Edwina Currie uttered a sentence in December 1988 that would rapidly end her ministerial career and send Britain’s egg industry into “crisis“:

Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.

Was she entirely accurate? No. She should have said “much” or left out the word “most”. That wordplay doesn’t sound like a crisis, though. Was there a genuine health concern that needed addressing? Absolutely. Egg production in the UK was affected with salmonella and she was correctly saying they could do better.

Government data showed concerning links between infections and egg consumption. Cases in Britain had more than doubled between 1982 and 1988. She brought to public attention that there was a real problem. Currie’s assessment was correct, despite an imperfect delivery by including a vague word “most”. Most of the time we shouldn’t say most.

What followed was a textbook case of self-serving defensive tactics, trying to avoid bad news, rushing to shoot the messenger to undermine their message. Notably, egg sales were suddenly reported by the industry to plummet overnight and they demanded the government give them handouts (penalty payments) while they slaughtered millions of their hens. The industry reported it lost tens of millions, demanding even further government handouts. How convenient for the salmonella spreaders they could so immediately demand victim status compensation.

The industry reaction’s effect on Currie? They forced her to resign in disgrace. The industry effectively capitalized on her report; a political moment was seized to secure government subsidies while deflecting attention from evidence of neglect in safety practices. The government provided £20 million in compensation without first establishing an independent investigation into the actual scale and cause of the problem being subsidized. Talk about ironic evidence of corruption in the food industry that had led to the poisonings in the first place. Who were the victims again? Did the 27,000 sick get any of those millions in compensation, ever?

The business tactic of explosive anti-accountability was perhaps as predictable as it was unfortunate. Public health warnings in England must be nuanced or they could naturally trigger fear responses known to “plague” them, if you get my drift.

…human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics in pre-Industrial Europe. Such an alternative transmission route explains many of the notable epidemiological differences between historical and modern plague epidemics.

Scientists keep trying to figure out what caused the plague, while cynical and cruel businesses always seem to have another model in mind…

There was an emergence of a social narrative that Jews had caused the Black Death [by] people who noticed that, in fact, getting rid of Jews was a way of getting rid of debt, as well as taking possession of their wealth. The eruption of the plague had simply given an external reason for this to occur.

Thus, consider how a proud “keep calm and carry on crowd” somehow was pivoted into excited self-serving behavior like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off at the very mention of a potential risk that needed thoughtful response. Instead of a measured action and patience about investigating a “most” eggs claim through scientific clarifications, somehow the egg industry was allowed to leverage mass panic to their favor, ginning up a hunt for…a very convenient scapegoat, a trusted source of concern.

Certainly, Currie’s delivery included a word that needed clarification. Who was more imperfect, the salmonella spreaders or the politician? Her use of “most” rather than providing very specific percentages transformed a targeted warning into an industry-wide condemnation. And in retrospect her job raising attention to a rising problem was effective. She was invoking the point that food poisoning from eggs jumped from 12,500 in 1982 to about 27,000 in 1988. That’s a lot of bad eggs, even if not most!

The “most” significant communication failure actually came after Currie had made her point. Industry representatives, media outlets, and government officials rushed into “don’t keep calm, don’t carry on” outrage instead of proper education. Rather than accept the criticism, contextualizing the risk, rather than providing leadership through the criticism and feedback, rather than providing consumers with practical safety guidance and goals, the egg industrialists under fire focused heavy return fire on destroying Currie herself.

How dare she say something was imperfect? How dare she focus on the bad things and bring attention on a worsening problem that had made 27,000 people sick?

The aftermath of the scandal presents a troubling paradox: the messenger who raised a very legitimate concern faced career destruction for a LOW imperfection in her delivery, while those who allowed salmonella to spread in the first place faced minimal scrutiny for CRITICAL imperfection in their delivery.

The egg producers who had failed to maintain adequate safety standards somehow emerged as the only victims of their own imperfections, while decrying any amount of imperfection as unacceptable in others. The industry stepped back in horror instead of forward into being potential contributors to resolving the real public health issue.

The British Egg Industry Council said it was seeking legal advice on whether it could sue Mrs Currie over “factually incorrect and highly irresponsible” remarks. A spokesman said the risk of an egg being infected with salmonella was less than 200 million to one. The National Farmers’ Union said it might seek legal damages.

