The infamous Tesla left turn in front of oncoming traffic has killed a woman.
Per a release from the Weber County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched to the scene at approximately 9:08 p.m. after a green Chevrolet Blazer and a white Tesla collided at the intersection. The Blazer was traveling south on Midland Drive where the Tesla was waiting to make a left turn from the northbound lane onto westbound 4000 South. The Tesla reportedly attempted the left turn in front of the Blazer, which subsequently crashed into its front passenger-side door.
The deceased woman was in the Tesla passenger seat.
There have been multiple reports just this month of Tesla killing pedestrians. Here’s the latest tragic news:
Early investigation suggests that the Tesla was traveling southbound on Beach Boulevard in the second lane just north of Williams Avenue. The pedestrian was walking west across Beach at Williams Drive when he was struck near that intersection as he was in the same traffic lane the Tesla was in.
Lord Acton was wrong about a lot of things, especially his views on power.
Lets start with the unavoidable fact that Acton hated the idea of abolitionists spreading power to individuals, as he worried greatly about white male slaveholders abruptly losing their concentration of power (treatment of Blacks as property instead of humans).
In other words, Acton hypocritically framed states’ rights as wrong when they abolished slavery (Kansas). Instead he maintained that slaveholders were the noble ones for centralizing power into an elitist Confederacy to deny abolitionist states’ rights — he unmistakably and incorrectly rejected the individual’s right in order to express his strong preference for preservation and expansion of white supremacist tyranny.
Next, from this important context, let’s look at Acton’s most famous phrase taken from one of his letters to Bishop Creighton in 1887.
Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
…for some people, power seems to bring out their best. […] In sum, the study found, power doesn’t corrupt; it heightens pre-existing ethical tendencies.
That’s a relatively new study that blows Acton out of the water, and here’s another one:
I demonstrate that when powerholders attribute their power internally, they tend to participate in more self-interested work behaviors, but when they attribute their power externally, they tend to participate in more global prosocial behaviors.
Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power
Acton provably and easily seems a terrible fool.
Really these studies just confirm what we already should have known all this time. New research continues to tell us basically the same things the great American politician Robert G. Ingersoll, had been campaigning about and published in 1895:
Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except on the side of mercy.
Funny how Americans probably won’t recognize one of their best men, the famous Ingersoll. Honestly, how well do you know Ingersoll’s writings and what he did for America?
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), known as The Great Agnostic, traveled the country for more than thirty years lecturing to capacity crowds on more than twelve hundred occasions. He usually talked for three or four hours straight with no notes. His topics ranged from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, from science to religion. His biggest crowds turned out to hear him denounce religion and the Bible. He was no doubt one of the greatest orators in American history.
He was ahead of his time on social issues such as women’s rights, birth control, and equality of the races. Frederick Douglass is said to have stated that , of all the great men of his personal acquaintance, there were only two in whose presence he could be without feeling that he was regarded as an inferior–Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll. Yet, his name has been all but forgotten.
“Norval Morrisseau (Anishinaabe 1931–2007), Children with Tree of Life, ca. 1980–85” Source: AGH
The Smithsonian provides a long-form story about the sort of open fraud that probably deserves far more attention, especially as we debate plagiarism rising due to AI.
Morrisseau, though justifiably incensed [in 2001 about massive scale theft], wasn’t surprised that imitations of his work were being sold as authentic on the open market. As early as 1991, the Toronto Star reported the artist was complaining about being “ripped off” by fraudsters. But for years Canadian law enforcement did little to investigate the artist’s claims that forgers were imitating his work. Eventually, in the face of this inaction, Morrisseau’s lawyers advised him to notify galleries and auctioneers that they were selling fakes and warn them that they could be the subject of a court injunction, civil action or criminal complaint. Still the sales went on.
It wasn’t until this past year, more than 15 years after the artist died from complications related to Parkinson’s, that an unlikely consortium of investigators, led by a homicide cop from the small city of Thunder Bay, Ontario, finally exposed the scheme to defraud Morrisseau. Not even the artist himself could have imagined the scale of the fraud, which in both the number of forged paintings and the profits made from their sale was likely the biggest art fraud in history—not in Canada or North America but anywhere in the world.
Spoiler alert: a lack of any serious investigation by Canadian authorities facilitated long time exploitation and abuse of indigenous children.
Under Lamont’s direction, youths and other Indigenous people in Thunder Bay were paid—or forced at threat of violence—to create Morrisseau look-alikes by the hundreds.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
