Is it a good Samaritan act to protect a neighborhood in Texas from the highly dangerous Tesla? Asking for a friend who was killed by one of these Swasticars.
The League City Police Department is investigating the theft of tires from 11 Tesla vehicles at 2455 Tuscan Lakes Blvd. League City police say 44 tires were stolen on Valentine’s Day, with an attempt made on a 12th vehicle. On February 15, another attempt to steal tires from a Tesla was reported. Both cases have been inactivated due to lack of leads.
Someone without the proper Tesla app credentials managed to physically reduce these vehicles’ operational capacity to zero? But the app! The app! Software is the future!
Elon’s engineers surely are frantically coding a software update that will make wheels optional. That magical “push” strategy working yet?
Mars doesn’t needs wheels does it? Maybe Tesla can charge extra and call this an upgrade to their future of never actually achieving space travel.
I wonder if the 12th set was abandoned because Tesla’s new security feature activated: does the car alarm shout Heil Hitler yet?
Alleged scene of the parking lot where wheels are being removed.
Security experts recommend Tesla owners implement a new defensive protocol: buy a different brand.
A staffer from TASS, a Russian outlet that often promotes glorified coverage of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, was briefly in the room for President Donald Trump’s bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. American media mainstays Reuters and the Associated Press were not granted access.
For a reporter from TASS (a Russian state media outlet known to have close ties to the Kremlin) to gain access to the Oval Office during a sensitive meeting with the Ukrainian president suggests a serious security lapse was deliberate.
Trump recently has taken direct control over which journalists are granted access the Oval Office. His centralization of media access, under strict Goebbels-like control, creates a system where honest news outlets can be excluded while dangerous ones (in this case, foreign state media) are sold entry.
…analysts at [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency. “People are saying Russia is winning. Putin is on the inside now.”
A very cynical twist to this great replacement strategy, moving Russian assets inside the federal government to replace citizens that Trump tries to outrage, is the trap being set.
…mass firings could offer a rich recruitment opportunity for foreign intelligence services that might seek to exploit financially vulnerable or resentful former employees.
Here’s the story: restrict American information flow, remove American focus on Russian threats, and create the most toxic environment possible to push disgruntled former employees into Russian recruitment.
Taken together, these systematic changes compromise national security interests in ways that benefit Russia, as well as other adversaries. This pattern isn’t novel, as it parallels several historical precedents where governments became compromised by foreign influence:
The Vichy regime in France during WWII represents one of the most stark examples. After France fell to Nazi Germany, the Vichy government under Marshal Pétain actively collaborated with German authorities, restricting press freedom, purging civil servants deemed disloyal, and essentially functioning as a proxy administration that served foreign interests while maintaining a façade of independence.
The situation in Czechoslovakia before and during the 1948 Communist coup offers another parallel. Soviet-aligned officials gradually gained control of key ministries, particularly interior and information ministries, allowing them to control security forces and media access. This culminated in the complete communist takeover, with opposition voices silenced and government functions increasingly serving Soviet rather than Czech interests.
In more recent history, Viktor Yanukovych’s administration in Ukraine (2010-2014) showed similar patterns. His government increasingly aligned with Russian interests, restricted press freedom, and made policy decisions that benefited Moscow while undermining Ukraine’s relationship with Western democracies – ultimately leading to the Euromaidan protests and his ousting.
Is Trump the new Yanukovych?
What makes these historical examples particularly troubling is how they began with seemingly isolated incidents such as changes to press access, selective enforcement of security protocols, and personnel changes in key positions, before evolving into comprehensive systems of foreign compromise and control.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump cooked up a calculated fraud to target a narrow demographic: white women in their 30s.
His strategy? Promising robust protection and funding for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
“We are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump boldly declared in an NBC News interview last August. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” He doubled down the following day, explaining his motivation: “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”
These promises resonated with a demographic that represents the vast majority of IVF users (nearly 90%) – educated white women in their 30s who often delay childbearing for career advancement and who tend to be reliable voters in suburban swing districts.
Bitler and Schmidt (27) found that infertility treatment was used much more heavily by White women and insurance mandates did not ameliorate these disparities. Seifer et al. (28) reported that in mandated states… 86.5% were performed among White women…
And guess what Trump did to his targeted demographic.
A major problem that has been identified in reproductive medicine, however, is that in the United States, access and outcomes to IVF are not equal. Black and Hispanic women are less likely than white women to access fertility care…
Removed chances of IVF, hitting the group he tricked into voting for him. His new and intentionally hypocritical executive order requests “policy recommendations” within 90 days as a delay tactic. No mandated coverage. No federal funding. No protection against state restrictions.
No IVF.
To be perfectly clear here, IVF was a targeting mechanism. Trump didn’t care about the words he used, except to navigate victims into his fraud. The GOP twice blocked the Right to IVF Act, which would have created genuine protections and coverage requirements for fertility treatments, so the delay is a failure signal.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, who sponsored the IVF legislation, called out Trump’s fraud order as “toothless” and “lip service from a known liar.”
While Trump is broadly denying young white women healthcare access, the administration also is engaged in targeted cuts. These young white women who voted for Trump, specifically because of his IVF promises, now will not only get no help with their dream of fertility treatments, they will lose all healthcare benefits as their jobs (and/or their spouses’ jobs) are aborted.
This horrible political catfishing – promising something appealing to gain support, with zero intention of following through – demonstrates the disgusting racist and mysogynist calculations of Trump. For the young white women who were victimized by him, believing their reproductive options would be cared for by “grab’em by the pussy” man, the reality is proving to be quite different than the self-centered vote they gave him.
The question now becomes whether this demographic will be able to react appropriately and hold Trump accountable, or whether new promises will once again “grab them” despite the track record of disappointment.
Related: Trump voters sooner rather than later must ask themselves, like in the Mitchell and Webb sketch, “Are we the baddies?”
Nazi officers suddenly realize they are the bad guys.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