The doubling of salmonella cases in five years to 27,000 people was effectively sidelined by industry representatives’ focus on defending their economic interests. Their claim of “200 million to one” odds of infection were foul, as it contradicted reliable government data showing rapidly increasing illness rates.

This pattern repeats itself regularly in public discourse to this day, and especially in security discussions with regard to technology such as the unsafe Tesla designs. We still see efforts to punish those who highlight uncomfortable truths, while counter-attacks are unleashed by those responsible for creating problems to avoid taking any accountability.

From whistleblowers to scientists warning about climate change, our tendency to attack messengers rather than address messages remains one of the most counterproductive social habits in risk management.

Currie’s egg scandal was about a collective inability to process warnings without feeling personally attacked and trying to throw everything at the source, rather than process the warnings. It highlighted a social response, if not a cultural one, where a panic instinct was to curate a simple villain story to avoid thinking hard about complex solutions.

The irony? The Lion Quality mark introduced after her scandalous “more” has made British eggs among the safest in the world. Currie’s warning, imperfect as any warning, ultimately is what led to very needed significant improvements in food safety.

…the industry did have a problem and was giving too many people food poisoning. Farms tried to clean up but the real breakthrough came in 1998 when the vaccination of hens for salmonella was introduced at farms backing the new British Lion mark. All the big egg producers put the marks on their eggs. From 1998 there have been falls almost every year in the number of human cases of Salmonella enteritidis. In 1997, there were 22,254 cases. In 2005, there were 6,677.

Perhaps it’s time we recognized someone who took the fall for speaking uncomfortable truths in British society, for her imperfectly delivered message bringing everyone a more perfect world.

She deserved “more” thoughtful responses than the unfair and imperfect panic and persecution in the place that prides itself on a decorum of perfection. In retrospect, all the claims of harm by the egg industry were targeted political propaganda that evaporated the power of a person whose job it was to improve health. Currie explained it herself later:

…the numbers of confirmed cases continued to run at about 30,000 a year for the next decade, with about 60 deaths a year. […] There really was a problem with eggs. The hens’ oviducts had become contaminated with a new variant of salmonella, which did not kill the birds, but showed up in infected eggs, and caused a particularly virulent food poisoning in humans. It resulted from laying stocks being fed “protein” that turned out to be ground-up dead chickens. Similar insane feeding practices led to BSE in cattle in the 1980s and 90s. […] Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were equivalent to a bunch of lunatics. They’d appointed themselves apologists for the farming industry – not their role, as public regulators and advisers. They were unscientific and incompetent. […] I hadn’t made a mistake – not in the substance. I was public health minister. If something wasn’t done during the winter of 1988, I could foresee that we would have an epidemic on our hands…

The egg industry’s response went beyond mere defensiveness, employing legal threats, contestable statistics, and claims of catastrophic financial harm to undermine a health official raising legitimate concerns. The subsequent events raise questions about whether public panic was amplified and leveraged to secure financial benefits by the very industry that should instead have focused on its obviously flawed safety standards.

When a former NASA engineer demonstrated conclusively and cautiously a Tesla unable to detect a wall and running over child mannequins, a social media army has jumped into action to angrily defend the man-slaughtering design.

Tesla’s response of course to findings like this has never been to address safety concerns with engineering, but instead a barrage of debate tactics and threats. Thus, it’s time again to watch the masterclass in military intelligence methods unleashing their usual terminological obfuscation/smoke game.

The media machine [using Soviet scaffolding repurposed by KGB officers to run their Russian dictatorship] seeks to not only provide an alternative narrative with a Russian version of events, but also to cause general confusion and question the whole notion of the truth. It provides varying accounts of events, often based in truth, that work to sow discord and confusion.

This is not a theoretical experience for American engineers working on safety reports, this has been a long-time fundamental public safety issue by design.

Everyone knows the Kremlin seeks to use information to deny, deceive, and confuse… You could spend every hour of every day trying to bat down every lie, to the point where you don’t achieve anything else. And that’s exactly what the Kremlin wants

An engineer’s hands are tied up with truckloads of misdirection and misinformation so they can’t possibly do engineering? A truth-teller delivering transparent results is accused of manipulation by the biggest manipulators, up is down, math and physics no longer can be real… in the fog of information warfare. We know how and why many people will die, until we’re facing a tidal wave of “nothing is real” attacks.

