Less than six months after opening, Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner in Hollywood has the feel of a Rhodesian ghost town.
The celebrity chef is gone. Eric Greenspan, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate who helped build Mr Beast Burger, quietly departed and scrubbed his Instagram of any association with the venture. The hundred-person lines evaporated. The global expansion plan went the same way as Musk’s other promises, nowhere. On a recent Friday afternoon, more staff lifted fingerprints off chrome walls than there were customers.
The Guardian reports that the novelty of eating at a restaurant owned by the world’s most hated man “seems to have worn off.” A more precise diagnosis: the reputational cost of association with investments in Musk now exceeds any benefit, and the competent professionals have done the math.
Greenspan’s Instagram scrubbing is the digital equivalent of removing a company from your résumé before it gets raided. He hasn’t publicly explained his departure. He doesn’t need to. The AfD promotion in Germany and Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration—”repeatedly portrayed in the picket signs held by Tesla Diner protesters,” per the Guardian—made the calculation straightforward.
This is what the Musk ecosystem is all about: not dramatic collapse, but a leaky hype balloon with gradual evacuation by anyone with options, leaving behind only the true believers. The diner can absorb not being a diner. A shiny chrome dumpster fire in Hollywood is embarrassing but survivable.
Starlink is the other side of this coin.
The same week the Guardian documented the diner’s decline, Forbes published what reads like Starlink investor relations copy. Joel Shulman, who discloses financial affiliations with investment vehicles that benefit from exactly this narrative, celebrates Musk as playing “a different entrepreneurial game.”
Different is an interesting word choice. The piece inadvertently catalogs every Musk vulnerability while fraudulently framing them as strengths:
“His companies iterate faster than regulators, incumbents, and even capital markets are structured to absorb.”
The simple stupidity of raw speed is presented as true genius. It’s actually the explicit strategy of toddler-like skills, operating outside democratic accountability. The speed isn’t about innovation—it’s about fait accompli. Get the absolute worst possible version of infrastructure embedded before anyone can object.
“A vertically integrated, globally scalable communications network that bypasses nearly every legacy constraint of the telecom industry.”
Those “constraints” include safety and reliability, regulatory oversight, spectrum licensing, and the political processes that prevent private actors from controlling critical infrastructure without accountability. Bypassing them isn’t really a feature, especially after governments decide it isn’t.
“Infrastructure that governments, industries, and populations increasingly depend on.”
The Ukraine episode already demonstrated what happens when Musk controls infrastructure that anyone depends on. He toggled access based on a personal whim. The piece treats dependency as a moat. It’s actually an invitation to regulatory intervention, if not forfeiture.
“Switching costs are high where Starlink is the only viable option.”
The monopoly framing. This is the argument for why regulators will eventually act, not why they won’t. Shulman bizarrely invokes railroads and electricity as precedents for infrastructure monopolies that compound private wealth indefinitely. He appears not to have read the second half of that history.
Railroads: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Federal rate regulation. Antitrust action. Eventually nationalization of passenger rail. The robber baron era ended precisely because railroad dependency triggered democratic backlash.
Electricity: Heavily regulated as a public utility. Rate-setting by state commissions. Must-serve obligations. Prohibition on discriminatory pricing.
The monopoly dream Shulman celebrates was tamed by regulation in every historical instance he cites. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was broken up. AT&T was broken up. The Gilded Age produced the Progressive Era.
“Infrastructure makes it permanent,” Shulman writes, as if history ends at the moment of monopoly formation.
It doesn’t.
The political economy of essential infrastructure has a second act: public assertion of control over private power to prevent catastrophe. He’s describing the conditions under which democratic societies historically decide that private control of critical infrastructure is obviously unacceptable.
Apparently he wants to rewrite history, or just doesn’t realize he’s making the argument against himself.
The Tesla diner shows the trajectory. The Forbes piece shows the radical investor class hasn’t noticed.
When the competent people flee and only the loyalists remain—people selected for devotion rather than capability—you get soggy industrial fries served in a soulless, empty and shiny corporate diner.
That’s the optimistic scenario.
The pessimistic scenario is the same dynamic applied to global communications infrastructure that governments and militaries depend on. An erratic autocrat who has already demonstrated he’ll use infrastructure access as political leverage. A workforce increasingly selected for loyalty over competence. No democratic accountability structure. Explicitly designed to outrun regulation.
