It’s a pattern hard to miss. This one happened today.
…collision happened shortly after 11 a.m. Friday on West Pontiac Trail near Huntley Drive involving a 2022 Tesla and a 2010 Honda Odyssey, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.
A preliminary investigation indicates that the Tesla driver, a 24-year-old Dearborn resident, crossed the center yellow line and crashed into the Honda, driven by a 73-year-old Walled Lake resident, the sheriff’s office said. Both drivers were transported to Henry Ford Providence Novi Hospital…
“Based on representations the Blaines heard made by Musk and Tesla… [they] believed [it] was a safer driver than a human driver of convention[al] vehicles,” the complaint states.
However, it contends, the deadly wreck was brought about by the car’s allegedly inadequate “Autosteer” function, a next-gen form of cruise control the company says “detects lane markings, road edges, and the presence of vehicles and objects to intelligently keep your vehicle in its driving lane.” The complaint also assigns blame to the Model X’s “Lane Departure Warning,” “Lane Keeping Assist,” “Lane Centering Assistance,” and “Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance” systems, contending they “defectively failed” to work as advertised.
The number of cars made in America will take a sharp decline as Tesla just started quietly shifting production abroad.
Germans through all of 2025 bought less than 20K cars made by the Tesla factory in Germany, a resounding economic and political disaster. Sales dropped a whopping 56% compared to the prior year.
The huge design plan, wiping out a forest, was to produce 500,000 cars a year. That should give perspective on just how bad Tesla sales have been. Honestly, they should have sold tours of the forest instead of cutting it all down just to suck at selling cars.
Data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority shows that in the first 11 months of the year, 17,358 new Tesla cars were registered.
The factory meanwhile claims success. Pundits might have laughed at this miscalculation, but Tesla says a loophole in Canadian tariffs against American-made cars (when shipped from the EU) is about to make the idle factory very useful. The allegedly illegal Eastern Europeans who run the factory probably don’t care who buys what from where as long as they are paid to keep silent.
“I live in Frankfurt (Oder) [on the Polish border], and I’ve never even been to town,” admitted one of the few Tesla workers who agreed to speak…
The policy outcome inverts the xenophobic nationalist “American-made” rhetoric entirely: American car production declines because American tariffs make American cars uncompetitive in neighboring markets. The German factory Musk poisoned politically by campaigning for Germany’s Nazi party (AfD) becomes his loophole.
Canadians can now order Teslas directly from Grünheide at a significantly lower price, rather than buying from the US and paying Canada’s retaliatory 25% import duties on US-made cars in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The AFD (Nazi Party) rally in Germany was headlined by the Tesla CEO
One must admit the cruelty, really. If you set out to design a cartoonishly villainous assault on Colorado specifically, you could hardly do worse than shitting in their coal and water in the same week. It’s as if someone studied the state seal, noted the pickaxe and the mountains, and thought: attack.
The coal situation achieves a kind of particular insult to Coloradans. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking CEO who donated $228,390 to Trump’s campaign and once swallowed fracking fluid on camera to fake its safety, has ordered a coal plant to remain open under emergency powers. The emergency does not exist. The grid doesn’t need the power. The plant itself is currently broken, after a critical part failed on December 19th, and produces nothing at all. Rural Colorado ratepayers will spend millions on “repairs”, then $85 million annually operating it, to generate electricity priced higher than alternatives nearly 100% of the time.
Peak Cruelty
The massive corruption for an undeserving beneficiary is not difficult to identify.
Two-thirds of that $85 million is fuel costs, paid to Trapper Mine, whose sole customer is this plant. The “emergency order” is a coal subsidy dressed in the language of grid reliability. This is Wright’s sixth such order – plants in Indiana, Michigan, Washington, Pennsylvania – suggesting less an emergency than a policy of preventing market forces from retiring coal under any circumstances.
Trump’s stated rationale was utter nonsense. Eighty-five million for unnecessary coal from a dead site: “emergency” infrastructure. Just a half million for potable water to 50,000 people: a sudden taxpayer burden claim.
One does not need to be a student of logic to notice the hate for humanity behind the asymmetry.
The bill’s sponsor was a Trump loyalist Lauren Boebert. It was, by most accounts, the most significant legislation of her congressional career. However, six weeks earlier she had been summoned to the White House Situation Room and pressured to remove her name from the discharge petition forcing release of Jeffrey Epstein’s DOJ files. She declined to kiss the Epstein child trafficker ring. The Trump-Epstein disclosure bill passed 427-1. Thomas Massie described what they overcame: “We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice president.”
“I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability,” she said, in the manner of someone who believes precisely the opposite.
Colorado, it should be noted, also refused to release election-tampering convict Tina Peters after Trump’s pardon. A pardon that is fraud as it does not apply to state crimes. The state has managed to become a target of the Trump family on multiple fronts.
The Scorpion
Rural Coloradans who voted for Trump three times will now subsidize overpriced and unneeded coal to enrich executives of a plant that doesn’t work, while drinking water is left dangerously contaminated because half a million dollars for health was deemed a waste of money by Trump. The coal industry receives an $85 million handout from taxpayers laundered through abuse of emergency powers. A loyalist who defected on a single vote, and cared about children, watches her signature achievement destroyed.
This is not governance.
It is not even competent grift.
It is the behavior of a very sick man who is proving consequences do not apply to him, like a cartoon villain with no redeeming qualities.
This is a giant T burning on the lawns of Colorado.
The cruelty is the point. America is being recast as the bad cowboy. What would Captain Silas Soule say?
Based on the horrific massacre at Sand Creek, Soul of Silas is a dramatic black and white Western Noir. The film chronicles the final brave acts of one of America’s unsung heroes from the Wild West: Captain Silas Soule, no stranger to the battle for justice.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