Notably the angry mob spins their attacks as a “defense” strategy to protect their assets, their way of life, as if they are the real victims and not the people who will be killed by design. They’re blasting information weapons out into the Internet with a claim to be protecting something they consider so valuable, so critical to their own survival, any lives lost by others (e.g. killed by Tesla) get reframed as just collateral damage.

Consider the irony. A Tesla vision failure means it can’t “see” a child mannequin and runs it over without any regard for human life. Tesla defenders don’t “see” this as design failure, but rather focus on what they can “see” as an attack by anyone who dares to speak the truth of exactly how and why a child would be killed.

It’s a kind of consistency in trained and limited vision, an inability to process real outcomes, that’s a result of military-like basic training about who deserves to live or die.

“You’ll Believe What We Tell You To” Say Tesla PK Shock Troops

Tribune.com.pk’s recent mob-rule-sounding propaganda blast attacking Mark Rober’s Tesla test is a perfect example of how the military intelligence of an unnamed nation state can unleash weaponized words to deflect meaningful criticism to float the stock value underpinning one of their key foreign assets.

The techniques we’re seeing mirror Soviet “Operation Infektion” that falsely claimed AIDS was a US bioweapon – a playbook preserved and upgraded by those who deployed it originally. Despite having an economy smaller than Italy’s, this nation maintains disproportionate global influence operations, as essential to its power as oil revenues. Like inheriting a Cold War nuclear arsenal then repurposing it for neighborhood extortion, former intelligence operatives now running a dictatorship deploy their keyboard armies against threats to their investments. Tesla’s terminology battles represent just one theater in this broader campaign – flooding discourse with confusion to exhaust experts and undermine regulation. The ultimate goal remains unchanged: enable rapid wealth extraction by using asymmetric information attacks to prevent accountability for preventable harms and deaths.

With that in mind, thousands of keyboard warriors from an unknown country are now on a campaign to attack Rober as if he “misrepresented Tesla” because he supposedly tested “Autopilot” not “Full Self-Driving”, as if any of those words have actual meaning and a distinction matters when the fundamental issue is Tesla in 2025 demonstrates the complete failure to detect a wall and mannequins it claimed a decade ago to be a solved problem. More to the point, Tesla claimed it would be the first to solve this safety issue and be the most safe car on the road, placing itself above all other designs and engineers unequivocally and without exception.

Here’s the absurd logic at work, just to make clear how cruel and cynical the military intelligence system is at pushing Tesla into certain death of Americans (remember for purposes of information warfare severity, millions of people died during the Cold War from its targeted application):

• Tesla markets the term “Autopilot” without shame in 2016, announcing autopilot capabilities removing any need for a human by 2017, and their CEO repeatedly states that anyone criticizing autopilot with caution about adoption should be held responsible for deaths — BECAUSE AUTOPILOT IS SOLD AS CAPABLE OF PREVENTING DEATH
• People start to die because they trust Tesla marketing, with two fatal crashes immediately in 2016 and a pedestrian dead in 2018…
• Tesla starts to passively criticize Autopilot itself by 2020, announcing “Full Self-Driving” that will do what Autopilot was sold to do.
• Tesla in late 2024 changes the name of FSD to “supervised”, passively criticizing both Autopilot and FSD as being incapable of achieving their meaning, admitting they’ve never been using language correctly. Musk pumps even harder on the propaganda, claiming there will be ZERO CRASHES IN 2025, despite at least 52 deaths from Autopilot and FSD together so far)
• Anyone testing these systems is accused of the crime that Tesla is committing, as if misuse of language is applied to anyone pointing out the misuse of language. It’s always “didn’t test the right system” because there is no actual system to test, just a shell game of opaque unaccountable abusive behavior that puts everyone in danger except Tesla.

This terminological methodology, well known to scholars of military intelligence and targeted attacks on populations, is designed for Tesla to never be held accountable. When deaths occur, the response isn’t to investigate and fix the technology, but to revise words and change definitions. When tests demonstrate failures, the reaction isn’t engineering revised and better safety systems, but semantic arguments to avoid engineering at all. Meanwhile, the body count continues to rise while Musk makes increasingly absurd safety claims detached from reality and attacks his critics with baseless claims they are doing what he does. It’s a casino mentality where he sets up mirrors and tables to unjust house rules such that anyone who dares to enter his realm can never win.