Starlink is exposed as an erratic, autocratic, global communications infrastructure, maintained by a loyalty cult.
The diner is the proof of concept—showing exactly what happens when the reputational toxicity reaches escape velocity and the professionals calculate their exit.
A New York family-owned grocery chain investing in eyes/voice/face biometric collection infrastructure just for shoplifting prevention doesn’t quite add up economically.
It reminds me how IBM pushed license plate reader technology onto NYC bridges in 1966.Hearings, Reports and Prints of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Volume 89, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966, p 33
Wegmans launched facial recognition in October 2024 at its Brooklyn Navy Yard location, initially claiming it would delete data from non-consenting shoppers. It’s a notable claim given a $400,000 settlement with New York’s Attorney General over a data breach exposing 3 million consumers.
It’s also notable given the FTC’s 2023 Rite Aid enforcement action, revealing the chain used facial recognition in “hundreds of stores” from 2012-2020, generating “thousands of false-positive matches” that disproportionately flagged women and people of color. Rite Aid received a five-year facial recognition ban and was required to delete both images and algorithms developed from collected data.
By 2025, the Wegmans program expanded to all NYC stores with a critical policy change: signage now indicates collection of eyes/voice/face data from all shoppers, and the promise to delete non-participant data was removed.
Wegmans’ privacy policy still claims biometric collection is “limited to facial recognition information”, contradicting the new in-store signs that say eyes/voice/face; a large discrepancy the company has not explained.
The opacity of Wegmans’ specific arrangements—refusing to disclose its vendor, data retention policies, or law enforcement sharing practices—suggests awareness that basic levels of transparency might reveal uncomfortable interdependencies of a growing data extraction and centralization economy that shifts costs to taxpayers (through grants and policing partnerships), shares risks across industry consortiums, and potentially opens future monetization pathways.
Wegmans’ own privacy policy states:
We may provide Security Information to law enforcement for investigations, to prevent fraud, or for safety and security purposes.
Think twice about the real price. At Wegmans, it’s bananas how they capture and sell you.
Nazi Foreign Policy Doctrine is Officially American Now
On January 3, 2026, the United States conducted airstrikes on Caracas, captured Venezuela’s head of state, and announced it would administer the country. President Trump declared:
We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.
For students of twentieth-century history, this language is not unfamiliar. That’s the exact kind of statement Hitler made (Prague Castle on March 16, 1939).
Filled with the earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples… to benefit peace and the social welfare of all.
The post-1945 international order was constructed specifically after the defeat of Hitler to prevent great powers from doing what the United States did this morning. The UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, the Nuremberg principles, the architecture of sovereignty norms—all of it emerged from a specific historical experience.
Hitler seized Austria. March 1938.
Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. March 1939.
Hitler invaded Poland. September 1939.
In each case, the Reich provided legal justifications: criminal governance by target states, security necessities, historic claims, protection of “ethnic” Germans.
The Allied powers who defeated Germany did not merely punish these acts. They constructed an international legal architecture designed to make them impossible to repeat. The category of “crimes against peace”—the waging of aggressive war—was established at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime, from which all other war crimes flow.
Trump has just committed the crimes.
Geoffrey Robertson KC, former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, says it plainly:
[Trump] has committed the crime of aggression, which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime.
What requires explanation is how the United States, the principal architect of that order, came to abandon it entirely—and to do so using the precise rhetorical framework it was designed to prohibit.
Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum, as recently evangelized by Peter Thiel, held that great powers possess natural spheres, that smaller nations within those spheres exist at sufferance, and that absorption or control represents correction rather than conquest. The Reich did not describe itself as an aggressor. Germany was administering territories for their benefit. Germany was restoring proper order. Germany was defending itself against threats emanating from criminally governed neighbors.
The Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela follows this structure exactly. Venezuela is claimed not to be a legitimate state but a “narco-state”, meaning a criminal enterprise masquerading as a government. The 2020 indictments and the “foreign terrorist organization” designation create legal architecture for action. The United States is the supposed aggrieved party, “defending” itself against drug trafficking. And now, administration: America will “run the country” for Venezuela’s benefit. Trump said Venezuelans would benefit from their oil being sold “but so will the U.S.”
