A new Los Angeles op-ed on AV safety opens with “there’s nothing wrong with mourning” a cat, then spends the entire piece arguing that mourning should produce exactly zero policy response.

There’s nothing wrong with mourning the death of a neighborhood cat. You’ll have trouble finding someone who likes cats more than I do.

Hey, this guy says some of his best friends are cats, just so you know.

There’s nothing wrong with mourning death, according to the author, as long as the mourning doesn’t prevent more death.

Why?

He’s not saying “don’t be sad about the cat.”

He’s saying: “Accept that corporations killing things you love is the price of progress, and demanding accountability will kill more humans.”

Corporations? Like the ones funding the author, Steven Greenhut, Western region director for the right-wing extremist R Street Institute?

Is Greenhut literally being paid to normalize corporate greed to the degree of cold blooded murder for profit?

R Street receives funding from tech companies and insurers who profit directly from autonomous vehicle liability limitations, the exact policies Greenhut advocates. In fact, Google, which owns Waymo, directly funded R Street through its Google.org foundation. Greenhut isn’t just defending autonomous vehicles in the abstract. He’s defending his funders’ products.

I mean, Greenhut isn’t writing policy recommendations when it’s all actually marketing deliverables for his paycheck. You think he is going to give up this source of income to show some concern or care about your kids or pets being killed?

Extreme.

The Escalation Pattern

This is exactly the racist jaywalking playbook.

1920s: “Pedestrians are obstacles to vehicle flow” = car manufacturers criminalize non-whites for walking.

2017: “Protesters are obstacles to traffic” = oil companies propose zero liability for running over non-white protestors.

2025: “Pets are acceptable losses” = Big Tech normalizes corporate immunity for killing dehumanized targets.

Each step expands the category of acceptable targets while contracting the zone of accountability.

When Death Starts Normalizing

When Greenhut says drivers aren’t held accountable for hitting animals, he’s stating a current failure of justice as justification for systematizing that failure at corporate scale.

The argument structure is:

• Individual drivers often escape accountability (bad)
• Therefore corporations should definitely escape accountability (worse?)
• This is actually good because…

The Cat Is Doing Political Work

Kit Kat isn’t just a tragic death. Kit Kat is a test case for power.

1. If a beloved community fixture can be killed with zero consequences
2. If police can document the violation but issue nothing
3. If the response is memorialize but don’t regulate

Then the precedent is set: Corporate algorithmic agents can kill without legal consequence. Start with pets (aww, sad, but just animals). Move to cyclists (already happening in multiple Tesla “veered” examples). Expand to pedestrians (as overtly proposed by North Dakota government). Automate at scale (Swasticars).

Swiss Re “Data” is Dogshit

Greenhut cites “88% reduction in property damage claims” as if it’s safety data.

However, as I have explained repeatedly before, such as in “Waymo is Murder“: No citations = no fault documentation = fewer claims where liability is clear.

If police can’t cite the AV, victims are dumped into a cynical “gap in accountability,” and the company controls all evidence… of course property damage claims go down.

Thank you, NOT.

That’s NOT safety.

That’s legal engineering.

Swiss Re makes money when:

• Liability claims are minimized
• Fault is unclear
• Victims can’t prove responsibility
• Payouts are smaller

The 88% reduction in property damage claims could mean AVs are safer, OR (let’s be honest) victims can’t successfully file claims against corporations with armies of lawyers and no driver to hold accountable.

Which interpretation does Swiss Re have financial incentive to heavily promote?

Greenhut presents this dogshit data as if it’s independent verification. It’s marketing for a liability model that profits insurers and manufacturers while leaving victims with “gaps in accountability.”

Woof.

The Big Conclusion Reveals Everything

Greenhut ends his piece with this advice:

When something bad happens, sometimes the best approach is doing nothing.

This is the same logic male authorities used in the 1970s when they told women not to resist rape—advice that feminist activists fought against by teaching self-defense and organizing “Take Back the Night” marches.

Where was Greenhut in 1978?

As anyone learning the lessons of history, such as WWII and the rise of Hitler, knows about the people who said to do nothing… they were (and are) the bad guys.

Translation of Greenhut: When corporations kill without accountability, for profit, the best approach is protecting their ability to keep killing, for profit.

Every corporate atrocity in American history was enabled by people like this being paid to argue that corporate accountability would somehow be worse than mass death.

He’s clearly NOT arguing for actual safety (which would require accountability, independent verification, mandatory disclosure).

He’s arguing algorithms should be allowed to kill for profit and without any legal consequences.

And he’s using a dead pet.

Your pet could be next.

Your child on a bike could be after that.

Because that’s what Tesla “veered” documentation shows already. This isn’t speculative. The escalation from pets to cyclists is already documented. Kit Kat directly connects to Allie Huggins (one of many cyclists killed by Tesla hit-and-runs).

The cat’s death isn’t a tragedy Greenhut’s able to move on from, because it’s an obstacle to corporate immunity he needs to neutralize.