Deadly Tesla Disengagement

Learning how magicians lie is such a disappointment because the magic is lost. This is what the Electrek journalist discovered after being attacked by Tesla’s investors who demanded he believe in the magic:

NHTSA’s investigation of Tesla vehicles on Autopilot crashing into emergency vehicles on the highway found that Autopilot would disengage within less than one second prior to impact on average in the crashes that it was investigating…

Rober’s video captured this exact behavior! The magic gone in an instant. Watch carefully as the system disengages 17 frames before impact. This is a damning example of Tesla engineering designing coverups into friendly-fire situations. They built a feature to generate maximum plausible deniability to reduce their liability in a known deadly outcome they are responsible for creating. “The system wasn’t engaged during the crash” becomes the technical truth that masks the killer reality: the Tesla since 2016 promises of solving driverless completely by 2017 still fail to prevent a crash in 2025 that it should detect well in advance.

Seventeen LONG Frames Before Death

Other cars can do it today. Other cars didn’t promise to solve crashes by 2017. Tesla can’t do it today. Tesla promised to have it solved by 2017. You think it matters what words Tesla uses when they’ve proven since even before 2016 that none of their words can be trusted? Accepting their preference in terminology is like agreeing to let a toddler rewrite the dictionary in a way that helps them never be responsible for anything.

Tesla has been selling people a word salad unsafe for consumption. Their “apple” is actually a painted rock. And when someone breaks a tooth trying to bite into it, Tesla argues “this is our LOOKING apple, it can’t yet be bitten.” After many people lose their teeth Tesla announces “we have a banana for you to go with our apple.” Should someone test either the “apple” or the new “banana” they would discover both are painted rocks, to which Tesla says “forget the apple, we replaced the banana with another banana, and another one, and another one, next year the banana will be so edible nobody will break a tooth ever again”… and the next year more teeth are broken, repeating this advance fee fraud forever. It’s really no different than the 419 African email scam.

In this new safety test video by the ex-NASA engineer we see someone showing a Tesla apple for what it is, and always has been, just a painted rock. It’s a LIE that has dragged on since 2016. Because LiDAR don’t LIE. There shouldn’t be controversy in this VERY OLD NEWS. The exact opposite in fact, this video should be welcomed like how someone who just placed 154th in a group event gets congratulated. Hey Mark, welcome, and thanks for participating in something that has been operating for over ten years with the same results. Welcome to Mark, welcome into the big tent with everyone who already understands that since 2016 Tesla has been selling “driverless” for hundreds of millions and more hundreds of millions without ever providing what they had claimed from the start.

Another Brick in the Wall Tesla Can’t See

While Tesla plays word games to undermine safety, the reality remains unchanged: their low-quality consumer-grade camera-only system simply and predictably fails basic tests that LiDAR-equipped vehicles have passed for a decade. This isn’t new to anyone with a clue because engineers have been demonstrating this fundamental flaw repeatedly and dramatically (although, I’ll admit, not as dramatically as this high-production new Disney-like video). The Dawn Project and numerous safety experts have shown these exact same failures in many media formats with the same conclusive results, yet Tesla removed safety in the false name of a fictional “efficiency”.

Elon Musk… has expressed his admiration for Rand’s work, particularly “The Fountainhead.”

In Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead,” the character Dominique Francon purchases a beautiful Greek statue that she genuinely admires, then deliberately destroys it by throwing it out the window. It’s almost like Elon Musk is that character, who destroys everything he touches to prove that is better (for him) than letting it exist in a world that doesn’t appreciate him enough. Musk’s “the best part is no part” psychosis is destructive thinking that removed critical safety sensors from Tesla vehicles, despite warnings from experts. In the same way he created DOGE to force a false “efficiency” of minimal human safety, resulting in preventable deaths (targeting non-whites).

The philosophy of the malignant narcissist isn’t a mystery, the intent to deny/withhold and harm aren’t hidden. Elon Musk repeatedly implies deaths of non-white children will be consistent with his life’s eugenicist mission to generate more white people as quickly as possible.

Killing children is by design, I’m afraid. “Pro-natalists” like Musk claim they aren’t racist, but their pressure to have children is solely focused on white women, while they back policies that literally kill non-white children. He’s a eugenicist.

Tesla killing children in the road thus is the outcome of his racist game, given the majority of people at risk will statistically be non-white. DOGE eliminating USAID is projected to kill at least 3 million non-white people, far greater than Tesla death tolls. Elon Musk is consistent in his plotting to do harm to very specific groups of people.

