla buy piece making the rounds? It’s the worst form of carnival song and dance, like a guy in the desert wearing a tutu waving a stick chanting “I predict rain”.

Source: Twitter

Let me tell you something about markets that’s been true since trading floors had actual floors, not sock-puppets on Twitter spilling fraud as advice: a falling price isn’t a buy signal on its own, because it’s often a market finally reacting, as markets are supposed to do.

A true Alpha of the market won’t be the loudest, most aggressive, or most dominant, which all are misconceptions based on flawed studies of captive wolves. In the wild, the Alpha wolf (male or female) is simply a pack’s leadership figure, the adult who protects the children, makes prudent decisions for pack welfare, and demonstrates “quiet confidence” rather than brash aggression. Real Alphas don’t need to assert dominance; they lead by example and put their pack’s interests ahead of their own.

With this in mind, any recommendation telling you to buy because a stock dropped 26% and has an RSI of 26 has to be in context of dangers. Telling you to buy a house that is cheaper than last month also has to mention it was built by a racist South African to launder his blood money, using unqualified temporary staff, on the edge of an ocean cliff expected to wash away in the next 12 months. A house is about to drop into oblivion. Who thinks that price will go up?

I’ve watched too many “smart” self-described “Alphas” hazardously tell people to chase discounts all the way to zero. When I see a stock drop that much, I don’t think “fire sale” (literally, in the case of death-trap Tesla) – I think “why is this so bad and who gets hurt?”

Teslas notoriously “veer” uncontrollably and crash into a ball of fire. Their 1970s design defects (e.g. “Pinto doors”) trap occupants, burning everyone to death as witnesses and emergency responders can only watch in horror.

Here’s what’s missing from the hollow investor recommendation:

Show the analysis of Tesla’s actual vehicles. ACTUAL vehicle analysis by actual technologists. Real traders know a company is only as good as what it’s selling, and real technologists know Tesla hasn’t had a clue about how to make a product since 2012. If what Tesla’s pushing out the factory door gets worse by the quarter and putting lives at risk, for OVER A DECADE (the Woz ain’t no liar), that’s not a dip – that’s gravity working.

Reality isn’t a Heinlein novel, as much as Elon Musk fawns about how he’s bringing his child-hood book fantasies to life. Waterbeds never, ever are going to be the future.

Run, don’t walk, away from 1970s sci-fi gibberish tech.

Show me the analysis of cash flow. Show me the balance sheet strength. Show me debt obligations. That’s some real Alpha behavior. Yet, we don’t get a peep of these from “I’m an Alpha” pants.

Where’s the clear-eyed assessment of competitors winning the EV market, year over year, while Tesla’s fraud increasingly gets exposed? Musk has been obsessed with… his 20 BODYGUARDS hiding him from feedback, shuttling him between bigger and bigger hate speeches and obvious Hitler salutes. EV sales rocket up globally, while Tesla sales are thrashed and trashed in an extension of his overt Nazism. Newsflash: Swasticar sales fell 80% globally because they are terrible cars, which means someone inevitably buys into a Hitler fantasy (looking at you UK). Without Musk’s big Hitler salutes to excite his faithful few, I’d wager Swasticar sales would have gone all the way to zero.

2024 Sales of Tesla in California dropped so far they almost fell off the chart versus other brands seeing huge growth.

Seeking Alpha talks up “energy storage and robotics” without any substantive analysis. A wolf pack leader would carefully evaluate territory, assess actual capabilities, and make decisions based on what’s best for the entire pack. The history and origins of Alpha wolf behavior from wildlife research say it’s never about flashy displays of dominance/control, but about steady leadership, protection of groups, making wise decisions that ensure trust in long-term survival. Now look at how the author throws in a line about “energy storage and robotics” like he tosses his penny into a fountain to make a wish.

I’m upgrading the stock to a buy for the long term as the company doesn’t only fall under the “automaker” title but is now emerging as a robotics company where the possibilities are endless.

That’s not analysis – that’s precisely the opposite. Seeking Alpha should remember their name is supposed to convey a measurement of how much a portfolio outperforms a benchmark through superior analysis and insight. A true alpha-generating investment analysis would carefully show the actual issues of Tesla’s health, and honestly evaluate the stunning level of risks, and make recommendations based on these fundamentals rather than wishful thinking. There’s nothing “alpha” about blindly recommending a falling stock based on an RSI number and vague promises about robotics as “possibilities are endless”.