That normalization is terrifying: we’ve seen this exact pattern produce ISIS recruitment pipelines, vehicular homicide proposals, and the criminalization of being a pedestrian.

Greenhut wants us to grieve Kit Kat quietly while accepting that no one will answer for corporate death for profit. Greenhut is literally paid by entities that profit from the deadly policy outcomes he advocates.

That acceptance is the foundation for algorithmic murder at scale.

Here’s a 2005 documentary that omits mentioning that Peter Thiel’s father, who apparently feared the 1968 anti-Nazi student movement, fled Germany to raise his son within the residual white-supremacist enclave (German genocide) of Namibia.

Described by the BBC as the story of Germany’s forgotten genocide. This powerful documentary by David Adetayo Olusoga took a sensitive and uncompromising look at the tragic circumstances leading to the massacre of three quarters of the Namibia population in German concentration camps built in Africa.

Systematic extermination of the local population is still being researched, yet little of the work seems to connect to Peter Thiel’s statements about being raised as a German boy escaping anti-Nazism to grow up instead in Hitler-loving Swakopmund.

Over time, Imperial Germany refused to tolerate the independence and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. In 1904, after a military victory against an Ovaherero force at Waterberg, the German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order against all men, women, and children of the Ovaherero. Those who survived the waves of violence that followed the orders were rounded up at ‘collection points’ across the colony and taken to concentration camps, where they were subjected to brutal conditions and forced labour.

Swakopmund was so racist, so directly aligned with support for Hitler, that even the South African government warned about the extremist enclave there in 1939.

The decision to move there after Hitler was defeated, in other words, should be framed entirely in the context of “early apartheid” that turned into the overt support for Nazism through the 1970s.

How strong were the post-WWII ties to Hitler that drew the Thiel family to relocate there, fleeing the end of Nazism?

Here is the news from 1976, as Peter Thiel was placed by his father into a school “More German than Germany“.

SWAKOPMUND, South‐West Africa —’Heil Hitler!” said the black gas station attendant matter‐of‐factly to the department customer, raising his right arm to the traditional height.

Extreme.

Notably, while Peter Thiel was raised in this environment to invest family “fortunes” into the unregulated American tech industry and become a billionaire, museums of the genocide cite a lack of funding.

One of the smallest museums in Africa might be its most important: A curator’s battle to commemorate Germany’s forgotten genocide in Namibia

While survivors of the genocide have tried to pursue officials, like the Germans who erected monuments celebrating genocide, perhaps Peter Thiel should be investigated more thoroughly as a living monument to genocide?

The Marine Denkmal (Marine Memorial) in Swakopmund, Namibia, commemorates the German imperial soldiers who fought against Indigenous Namibians in the Herero Wars (1904-1908). […] Opposition to removing the monument stems from the ideological reservations of German-speaking communities in Swakopmund, as well as fears about its economic consequences, mainly in terms of the memorial’s appeal to tourists.

If we investigate monuments promoting German genocide, shouldn’t we investigate the Germans today who directly benefited from and continue to advocate for the ideologies those monuments represent?

…I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room to ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman.

To put it another way, more investigative work should go into the “economics” Peter has claimed his family’s success was based upon:

…when Peter proudly entered Stanford he bragged to at least two classmates that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. He clearly was referring to his father’s work in apartheid-era Namibia

What kind of economic activity is available to Nazis fleeing post-WWII Germany to flourish in a post-genocide apartheid enclave?

What does ‘economically sound’ mean to Peter Thiel when the foundation is extermination orders and forced labor camps?

And what connections exist between this family history and his current ACTS 17 political organizing – particularly its funding sources and ideological framework?

File this news under the inevitable failure of doing business with white supremacists.

Far-right Christian nationalist and white nationalist accounts flooded [the FBI Director’s Diwali] post with bigoted memes and rhetoric. “Go back home and worship your sand demons,” a far-right pastor wrote. “Get the f**k out of my country,” read another reply. Said another, “This is America. We don’t do this.” These responses, some of which were seen millions of times, were on the tamer end of the spectrum.

Similar hostility followed Diwali greetings on X from former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, as well as posts about the holiday from the White House, the State Department, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Some Indian American conservatives seem shocked that segments of the political right are now taking aim at them.

Shocked by hate speech on the site literally rebranded with swastikas? The X rebrand was a form of overt Nazism, and thus hate speech by definition can not be a surprise there.

Indians in America apparently thought the Swastika-posting MAGA hate machinery meant that someone else, not them, would suffer from all that racism. The FBI Director is getting racist (arguably domestic terrorist) messages sent direct to his social media profile. If he isn’t protected by being “inside” the Trump cabal, nobody is. These Indians foolishly believed they could get a copy of the infamous get out of jail cards of white nationalism, while being non-Christian let alone non-white?

I’m reminded of the many in Nazi Germany who foolishly said Hitler wouldn’t flip and shoot them in the head on a moment’s notice because… reasons.

