Somebody apparently thinks that far too many travelers in America have started trying to get on planes with loaded guns.

TSA officers have found 6,301 firearms in carry-on bags so far this year, surpassing the previous record of 5,972 detected in 2021. The numbers have been increasing steadily over the last decade; in 2012, 1,549 firearms were detected at security checkpoints.

Eighty-eight percent of the guns found this year were loaded, the TSA said.

Firearm possession laws vary by location, but guns are never allowed in carry-on bags at any airport security checkpoint, even if a passenger has a concealed-weapon permit.

The solution proposed is as dumb as the people carrying a loaded gun into a security checkpoint.

The TSA said Friday it’s raising the maximum fine to $14,950. Previously it was $13,910.

Adding 8% as a penalty is barely an adjustment for inflation. I’ve seen cartons of milk go up in cost faster.

What the TSA should do is revoke the permit to carry a gun from those who aren’t able to carry one safely. Isn’t that the real purpose of a safety screening anyway, to make everyone safer?

It’s a less complicated story than it probably seems from the headlines.

A 35-year-old Israeli citizen living in the United States was one of seven suspects who has been charged by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) with 16 counts of conspiracy to defraud the US, money laundering on behalf of the Russian government and smuggling ammunition and weapon components to Moscow.

The accused, and his Russian wife, allegedly used an Etsy store with overt sympathy messages for Ukraine… to smuggle American military technology into Russia for killing Ukrainians.

The unassuming couple also outwardly sympathized with Ukraine throughout the 10-month war. Brayman, who lists Kyiv as his hometown on Facebook, shared a video on the site of a Ukrainian dance group…

Here’s the kind of portrait he posted that definitely screams suburban America small craft store owner.

Ok, I’m just going to throw out for the sake of a FSB long-game argument he wasn’t actually born in Ukraine and probably lied to get Israeli citizenship. “Vacation” to Israel may even have been to meet his FSB handlers. Allowing his wife to be Russian in the open would then suggest the FSB were being stingy/lazy.

But what do I know? I’ve really never been into crafting.

A recently filed lawsuit exposes the Facebook profit model, once again, this time in Ethiopia.

Amare’s son, researcher Abrham Amare, appealed to Facebook to have the posts removed but heard nothing back for weeks. Eight days after his father’s murder, Abrham received a response from Facebook: One of the posts targeting his father, shared by a page with more than 50,000 followers, had been removed.

“I hold Facebook personally responsible for my father’s murder,” he says.

Tesla lawyers seem to have lost touch with reality, which ironically led them to concede self driving has been a fraud the whole time.

Every year for ten years Tesla promised self driving capabilities were soon to be delivered, yet never delivered.

Here’s a typical example:

Tesla first started offering FSD in 2016, initially as a hardware package that the company said would receive necessary software updates over time to deliver the promise of true self-driving capability. CEO Elon Musk said at the time that he expected a Tesla to be able to travel from Los Angeles to New York “without the need for a single touch” on the steering wheel as soon as 2017. 

Two important points.

1. 2017 is not a long term goal for a 2016 announcement. In fact, it’s rediculously short.
2. The announcement wasn’t aspirational. It used “single touch” to demonstrate confidence in delivery, because that is something easily proven.

And we all see in 2022 that the above two statements were fraud, right?

I remember well the keynote presentation on Tesla I gave in 2016 warning about the coming safety disasters.

I called Tesla driverless the Titanic of our highways because they were going to predictably kill so many people.

It’s still amazingly relevant because I pointed then to why Tesla driverless engineering was so poor and misleading; I wanted to see the company held responsible for the unnecessary deaths it already was causing… wanted to prevent further disasters and needless suffering.

Fast forward and we find a growing graveyard of Tesla owners.

Tragic. Preventable.

And it’s within this context some tone-deaf Tesla lawyers want to clown around and insult everyone’s intelligence by saying this:

“Mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud,” Tesla’s lawyers wrote in a Nov. 28 court filing, according to CNN.

Tesla also cited… that the plaintiffs weren’t really harmed by the fact a true self-driving car hasn’t been delivered…”

Now let’s compare and contrast what Tesla did (A) with what Tesla lawyers say (B):

A) Tesla’s CEO said people should pay advance fees because driverless was short term reality.

B) Tesla lawyers now want to say the failure to deliver on short term reality should be treated as long term aspirations.

A) Tesla’s CEO said people should pay advance fees because driverless was all about safety and immediately would save lives and prevent crashes.

B) Tesla lawyers now want to say the mounting injury and death toll, as well as property loss from crashes, should be treated as “weren’t really harmed”.

Josh Brown is dead because of Elon Musk (who tweeted directly at him). That company’s lawyers want to argue now that being decapitated by Tesla isn’t a harm?

Is this another “thank you for smoking” example of lawyers who will say anything for a dollar?

Tesla lawyer arguments actually expose that the company has engaged in the very definition of advance fee fraud (AFF), also known as the African 419 Scam.

Like many successful con men, William C. Lange made people believe that he really cared about them—even as he looked them in the eye and took their money.

Lange, like Tesla, had asked victims to put money into his “short term” engineering plans. Instead he used investors money to buy Twitter and become its CEO.

Just kidding, but not really.

How is Lange not Like Musk? One was sentenced to 22 years in prison while the other walks free.

Look at a typical AFF model that increases cost incrementally to keep victims hooked and then this:

FSD cost $5,000 when launched in 2016, but Tesla raised the price to $10,000 in 2020, and again to $12,000 earlier this year, and finally to $15,000 in September.

More to the point, both Uber and Tesla “driverless” programs killed a human pedestrian in the same month of the same year.

Uber cancelled it’s program, whistleblowers disclosed details that proved it was being careless, and the driver was charged.

Tesla… raised the cost of its program, hired more lawyers and targeted critics.

Fraud.

In related news, Elon Musk keeps saying he wont sell Tesla stock right before he dumps huge amounts of Tesla stock, treating his investors like an ATM.

It was just last April that he promised very loudly he would sell no more shares, to keep the price high… before selling another $14.4 billion. Liar, liar cars on fire: there couldn’t be a bigger fraud.