With typical cheeky tone of the independent local publisher, Inside Croyden tells of a spook who served British policy to inject Franco into position for European fascism to spread.
Franco had been exiled to the Canaries by the elected government of the Spanish Republic, who didn’t trust him – with good reason, as it turned out. Once airlifted to Morocco [secretly by a British spy named Pollard], the general took command of Spain’s elite Army of Africa and launched a fascist-backed military uprising that sparked the Spanish Civil War. […]
[Britain’s subsequent public] policy of “non-intervention” was meant to look even-handed. In reality it meant that the Spanish Republic couldn’t buy arms to defend itself, while Germany’s Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini did all they could to help Franco.
After Guernica, Major Pollard had a letter published in The Times in which he said that targeting the town was “perfectly legitimate”, because it was claimed to be a centre of small arms manufacture, one which supplied weapons to terrorists.
In the same letter, Pollard said that the Basques who supported the Spanish Republic were “simply reaping what they have sown”.
In the years after the war, Pollard and his pilot, Cecil Bebb, were personally decorated by Franco, awarding them fascist Spain’s highest military honour, the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows.
The list of other recipients of that same award is a rogues’ gallery of war criminals, from Hitler to Himmler and from Mussolini to Von Rippentrop.
Pollard and Bebb flew from Croyden airport, thus the “local” aspect to the story.
The Pollard and Bebb would be an interesting name for a London public house, perhaps one that could be used to attract and infiltrate groups today attempting to be fascist.
It sounds better than the Musk and Thiel, anyway…
Much like Elon Musk, Major Pollard apparently was known for being deeply racist and a fascist sympathizer, let alone a horrible mess to work with.
His superiors considered that whilst there were ‘certain jobs’ at which Pollard could ‘do well’ these skills were overshadowed by his reputation for being at best ‘most indiscreet’ and, when combined with money and drink, ‘definitely unreliable.’ His further involvement in [WWII] was therefore deemed ‘fatal’.
On a related note, that paper’s fascinating local retelling of how British elites gleefully helped Franco and Hitler take power allegedly has been censored by Facebook.
First, you have to wonder just how many more people must die (as dutifully reported by TeslaDeaths.com) before Tesla is properly banned from public roads?
Tesla Deaths Per Year
Source: TeslaDeaths.com
Remember, the Ford Pinto had killed around 25 people (as told by Ford) when the entire country had to shift into gear in order to regulate against safety design negligence by car makers.
Front doors jam shut preventing escape or rescue from a burning car? That sounds just like a Tesla! How are they legal?
I mean do we expect a market to somehow adjust itself today such that people stop owning Tesla, as well as stop riding in and around them? I have doubts about such consumer self-correction as I still weekly read news from grieving families who say, too late, they never understood the real risk of their loved ones being burned alive, hit head-on or run over by Tesla.
And on this tragic note about the exploding number of deaths in defective cars, which seem to only be stopped with regulation, Tesla has many shockingly old safety design defects. Consider for comparison an assorted list of high safety models, from far better engineered brands.
Acura MDX four-wheel-drive
Audi Q5 four-wheel-drive
Chevrolet Traverse four-wheel-drive
Lexus RX 350 four-wheel-drive
Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan four-wheel-drive
Porsche Macan
Subaru Ascent
Toyota C-HR
Volvo XC60 four-wheel-drive
There are even more options than these, because it’s apparently easy to post better safety results than the high-priced low-quality “luxury” Tesla. This reference is only to show many cars achieve extremely low death rates in the latest real world results (NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System). In other words, no Tesla achieves what others can.
Source: IIHS
The IIHS emphasizes another angle on the data as well. They say marketing of the technology has as much to do with high death tolls as the designs themselves, or perhaps even more impact.
The explanation may lie in the image of the vehicles. Luxury cars are associated with ease and comfort. In contrast, the [most deaths] on this list are associated with [dangerous behavior suggestions that] influence how they’re driven. […] Marketing for the Dodge Charger HEMI, for example, focuses on its “ground-shaking” power, its acceleration “bolting off the line” and its “racing-inspired” high-performance brakes, while the Chevrolet Camaro promises buyers the ability to “dominate on the daily” with an “extreme track performance package” and the Ford Mustang offers “adrenaline chasers” the power to “keep ahead of the pack.”
Tesla’s infamously thoughtless “appetite for destruction” strangely isn’t mentioned in this paragraph, even though the brand is regularly posting dangerous behavior suggestions… such as their CEO boasting to customers that “accidents probably won’t happen” when they drive drunk or fall asleep at the wheel.
The latest NHTSA formal defect investigation letter to Tesla that the company must stop false advertising of “driverless” capabilities seems to fit. Tesla might be the most causal relationship of all, given repeated fraudulent safety statements leading directly to high death rates. I’d still argue Tesla engineering defects are a significant factor, however. No other brand has been reporting multiple cases of everyone inside being burned to death (again and again), for one obvious example, given the notorious “death trap” design defect that seals Tesla doors shut after a crash.
