I couldn’t help but notice local news wrote their headline with a clearly suicidal tone: “Driver takes his own life in BVR Tesla crash”

A 26-year-old man has been killed in a crash on Bear Valley Road. Victorville Police say the man, who was driving a 2015 Tesla Model S, slammed into the back of a semi-truck. The accident occurred in the slow lane, going westbound toward the 15 Freeway.

Who in the slow lane is prepared for any Tesla to slam into them at 100MPH like a VBIED?

Or should I ask this another way… is there a better explanation than suicide for why someone would still be driving a Tesla, after so many have slammed at high speed into the back of a truck?

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Tricia Blake told VVNG that based on recent statements made by the victim, his last conversations, and the evidence at the scene the deputy and coroner investigator determined it to be intentional. […] The coroner’s office recorded Vieira’s cause of death as suicide on a city street.

Driving into a truck is definitely a uniquely Tesla designed way to die.

• 2016: Tesla Autopilot slammed at high speed into back of truck
• 2016: Tesla Autopilot slammed high speed into side of truck
• 2018: Tesla Autopilot slammed into the back of a truck
• 2019: Tesla Autopilot slammed into a semi truck
• 2019: Tesla Autopilot slammed into side of truck
• 2020: Horrifying moment Tesla crashes into truck
• 2021: Tesla slammed into back of bus
• 2021: Tesla slammed into back of another truck
• 2021: Tesla slammed into back of yet another truck
• 2021: Tesla slammed into side of truck… again
• 2022: Tesla slams into rear of a parked semi truck
• 2022: Mother drives Tesla into truck, killing herself and three children

And I’m saying all this as someone who has spent decades researching vehicular suicide investigations and theory (including of course the 1930s Tatra T87).

It raises the serious question of whether mentally disturbed — angry, violent, hateful — people are being lured by “free speed extremist” branding to cause damage to themselves and society. Witnesses said there were no brakes applied, which is exactly what I was writing about recently here and here… and here.

…ethics questions of whether and when it’s justified to shoot at Teslas.

Or, perhaps even more importantly, a Kamikaze news story is why I’ve been warning since at least 2016 that any Tesla should be considered a loitering munition.

Update January 23: Police in Florida investigating multiple crashes describe Tesla as a catastrophic threat.

This is our third catastrophic crash with Teslas in just the last couple weeks,” Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said Saturday. “We’re seeing an overall pattern here in Martin County of more aggressive driving, greater speeds and just a general cavalier sense towards their fellow motorists’ safety.”

The third crash Snyder is referring to was a Tesla driver intentionally running a red light, which I’ve also written about before.

This doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention, given what we know from history of war. Institute for Study of War (ISW) is a legit source, and they’re not mincing words here.

[Videos claim that] Russian officials have evacuated over 150,000 children from Donbas in 2022 alone. It is unclear exactly how Russian sources are calculating this figure, and Ukrainian officials previously estimated this number to be 6,000 to 8,000.

[…]

Forced adoption programs and the deportation of children under the guise of vacation and rehabilitation schemes likely form the backbone of a massive Russian depopulation campaign that may amount to a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and constitute a wider ethnic cleansing effort, as ISW has previously reported.

Russian invasion objectives seem clearly to center on genocide, intentional destruction of Ukrainian identity.

An ISW report that is two months old already should have raised more mainstream alarm. I mention it here for war crimes investigators in context of Microsoft reporting around the same time that it will continue working with Russian “schools”, which could in fact mean ethnic cleansing (including turning the children into waves of infantry suicide missions against their own families, as witnessed in Mozambique).

When you read far more generic statements about Russian aggression in the coming months, such as trying to mobilize 700,000 soldiers to achieve something, now you know.

In a report published last November, Amnesty International said: “Russian authorities forcibly transferred and deported civilians from occupied areas of Ukraine in what amounted to war crimes and likely crimes against humanity”.

In December 2022, the French association Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre (“For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours”), asked the International Criminal Court to examine allegations of “genocide” amid the deportation of Ukrainian children.

Moscow has made no attempt to conceal its policy of child deportation. Removing Ukrainian children from occupied territories is part and parcel of the Kremlin’s propaganda, and in keeping with the “de-Ukrainisation” called for by Putin, who passed a law in May 2022 that made it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children. It also made it harder for Ukrainian families to reclaim their kidnapped children.

Russia is basically repeating a Nazi German strategy in WWII of turning children into cannon fodder. I’m just waiting now for confirmation that the new “re-education” centers used in these war crimes all run on Microsoft.

A new study blandly argues that attraction to tyranny is tied to a belief, usually misplaced, in direct personal benefit.

…society’s portrayal of strong leaders as tough, often masculine, figures willing to do the dirty work of protecting the group…

Portrayal is right.

This is like saying society portrays toddler rants as dirty work of protecting its family. A portrayal doesn’t automatically make something true or accurate.

For some people, due to their upbringing, life experiences and beliefs, following a tyrannical leader is a sincere and sensible choice for themselves and the group they belong to, especially if they view the world as a dangerous place.

Masculinity may translate into suicide very far away from protection, as I’ve written about here before in terms of Russian military failures.

Taking excessive casualties was not a consideration, he said. “We see how the Russians treat their mobilized men — they are not people,” said [Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian Air Force lieutenant colonel].

That’s the hard reality of tyranny, regardless of society’s portrayals.

I get the report saying there are people sincere in dehumanization of themselves and others, but sensible? Was it sensible being a Nazi because false benefits were promised based on lies? Was it sensible murdering neighbors to move into their homes and wear their clothes, while falsely calling them the aggressor? Are we supposed to think of the upside to mob violence or even war crimes?

Raised for generations with the (legitimate) belief that theirs was a martyred nation, many Poles found it increasingly hard to accept that their victimhood did not automatically grant them the moral high ground when it came to their behavior…

These are dangerous games where everyone loses — society regresses into self-harm — fighting under a false belief that parts of itself are an “other”.

A raging toddler is neither capable of nor intending family protection, any more than a broken clock can tell time. To imply that relativity somehow makes it right, is dead wrong — a form of science denial.

The study and its recommendations could benefit from advising that people really should think about whether things happen to them, or they make things happen. I’m reminded of a post I wrote in 2006 on WWII Kamikaze logic and motivations.

Invariably groups focused more on “things happen to them” (and associated fears) want solutions that are easy, routine and minimal judgement. This predisposes them to the false attraction of tyranny, especially during times of disruption (e.g. industrialization) where fraud is harder to detect. The broken clock is broken, no matter what society portrays it as. And it certainly isn’t sensible to say a broken clock can tell time.