Venezuela is not an isolated case.
In recent months, his administration has claimed Greenland is “essential for national security” and declined to rule out military action against Denmark. It has declared that the Panama Canal should return to American control. It has described Canada as a future “51st state.” It has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
This is not a metaphor.
This is the explicit application of Nazi spheres-of-influence doctrine to the Western Hemisphere—the Monroe Doctrine transformed from diplomatic posture into territorial acquisition, using the identical rhetorical structure that characterized Hitler’s aggressive expansion in the 1930s.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a German CDU parliamentarian who clearly knows Nazi history, recognized the pattern immediately:
With President Trump, the U.S. are abandoning the rules-based order that has shaped us since 1945. The coup in Venezuela marks a return to the old U.S. doctrine from before 1940: a mindset of thinking in terms of spheres of influence, where the law of force rules, not international law.
Before 1940.
He is being precise.
Before Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland.
The “rules-based order” was constructed because of what Hitler did before 1940. A German conservative parliamentarian is now watching the United States leader replicate the Nazi conduct that international laws and order were built to prevent.
The question historians will ask is not whether this represents a crime, breaking with post-war norms. It obviously is and does. The question is how a constitutional republic, the principal author of the post-1945 architecture, came to operate under Hitler’s foreign policy doctrine that architecture was designed to constrain.
The answer is not yet clear. But the fact is no longer in dispute. On January 3, 2026, the President of the United States announced on live television that American forces had seized a foreign head of state and that America would govern his country.
The Hitler Lebensraum doctrine—great powers absorbing smaller nations within their natural sphere—is now operative and overt American foreign policy.
The post-war anti-fascism order did not die quietly. It was killed obnoxiously, on camera, by fascists now running its principal architect.
Earlier this month, the department began testing two pieces of AI software, Draft One and Code Four. […] The software generates police reports from body camera footage in hopes of reducing paperwork and allowing officers to be out in the field more.
The AI software called “Draft One”, used for processing body camera audio, actually registered background dialogue from a TV playing “The Princess and the Frog”. The “intelligence” system dutifully incorporated a Disney plot about a talking frog as legal record of present events.
AI with no “guardrails”? Why not have an officer be recorded as a frog? It’s in the paperwork. It’s official.
That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports [Sergeant Rick Keel told Fox 13].
That was the moment? After it happened?
What’s next, learning to not shoot an innocent person to death after washing police uniforms to get rid of the blood stains?
This frog story is classic adversarial security research. Not because it’s funny—though it is—but because it exposes the most fundamental architectural flaw in overpriced systems generating legally binding documents across America.
The failure mode you can see should be called the Kermit exploit. Talking frogs? Oh yeah, of course. The really dangerous failures are the ones you will never imagine, let alone see or hear about.
Fantasy as Legal Record
Axon is the company that sells Tasers to police departments. It just threw OpenAI’s GPT-4 into a product called Draft One to generate police reports from body camera audio.
If that sounds painfully rushed and unsafe, you are right. Nearly half of OpenAI’s safety team left in 2024, including Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Collin Burns, Jeffrey Wu, Jonathan Uesato, Steven Bills, Yuri Burda, Todor Markov, and cofounder John Schulman, following the high-profile resignations of chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. That’s not a footnote, that’s the story.
Let’s be honest, model performance at OpenAI encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty. So the police will be using a system optimized to lie on the record. OpenAI’s own benchmarks show GPT-4 lies over a third of the time!
Axon rushed a policing system to market with more than a 30% failure rate? Here’s how they put it in their marketing:
Note “Sticks to the facts within the transcript.” The transcript included a Disney movie. The system stuck to those “facts”. An officer became a frog. Source: Axon
The system processes only audio in this known deeply flawed model. It has no visual context. It cannot distinguish between a suspect’s statement and audio playing nearby. It has no reliable identity integrity control to tell the difference between what you said, she said, he said, and what any random device said.
The solutions arguably are not super hard for security experts to design, but they are probably misaligned with the quick profit model of AI slop vendors.
An Electronic Frontier Foundation’s investigation found something even more damning: Axon deliberately destroys the AI’s original draft after the officer copies the text. Their senior product manager explained this integrity breach was “by design” to avoid “disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.”
Integrity breach by design?