Back in rural Kansas we used to have a saying for this: Thin ice don’t get any thicker when ice skates go on a Blue Light Special.

The market isn’t wrong to correct hard on the decade of lies from Tesla – that “buy” recommendation is completely out of touch. A stock going down happens because it deserves to be down, if you believe in a market having any real integrity at all.

A death-trap doesn’t stop killing people when the share price falls. Smart money doesn’t buy a dumpster fire just because someone slapped a discount sticker on it. Smart money asks why the dumpster is on fire.

I’ve seen too many “sure things” turn into “never agains” to be fooled by someone masquerading as an Alpha while demonstrating none of the actual qualities like careful assessment, protection of their pack (investors), and wise stewardship of resources. Seeking Alpha “buy” on a sale trigger is how you end up with a garage full of dusty lawn darts and a portfolio full of regrets.

Remember: Tesla is a decade out on a fraud, they promised full self-driving would be solved by 2016 and the first two deaths would be the last, then 2017 deaths, then 2018 deaths, then 2019 deaths… the Tesla death toll kept climbing. Today we look at Autopilot engineering from Tesla as more deadly to Americans than domestic terrorism. FACT.

Bernie Madoff didn’t get rich in a day, and Elon Musk obviously has been irrational longer than anyone should have allowed. So sometimes, just sometimes, the market is being perfectly rational to react to a huge over-hyped over-guarded mistake, and the “buy” recommendations increasingly have to be blind to the giant writing on the Wall… Street.

Let me explain simply how just one of the awful frauds worked.

Nissan had a LEAF EV that was a major player in the market by 2019, a genuine engineering achievement. The 2018-19 LEAF delivered about 150-215 miles of range (depending on the model), entirely adequate for the target market’s actual needs.

Elon Musk fraudulently started marketing the Tesla as 300 mile range. And I don’t mean just lying about the range, I mean intentionally corrupting the dashboard to lie, totally fake numbers such that Tesla owners would be surprised by catastrophic power loss and sudden car failure. And he setup a call-center support scam to bury the evidence. He corrupted Nissan’s market share with targeted abject lies, and a market should harshly correct him for it.

Seeking Alpha says this:

I think competition creates innovation, which can’t be a bad thing in the long term for the entire market.

Bad thing in the long term? That line reads to me like a carnival barker cheerleading victims into an unsafe oversold tent to sell spectator tickets outside to a tragic death show when those inside can’t escape a fire. He’s exhibiting “live wrong” thinking. Lance Armstrong was a bad thing in the long run, precisely because he treated competition as the one and only measure of innovation. Without regulations we should expect a market to collapse like a burning circus tent under the weight of unregulated criminals, loss of all gains, which is the opposite of good.

Seeking Alpha goes on to say this:

So really, for every hater, there’s a fan, and eventually, I think the Elon hate would blow over. Even if it doesn’t, I’m not projecting for the effect that could have on sales to be grave, and Dan Ives shares the sentiment…

For every Hitler hater, there’s a fan! How bad could Germany’s future be just because they marched into Russia without winter gear? The faithful still believed! This is the same magical thinking that leads investors to ignore fatal flaws while chasing false promises.

Elon Musk has been a frequent promoter of an AfD (Nazi) Party in Germany, which generates widespread disgust and protests such as this graffiti outside the Tesla factory.

The fact that Tesla’s stock ever had any power at all has been like watching the fraudulent dashboard numbers on the Tesla itself – both intentionally engineered to show inflated figures that don’t match any reality when measured against objective standards. Anyone with basic engineering skills could expose technology fraud in 2016; anyone with math skills in 2018 could spot market fraud.

Men on Mars by 2018!? Colonies on Mars by 2022!? Tell me how to BUY! I’ll take two colonies for $10 billion please. Oh, and now Elon Musk says I probably will die on the way and that’s just a minor setback? Well, then make it ten colonies for my dozen children born out of wedlock who I’ll strap into those deadly rockets instead of me! I’m upgrading to “the possibilities are endless” because… fantasy!

How many people are qualified to hook up a multimeter to a Tesla, let alone put a spreadsheet together for the stock market, or any of the other fraud brands that this conman has been able to fund with other peoples’ investments? The numbers never lied. And yet “Alpha” investors keep falling for the fraud.

Tesla surely will be known someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, as the biggest integrity breach in history among the constellation of other massive integrity breaches (SpaceX, Boring, Hyperloop, SolarCity, Twitter).