Are you driving the deadliest car in the world?
To put it another way, in 1971 a new agency (NHTSA) was pushing the first major safety regulations, against the desires of a hugely popular racist president Nixon. The “pro business” President expressed a list of clear disdains:
Environmental protection (“fighting a delaying action”)
Consumer advocacy (“Naderism”)
Safety regulations (“greatly exaggerated”)
“Environmentalists and consumerism people” who he claimed were “enemies of the system”
Most tellingly, Nixon dehumanized people if they were concerned with the environment, literally calling them animals and a threat:
…we can’t have a completely safe society or safe highways or safe cars and pollution-free and so forth. Or we could have, go back and live like a bunch of damned animals. […] They’re not one damn bit interested in safety or clean air. What they’re interested in is destroying the system.
He went even further to turn his comments racist and target Native Americans, as if to build a “white man” argument against environmental progress:
You see, what it is, too, is that we are, we are now becoming obsessed with the idea that … progress … industrialization, ipso facto, is bad. The great life is to have it like when the Indians were here. You know how the Indians lived? Dirty, filthy, horrible.
And so does anyone really think that the Tesla and Trump Whitehouse will reveal anything different than Ford and Nixon did with the Pinto? Hint: Ralph Nader refers to Tesla as manslaughter.
Transcripts reveal for historians how Nixon fundamentally sided with industry over public safety and environmental concerns, viewing regulation as an attack on business rather than an innovation engine for protection of people. He acted to delay critical safety requirements (like airbags) after meeting with car executives, proving himself to be a corrupt (ultimately criminal) President who dangerously prioritized big corporate short-term interests over sustainable investments and public safety.
Everyone knows why Elon Musk was taking in Russian billions to pour into an American election campaign, and dismantle the U.S. government. He’s basically an alleged criminal on the run, corrupting the system to avoid justice.
[Division Chief, NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation,] Magno cited seven posts or reposts by Tesla’s account on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, that Magno said indicated that Full Self-Driving is capable of driving itself.
“Tesla’s X account has reposted or endorsed postings that exhibit disengaged driver behavior,” Magno wrote. “We believe that Tesla’s postings conflict with its stated messaging that the driver is to maintain continued control over the dynamic driving task.”
The postings may encourage drivers to see Full Self-Driving, which now has the word “supervised” next to it in Tesla materials, to view the system as a “chauffeur or robotaxi rather than a partial automation/driver assist system that requires persistent attention and intermittent intervention by the driver,” Magno wrote.
Here is the most dangerous social engineering tactic within the Tesla fraud:
…Tesla’s postings conflict with its stated messaging…
Why so dangerous? What happens is that people become especially careless (disable their disbelief) because there is a passive warning from Tesla in parallel with an active message from Tesla that encourages people to ignore the passive warning.
A 71-year-old woman who exited a vehicle following a rear-end collision with two other vehicles was killed in Rimrock, Arizona when she was struck by a Tesla in FSD mode with a driver battling sun glare who was not charged.
That’s not unlike the pedestrian death by Tesla in Japan, April 2018. Six years of death have continued as if its system has been so unregulated (“green light”) as to get worse since then, instead of required to be safe.
[Tesla] argued that it should be exempt from prosecution under US or California laws because “Japan is not a party to the Hague Convention.”
Consider that Tesla may have designed an intentional (injected) “operator fatigue” error platform for profit; a very predictable disaster by design.
The Uber driver was charged, and pled guilty to endangerment. Yet somehow the Tesla drivers do the same thing over and over and over again, avoiding charges after negligently removing hands from the wheel.
Think about that contrast between Uber and Tesla, about a company that flagrantly fights in court against any regulation of safety. What does it mean when a Tesla driver is allowed to avoid accountability by claiming anti-science beliefs (e.g. faith in Elon Musk’s blatant lies about the car driving itself)? What if they said they thought God has been driving their car, as if that’s any different of a claim?
Legalized negligence, amounting to murder.
I can’t emphasize this enough. If there was no warning at all it would be better, because Tesla lying about driverless would face basic scepticism. Tesla’s strategic mixture of messaging is a toxic disarming tactic.
Because the company posts a milquetoast warning, and then brazenly lies to undermine that warning, it combines into dangerously effective disinformation.
And hundreds of people have been killed because of this. Uber killed one person and completely shut their “key to success” program down. Tesla should have too. Instead it has only expanded the death tolls, and charged customers for an anti-social privilege ticket of unaccountable murder.
Notably, the last time Trump occupied the White House starting in 2016, Elon Musk asked that the NHTSA be blocked from investigating people killed by Tesla. Thus, the “official” record of deaths doesn’t start until after Trump was forced to leave in 2020. Tesladeaths.com has the more accurate quantitative death toll, going all the way back to 2016. You also can read the 50 or so qualitative death reports on this blog.