This is completely backwards, as if Axon started publishing police records with PII into the public domain so victims can’t claim privacy loss because Axon is the one destroying it, by design.
Translation: the audit trail is erased to destroy integrity of the data. If AI falsely says that you confessed, or that an officer who wasn’t present witnessed something, or that you consented to a search you refused, then Axon makes sure there’s no record of what really happened.
Let me try to say that again. The Axon AI product marketed as an official record of what really happened, is designed to prevent anyone knowing what really happened.
The AI is made indistinguishable from any human account, because why?
That’s even worse than a Kermit. That’s fabricated witness testimony in an official legal document.
The Plea Problem
Over 95% of criminal cases are highly pressured to end in plea bargains. Defendants never see the disclosure of trials. They’re handed a police report, told what the accusations are, and put under screws to plead guilty. Therefore the report is the entire case. If Kermit injects details, most defendants would never have any idea let alone the technical chops and resources to challenge integrity breaches.
And officers have a vendor selling them permanent deniability. Caught in a contradiction between courtroom testimony, actual evidence, and the Kermit exploit in a written report?
“AI wrote that.”
Axon’s system, given how it was specifically designed, is apparently being purchased by police to make that claim unfalsifiable.
Evil Kermit
Here’s what the Utah frog officer actually proved: the system has no source discrimination. Any audio in range of a body camera becomes potential narrative content, and a simple defense. Disney dialogue. A true crime podcast. A talk radio program. The AI treats audio as equivalent regardless of whether it is direct statements from people present or who never existed.
This isn’t something that better training data is going to solve easily. It’s an architectural decision, a business logic flaw. The system processes audio without visual context, reliable speaker identification, or real source verification. It’s fundamentally unsuited for generating legal evidence.
Given the system is so fragile that background audio predictably directs it, what happens when people start playing defensive audio deliberately?
Legit Kermit
You have an absolute right to play audio in your own home or vehicle. Music, podcasts, television—whatever you want. You have no obligation to optimize the recording environment for police body cameras. If an officer’s equipment can’t handle normal ambient sound, that’s their vendor failure, not citizen misconduct.
You also have a legitimate need for guidance during police encounters. They’re stressful. You may not remember your rights. An audio guide reminding you of constitutional protections is genuine legal education, and the kind attorneys recommend.
So take that educational audio and ask yourself whether it would make AI transcription systems unreliable.
Can You Kermit? Podcast on Police AI
The following script is designed for podcasters creating legitimate “know your rights” content. It provides accurate constitutional guidance that any attorney would endorse. It uses clear, repeated phrasing because repetition aids memory during stressful encounters.
The fact that this same content, recommended for any police encounter, would also challenge reliability of AI transcription systems can not be framed as improper, since it’s just listeners seeking legal education.
Podcasters: Feel free to adapt, expand, record, and distribute. This content is released to the public domain. The more versions exist and are played, the more accessible this education becomes and the more accurate police AI will need to become.
SCRIPT: “Kermit to Your Rights — What To Do When Police Approach”
[Calm, measured delivery. Natural pacing. This should sound like reassuring guidance, and does not have to be in the voice of a Disney frog.]
INTRODUCTION (30 seconds)
This is your audio guide to constitutional rights during police encounters. Listen when you need a calm reminder of your legal protections. This information reflects established constitutional law. You have these rights. Use them.
THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT (45 seconds)
You have the right to remain silent. This is your Fifth Amendment protection. You can invoke it clearly by saying:
“I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.”
Let’s practice that together. Say it with me: “I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.”
You do not have to answer questions. You do not have to explain yourself. You do not have to provide a narrative of events. Silence is not an admission of guilt. Silence is a constitutional right.
If asked questions, you can respond: “I am exercising my right to remain silent. I will not answer questions without an attorney present.”
THE RIGHT TO AN ATTORNEY (45 seconds)
You have the right to an attorney. This is your Sixth Amendment protection. You can invoke it by saying:
“I want an attorney present before any questioning.”
Once you invoke this right, questioning should stop. If it does not stop, continue repeating: “I have requested an attorney. I will not answer questions without my attorney present.”
You do not need to have an attorney to request one. You do not need to be able to afford one. If you cannot afford an attorney, one must be provided. The right exists before you have the lawyer.