These insights are from someone who’s taken a Tesla apart, hacked the guts out of it to prove it fraud over ten years ago, and somehow has not lost his shirt by revealing truths. I’ve called Tesla a man-slaughtering Titanic of math and I stand by my hands-on technical assessment of the many catastrophic engineering flaws. I care about my pack and I take care of them. You?

Great Disasters of Machine Learning: Predicting Titanic Events in Our Oceans of Math

Security

GOP Declares Impeachable Offence if a Judge Dares to Disagree With Trump

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And… that’s the symbolic end of democracy, folks.

As I had warned earlier, in my write-up about an important dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s EPA national security case, anti-democracy thugs are swinging hard to impeach any judge who disagrees with Trump.

The congressman has called Judge Bates a “radical activist” judge, and has launched an impeachment campaign against a myriad of other judges who he claims have “disobey[ed] their oaths to score political points.” In a recent post on X, Ogles declared that his recent actions against federal judges, such as Amir Ali and Bates, are part of an “impeachathon” that will include a number of other judges.

Granted, no pun intended, these overtly fascist “flood the zone with bullshit” resolutions likely won’t pass. But judicial intimidation, egregious waste and ugly harassment is in effect now by the GOP and opens the door to even worse degradation of American law and order.

The GOP is very plainly saying they are gunning for a civil war, with congressmen acting like a drunkard McCarthy brought back from the dead to spread stupid label-based havoc again.

Who’s a radical? Where’s a radical? Look under your bed, beware the shadows. Watch out! Radicals are gonna’ radically disagree with you. And then what? What can America do if there’s any disagreement? Oh no! More than one opinion? Traitors! America can’t tolerate differences.

History, Security

Why Trump Slipped Out a “Lesotho” and What That Reveals About a DOGE Coup

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Lesotho’s troubled political journey offers American scholars of coup risk a rich narrative of how democracies are captured through cycles of instability. The mountainous kingdom’s history reveals an interplay between militant ambition, constitutional weakness, and politics that almost guarantees a coup.

Lesotho’s government says it is shocked by US President Donald Trump saying that “nobody has ever heard of” the southern African nation. Trump, addressing the US Congress in his first speech since his return to the Oval Office, made the reference… “Eight million dollars to… the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from some US lawmakers.

Trump’s dismissive comment appears to be a slip of the tongue, an exposure of private backroom deals: Why would the President specifically highlight Lesotho in a congressional address only to immediately diminish its significance? This paradox—making something notable while claiming it’s unnoticed—reveals a lot.

For those familiar with patterns of democratic erosion and military intervention, Lesotho isn’t obscure at all, but rather a canonical case study of white supremacist meddling. For South Africans like Elon Musk, Lesotho carries deep personal and historical significance as a sanctuary for anti-apartheid activists during the regime he was born under and profited directly from.

If you told me it has been life-long dream of a white boy born into apartheid to control and monitor any and all network communications in Lesotho, I’d ask you have you heard about the Neuralink likely origin story of forcing Stephen Bantu Biko’s brain to disclose the entire anti-apartheid network before being tortured to death by police.

Since independence in 1966 from British colonial occupation, Lesotho experienced a recurring pattern of constitutional authority being gradually eroded until military intervention occurred.

Tension and imbalance began immediately for the new state, when a King attempted to make monarchial powers great again, beyond the freshly written constitutional-monarchy framework. This fundamental disagreement about where authority in a democracy should ultimately rest – with elected officials or elitist monarchs/oligarchs – has haunted Lesotho ever since, much as America debates legislative versus an unaccountable unitary executive power.

Musk and DOGE try to slash government by cutting out those who answer to voters

The Lesotho watershed was 1970, when a Prime Minister facing electoral defeat simply refused to accept the results. He instead declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and placed the King under house arrest. This precedent has obvious harms: constitutional processes can be set aside when they became inconvenient to those in power.

Indeed, the refusal to accept electoral defeat created the dangerous template that would be followed repeatedly afterwards, including the 1998 crisis when opposition parties rejected election results despite the LCD winning 79 of 80 seats – claiming fraud without sufficient evidence.

Military intervention for state capture then necessarily became normalized in Lesotho’s political landscape. When a Major General finally overthrew the sixteen-long-years’ Prime Minister government in 1986, it marked how military involvement was the next level of crisis. The relationship between civilian leadership and military command was horribly strained, with the inherent power of military factions becoming sucked into political disputes rather than allowed to remain neutral.