That’s why you have to understand in the fog of information warfare that Elon Musk makes increasingly absurd claims on purpose, recently promoting the nonsense that Tesla vehicles “won’t crash” in 2025 even as Tesla crash rates have actually accelerated even faster than fleet growth, according to NHTSA data.

Tesla at War, Casualties Mounting

The public deserves better than semantic games. When a vehicle can’t detect a wall or mannequins in the road, the terminology used to market its driver assistance features becomes irrelevant. The question isn’t whether it was “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving” that failed, but why Tesla continues to deploy systems with demonstrated safety flaws and fights regulation rather than improving their technology.

As the Tribune.pk article unwittingly reveals, we’re witnessing a coordinated effort to shift discussion from “does this system have a correct outcome” to “which term was used at the moment of failure”. That’s a shell game designed to exhaust and confuse the public while real safety concerns go unaddressed and more and more people die by design.

The truth is simple: if your vehicle that has been vehemently and angrily defended since 2016 as “driverless” still can’t detect a child in the road or a giant wall, the terms don’t really matter. Over 52 people are dead. What matters is Tesla intentionally misleads people, they’re dead, and it shouldn’t be on the road anymore. At this point, Tesla should be recognized as a foreign-backed threat even worse than domestic terrorism, literally…

“President” Musk has deployed his loyal White House occupant Donald Trump to announce today a shocking new initiative: Tesla deaths, apparently already worse than domestic terrorism, are to be officially increased.

I wish I were kidding. Tesla products causing an alarmingly high-rate of deaths are to be deployed more widely as a matter of some kind of federal priority? We’re hearing a Trump initiative that will kill more Americans, and damage more property, as near as I can tell.

What could possibly be behind this cruel misdirection from the White House, where Trump seems increasingly comfortable serving as an oligarch’s spokesperson instead of an American president? Does anyone remember the style and history of their campaign messaging going back to 2016?

The results from this original tryst (2016-2020) have been very clear, given how Tesla “Autopilot” was deregulated enough to go on and kill more people than even domestic terrorist vehicle attacks:

Let’s go now to the Trump stage of 2025 to hear the exact latest clown-around performance.

Donald Trump said he will label violence against Tesla dealerships domestic terrorism as he appeared with Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, to show support amid recent anti-Tesla protests and the slump in the company’s stock price. Several Tesla vehicles were parked in the driveway of the White House for the US president to pick from, accompanied by Musk and his young son.

The irony is impossible to miss: Trump is ready to label protests against potentially dangerous Tesla vehicles as “domestic terrorism” while standing next to the very man whose products the data suggests might be the bigger threat. But who’s really calling the shots in this bizarre press conference?

Imagine if the White House proudly displayed VBIEDs (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) in the driveway while American troops were being killed by the same weapons in combat zones.

This isn’t just dangerous political theater, it’s moral abdication. When Tesla vehicles are claiming more American lives than domestic terrorism according to statistics, why is our government criminalizing those who raise concerns rather than addressing the clear and present Tesla death danger?

The Trump jelly platform seems disturbingly clear: American lives are apparently worth less than protecting Musk’s fake wealth from his fake stock price.

Furthermore, when I hear Trump talk about a worry that people freely throw “Molotov cocktails” at the authoritarian Tesla brand, a certain history fact comes immediately to mind.

The “Molotov” label comes from Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who had brazenly claimed that bombs exploding in Finnish civilian neighborhoods in 1939 were “humanitarian food deliveries.” The Finns, in their cold and bitter irony, named improvised bottles of fuel lit on fire as “Molotov cocktails”, because they said it was just a “drink” to go with the explosive authoritarian “bread baskets.”

Fast forward to today and Trump fills the driveway with machines implicated in hundreds of American deaths saying they deserve special government protection as if Molotov’s bread baskets, while those who protest them with cocktails are “domestic terrorists.” See what I mean about history?

Orwell would recognize Trump’s corrupt use of language immediately. Hopefully it also should be recognized by anyone still able to read 1984 (e.g. Trump’s Secretary of Defense Hegseth has literally ordered Orwell’s books urgently axed from military libraries and reading lists).

I’d say the cruel White House performance of domestic terrorism doublespeak has tell-tale smells of Russia’s Putin influence, but the security community surely by now knows the awful “Musk” of such autocratic theater.