But wait, it gets worse, as the Indians trying to put white nationalists into power were engaging in the exact form of “non-white” racism they now are allegedly surprised targets them as non-whites.

…Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator who has peddled racism against Black Americans for decades, mused: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”

This type of degrading rhetoric is not new, but it’s increasingly prominent from the political right. With the rise of once-fringe figures, and with President Donald Trump aggressively cracking down on nearly every type of immigration, some members of the MAGA coalition are openly suggesting that only white Christians belong in America.

Peddled racism for decades, and yet we are supposed to believe this guy is surprised by the racism he himself peddled?

Pardon my French but WTAF? The Right always used to talk like this! Nixon, Ford, Reagan… huge racists, and there’s no secret about it.

Monkeys. That’s what the white Right calls people with skin darker than their own.

That’s the guy with a long history of racism that the Right chose to be their President, not that long after Gerald Ford had literally created the white-supremacist America First college hate group that was aligned with Hitler, until if course it became banned after declaration of war.

Imagine having that giant seditious period of promoting Hitler on your resume, right next to being the American President who was never elected. That’s the kind of politician who defines the Right these days, pining for an unelected unitary executive who keeps the non-whites out of power.

Truman clearly warned Eisenhower that Richard Nixon was the kind of man America had just defeated in WWII. Ford probably was even worse in that context. And Truman was right, yet not leading the Right, so here we are a generation later talking about the same wrong Right.

A recent article in Behavioral Scientist presents Richard Thaler as the founder of behavioral economics. This is misinformation.

Thaler was effective at packaging and promoting psychological research in ways that economics couldn’t ignore, while he most certainly did NOT discover human irrationality.

Common sense, right? Claiming someone recently discovered human irrationality is itself irrational… the latest evidence confirming ancient theories of human irrationality.

More specifically, making claims about “observing that people are influenced” – the fundamental insight that context and framing affect decisions – definitely is NOT Thaler’s invention.

Herbert Simon won a Nobel in 1978 (before Thaler even started) for work on bounded rationality. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory was then presented in 1979. An endowment effect was documented by Thaler, yet the fundamental psychology of loss aversion came from Kahneman and Tversky. Going back earlier, researchers like Ward Edwards in the 1950s-60s presented psychological research on decision-making that challenged expected utility theory. And we really should include Smith, Wollstonecraft, Kant and Hume (published extensively that human reasoning isn’t purely rational calculation), as I wrote here in 2016, about some of my work in 2014.

I say this because nobody should be calling Thaler the founder of behavioral economics (he helped establish a distinct field in economics, but absolutely didn’t invent the ideas or lay the foundation). The article frames “anomalies” as Thaler’s discovery, despite economists and psychologists documenting violations of rational choice theory for decades. And then, insult to injury, the article says Imas’ career progression is defined by some weird proximity to Thaler (“once a distant role model… now a friend and collaborator”).

With propagandist articles like this, it’s no wonder economists are skeptical of behavioral theory as glorification of propagandists.

The misinformation serves a specific function: it centers credit within economics (and specifically at Chicago, infamous for hero seeking radical individualism) rather than acknowledging that economics was VERY late to recognize what other disciplines already knew and shared with them.

Thaler’s actual contribution was politics and marketing of others’ work to fit his own sphere of influence (erasing them), NOT discovery.

Historians, popping immodest economist bubbles since… forever.

I mean historians see through the fog of Chicago immediately because we trace actual intellectual genealogies rather than mythologized “founding fathers” trying to prove themselves weird ubermensch. The economist version is institutional hagiography, and false heroism, NOT history.

Philosophy (18th-19th c): Humans aren’t rational calculators.

Psychology (1950s-1970s): Empirical demonstration of systematic deviations from rationality.

Chicago (1980s+): “Ooh, look at what we found others talking about. Can we get someone around here to take credit for discovering them, and rebrand it anomalies?!”

The mythology machine creates a hero narrative where Thaler is the lone genius challenging orthodoxy, rather than what actually happened, to fit the Chicago mental model of radical white male individualism.

They can’t bring themselves to admit a story where knowledge emerges collectively and collaboratively across disciplines.

God forbid the ruling men of Chicago recognize that women and non-economists did foundational work. Women? Could you imagine, Chicago school dudes giving credit to women? Where’s the credit for Sarah Lichtenstein’s work on preference reversals that directly challenged rational choice? For Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory that explained how people actually categorize? For developmental psychologists studying children’s economic reasoning? For Baruch Fischhoff’s work on hindsight bias and risk perception?

Progress happens through institutions slowly correcting errors, yet Chicago instead waits at the top of a tree for scraps like a vulture hoping to spin a narrative about being the apex predator. Imagine economists admitting it was fundamentally wrong and learning from outsiders?

The Thaler propaganda is to curate a lone genius, bravely challenging orthodoxy from within, founding a new field through individual brilliance. That’s the same bogus narrative structure as their whole economic theory – the heroic individual entrepreneur disrupting markets like a God above mere mortals. It’s circular and self-serving mythology.