Here is a story often repeated about the Tesla. I think the Pennsylvania case was perhaps the most dramatic, given the photos and descriptions of water wasted. Instead, Florida police just say this:

A Spring Hill woman was uninjured after her Tesla crashed and caught fire on Thursday morning. Troopers say the 24-year-old woman collided with debris on U.S. 19 and lost control of the vehicle. The Telsa caught fire in the driveway entrance to Castriota Chevrolet, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

Well at least she was in a place to buy a Chevy and continue her life without any more Tesla fires.

Here’s an interesting press release from the competitive ethics circuit.

Ethics Bowl team wins 2025 national championship…. The Macalester team competed against 35 other teams over two days, ultimately defeating Stanford by one point in the final round.

For the final match, students were asked to discuss questions about space weaponry and term limits for federal judges, including “If you were tasked with outlining the United States’ policy with respect to the use of space weaponry, what would that policy look like?” and “If you were tasked with producing a policy regarding the term lengths for federal judges (up to and including lifetime appointments), what would that policy look like?”

Teams are judged by their ability to identify and analyze the ethical dimensions of each case in a clear, focused, and thoughtful manner, with an appreciation for varied perspectives.

Congratulations to the Macalester team. A job well done, as you can see in the recording.

These topics were obviously picked way back before a week ago, when America still had a Justice branch of government.

And here’s a bit of trivia for you: my undergraduate degree in ethics is from… Macalester. Go Scots!
Squeeze that bag of air,
like you just don’t care!

I tend to never mention this because, well, who has ever heard of… McGill? No, I said Macalester. My other degree from LSE is a different story entirely.

Of course the real shocker is that Stanford is allowed to compete in ethics. Anyone under the Stanford name claiming to care about ethics should first have to identify and analyze the ethical dimensions of Leland Stanford’s genocide of native Americans, followed by his relentless fraud and overt racism. Genocide? Yes, genocide. That name Stanford sure has a lot to answer before it steps into a bowl of ethics. I mean can you imagine if the headline was that Macalester defeated Hitler University in an ethics bowl?

It’s the eighth recall in under two years. Guinness record?

Tesla says they used the wrong glue in their luxury survivability design. It’s hard to tell which is worse, flat steel body panels or attempting to use only glue.

Like a toddler car project with maximum DOGE (“efficiency”) and minimum wisdom, the Cyberstuck glue failure means total failure.

There was no thought put in beyond “just stick it on, hurry up”. Imagine the thinker who came up with a price tag over $100K for a car made from flat sheets of steel glued on.

The problem boils down to Tesla apparently didn’t think about their “truck” being exposed to… weather. The Tesla genius glue fails from being outside. And that’s amazingly consistent with the Cybertruck regularly being ruined by any and all forms of water, from snow to rain.

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.