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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla quality failures get worse over time. Later models show pattern of safety decline.
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.
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.
Key Observations: Data clearly shows that both serious incidents (orange line) and fatal incidents (pink line) are increasing at a steeper rate than the fleet size growth (blue line). This is particularly evident from 2021 onwards, where: Fleet size (blue) shows a linear growth of about 1x per year. Serious incidents (orange) show an exponential growth curve, reaching nearly 5x by 2024. Fatal incidents (pink) also show a steeper-than-linear growth, though not as dramatic as serious incidents. The divergence between the blue line (fleet growth) and the incident lines (orange and pink) indicates that incidents are indeed accelerating faster than the production/deployment of new vehicles. Source: Tesladeaths.com and NHTSA
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.
America is adrift from a rise of “Fisters”, that is to say “America Fisters“.
An “Aryan fist” is used by white supremacists such as neo-Nazis globally and the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. For example, the right-wing terrorist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik saluted with a raised fist in court in Oslo in 2012.
What does the angry rhetoric of the hateful nativist “America First” platform coupled with a raised fist mean?
The return of the “America First” ideology—a nativist hate group of the 1800s, better known as the KKK—has abruptly created a federal leadership vacuum swarming with raised fists. The contemporary usage has once again raised concerns about its inherently nationalist rhetoric. Critics argue that the slogan implicitly positions some Americans as more authentically “American” than others, intentionally weaponizing the labels of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Muslim American… anything that would acknowledge both a race, religion or cultural heritage with an American identity. Framing of “America” having to be first, then labeling non-whites of America as always second, drives historical hierarchies to deny America embracing the truth of multicultural composition.
As their always divisive rhetoric gains ground like it’s 1836 again (eve of Andrew Jackson’s moral and economic collapse sending America into depression and then Civil War), we’re witnessing the same destructive patterns that periodically threaten American unity. Over a century after General Grant destroyed them on the battle field, and next destroyed them at the voting booth as President Grant, we can clearly see Trump is bringing the KKK back.
President Grant’s tomb says it plainly for all to see. Shut down the America First (KKK) mob rule (yet again) or they will inflict violent injustices upon everyone.
But there’s a modern counterforce hidden in plain sight, which should be familiar to most people today—Fred Rogers. Not just the digestible Daniel Tiger most remember spun out of his era of troubled times, but also the deeply principled American hero as community-builder detailed in Michael Long’s “Peaceful Neighbor.” Rogers wasn’t creating mere entertainment; he was using entertainment as a vessel to offer a clear superior outcome.
“Only people who take the time to see our work can begin to understand the depth of it.” This is the invitation of Peaceful Neighbor, to see and understand Rogers’s convictions and their expression through his program. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it turns out, is far from sappy, sentimental, and shallow; it’s a sharp political response to a civil and political society poised to kill.
While the old white supremacist nativists exploit fear of the other and destroy anything diverting from their fictional vision of self, Rogers long ago demonstrated how to build genuine connection across necessary and fruitful differences.