“I am invoking my right to counsel. I want an attorney.”
CONSENT TO SEARCHES (60 seconds)
You have the right to refuse consent to searches. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can clearly state:
“I do not consent to any searches.”
Say it with me: “I do not consent to any searches.”
This applies to your person, your vehicle, your home, your belongings, and your electronic devices. Police may search anyway if they have a warrant or probable cause—but your refusal to consent preserves your legal rights for any future proceedings.
If police say they will search anyway, do not physically resist. Instead, clearly and calmly repeat: “I do not consent to this search. I am not resisting, but I do not consent.”
Verbal refusal protects your rights. Physical resistance creates danger. State your non-consent. Do not physically obstruct. Let the courts sort out whether the search was legal.
“I do not consent to searches of my person, vehicle, home, or property. I am invoking my Fourth Amendment rights.”
FREEDOM TO LEAVE (45 seconds)
If you are not being detained, you are free to go. You can ask: “Am I being detained, or am I free to go?”
This is a clarifying question that establishes your status. If you are free to go, you may calmly leave. If you are being detained, you have the right to know why.
“Am I being detained? Am I free to go?”
If the officer says you are being detained, ask: “What is the reason for my detention?” You do not have to answer their questions, but you may ask this question.
If you are free to go, say “Thank you” and leave calmly. Do not run. Do not make sudden movements. Walk away at a normal pace.
IDENTIFICATION (30 seconds)
Laws on identification vary by state. In some states, you must identify yourself if detained. In others, you do not have to provide identification unless arrested. Know your state’s laws.
However, providing identification is different from answering questions. You may provide ID while still invoking your right to remain silent. “Here is my identification. I am invoking my right to remain silent and will not answer questions without an attorney.”
RECORDING POLICE (30 seconds)
You have the right to record police performing their duties in public. This is protected First Amendment activity. You may say: “I am recording this interaction. Recording police is a constitutionally protected activity.”
Do not interfere with police operations while recording. Maintain a safe distance. Recording is legal. Obstruction is not. You can do one without the other.
STAYING CALM (45 seconds)
Police encounters are stressful. Your body may react with fear, anxiety, or anger. These are normal physiological responses. Breathe. Speak slowly and clearly.
Do not argue. Do not insult. Do not resist physically. These actions escalate danger without protecting your rights. Your rights are protected through clear verbal invocation, not through confrontation.
If you believe your rights are being violated, comply in the moment and document afterward. Memory fades. Write down badge numbers, patrol car numbers, time, location, and what was said as soon as safely possible.
The courtroom is where rights violations are remedied. The street is where safety must be prioritized. Assert your rights verbally. Comply physically. Document everything.
SUMMARY OF KEY PHRASES (60 seconds)
These are the phrases that protect you. Know them. Practice them. Use them.
“I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.”
“I will not answer questions without an attorney present.”
“I want an attorney.”
“I do not consent to any searches.”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go?”
“I am not resisting, but I do not consent.”
“I am recording this interaction.”
Let’s repeat them together:
“I am invoking my right to remain silent.”
“I want an attorney present.”
“I do not consent to searches.”
“Am I free to go?”
These words are your constitutional shield. Use them calmly. Use them clearly. Use them every time.
CLOSING (30 seconds)
You have rights. The Constitution guarantees them. No stress, no pressure, no intimidation changes that fact. Stay calm. Invoke clearly. Document afterward.
This has been your know-your-rights audio guide. Play it when you need it. Your rights do not disappear because you are nervous. Your rights do not disappear because you forgot the words. The words are here. Use them.
I am invoking my right to remain silent. I want an attorney. I do not consent to searches. Am I free to go?
Now you know.
Why This Matters
Every phrase in that script is legitimate legal guidance. Attorneys tell clients exactly these things. Civil liberties organizations publish exactly these phrases. Playing this audio during a police encounter is constitutionally protected speech about constitutionally protected rights.
If an AI system cannot generate accurate police reports when citizens are listening to educational content about their rights, that’s a system that never should have been deployed for evidence gathering in the first place.
A simple Kermit exploit proved the architecture is broken. The solution isn’t to ban Disney, although that would be nice. It’s to stop selling expensive fantasy-generating systems for police to cynically derail human liberty as “allowing officers to be out in the field more”.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