The fragility of democracy was further complicated by geographic encirclement by South Africa. Lesotho is extraordinarily vulnerable to external pressures, such as during South Africa’s extreme violence to keep apartheid going (e.g. the failure of which allegedly prompted Elon Musk to abruptly flee in 1988 to America with big bags of apartheid money).

The 1982 Christmas spirit quickly dissipated. [The capitol city of Lesotho,] Maseru residents were in a state of shock and disbelief. The city centre took on a new shape: bullet holes marked the walls of houses, homes were ransacked, windows broken, frames charred, and smoke emanated from debris comprised of a mixture of built fabric and human remains. During the attack [by South African apartheid forces], some people were wrapped in blankets by SADF officials and set on fire. […] This was the period when South Africa was heavily engaged in an onslaught on the rest of the sub-continent and Lesotho was on the top of South Africa’s hit list.

Even Ronald Reagan “deplored” this “Operation Blanket“, named for how South African troops planned to burn political opponents to death (foreshadowing Elon Musk’s death-trap design of Tesla).

While Lesotho was on the right side of history, as it harbored refugees from an international tyranny of apartheid, the rise of South African democracy didn’t eliminate the power imbalances. South Africa, as well as Botswana, and Zimbabwe, repeatedly continued to intervene in Lesotho’s ongoing affairs, even militarily, on the premise of helping “situations” to stabilize.

Recently, Lesotho has experimented with coalition governments, which has created new vulnerabilities. A Prime Minister who faced a 2014 no-confidence vote, suspended parliament and later fled the country claiming a military coup attempt. The military’s confused leadership response – fractured into competing internal claims of command authority – reflected how appointments had been for political convenience and partisan rather than professional positions of best national interest.

For American scholars of coup risk, Lesotho demonstrates exactly how democratic institutions gradually hollow out from within. This goes beyond academic theory into a practical playbook of methods for democratic erosion, tested and refined by opportunistic elites across multiple countries. Elon Musk thus stands out, for obvious reasons.

The formal structures of democracy – elections, parliaments, courts – on the surface continue to exist, but their effectiveness is undermined by corrupted leaders who bypass them or ignore any outcomes.

What appears superficially to be a functioning democracy becomes increasingly vulnerable to undemocratic interventions when constitutional processes no longer provide legitimate paths to resolve political conflicts.

The Lesotho narrative warns that coups rarely emerge from nowhere, and we already know some of the where from. They typically follow democratic norms being eroded in the open, where constitutional processes are subverted, and military leadership is politicized.

Those studying coup risks recognize why a bureaucrat like Trump suddenly referenced Lesotho after his close collaboration with President Musk, whose oppressive role brings perspectives shaped by his South African apartheid upbringing of racist regional interventions and imposed constitutional crises.

It’s past time for Americans to examine these deep patterns of institutional decay that made military intervention highly probable – and sometimes even predictable – seeing them not as distant foreign problems but as warning signs increasingly visible in our own democracy’s stress points caused by a South African-led DOGE coup team.

The US Marshals Service has deputized members of Elon Musk’s private security detail, which means they will now have certain rights and protections of federal law enforcement agents.

1976 AP photograph of South African police using violence to censor Black political voices. The apartheid whites infamously opened fire on school children.
Security

The Trust is Gone: American Reputation Turned to “Muddy Quicksand” by Trump

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Trust is the backbone of finance. It’s the backbone of policy. And if there’s one thing to say about the slippery slimy tactics of the very jelly thing called Trump, it’s that everyone knows he has no backbone.

Since storming back into office, Mr. Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day.

Storming, as in “Die Sturmabteilung” (SA) of Hitler. Have you ever witnessed a backbone within a tornado? Impossible—it’s precisely the opposite: a chaotic destructive force leaving only devastation behind.

The reason for this 2025 “Storming” behavior was clear as early as 2016, when I warned about the impending integrity collapse stemming from inadequate AI safety regulation of such “Stormies”.

Conclusion slide to my award-winning presentation on Big Data Integrity Breaches, from KiwiCon 2016

Aspirational fascists are unmistakable, which makes it tragically ironic how many choose to not see along with him, rather than acknowledge his fundamental dangerous reality destroying trust in America: no backbone.

…writing comedy about the ever-shifting opinions of Donald Trump, the Speedy Gonzales of on-the-hoof policymaking, is like playing pin the tail on the donkey, but it’s unfair on donkeys. […] Teenage thugs caught on a security camera roughing up a petrol station attendant and tipping the contents of the till into an Adidas bag have more dignity and honour than Trump and Vance…

No backbone, no honor among thieves, as anyone in security knows well.