The era of the telegram came to an end in Germany with a final flourish of thousands of the once-popular message service, the country’s main postal service, Deutsche Post, said Wednesday.
Deutsche Post said that 3,228 telegrams were dispatched on the final day of service on New Year’s Eve.
Kinda curious if the last word someone paid to send was “stop”? The cost of operating and using it had gotten quite high.
The canonical example is when German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent the following encrypted text to Germany’s minister in Mexico on January 16, 1917.
Encrypted left. Decryption work right. Click to enlarge.
You may notice the telegram says “via Galveston” (Texas) but more importantly it routed through England. The British at the start of WWI severed cables connecting Germany to the world in order to intercept all its telegrams.
WWI map of global telegram cables. Source: BBC
The British delivered a decrypted version of Zimmerman’s telegram to the U.S. government on February 24. The text also was exposed by the press on March 1, raising public anger immediately about a German military alliance with Mexico and Japan carrying threats of invasion.
Public knowledge of these secret German plans was how the British government helped American public opinion overcome powerful leaders trying to aid Germany (i.e. Henry Ford) and shift the balance of power to better men.
Most notable, perhaps, was that former President Theodore Roosevelt along with the U.S. Army Chief of Staff (former commanding officer of the famous “Rough Riders”) had heavily promoted active response to aggression. Roosevelt objected since the start of WWI to America being passively in alignment with Germany, and objected even more in 1915 when “America First” became Wilson’s racist campaign for re-election (including a restart of the KKK).
Roosevelt instead campaigned for a civilian Preparedness Movement to ready America for defense of freedom.
1915 film “The Battle Cry of Peace” promoted by U.S. Army General Leonard Wood and former President Theodore Roosevelt
Basically, in the two years before the Zimmerman telegram exposed Wilson’s treachery, Americans had watched their President fraudulently blame “leftists” and “labor” for a growing “holocaust” of German attacks bombing cities, burning factories and sinking ships.
When a Preparedness Day parade was bombed by German military intelligence, for example, Wilson had for years before secretly been advised of this and related plots. On July 22, 1916 (just eight days before the infamous Black Tom explosion in NYC) a massive explosion rocked downtown San Francisco and killed 10 people.
Source: SFGate
Authorities under Wilson, despite strong counter intelligence, intentionally ignored their known and obvious German suspects and instead falsely used the violence as pretense to target “leftist organizers”. Today it’s known as a “one of America’s darkest miscarriages of justice”.
Think about the outrage then if Wilson had been caught enabling a foreign military to kill Americans so he could win elections (e.g. what Richard Nixon also did).
If that sounds like something the GOP still would do today, you know now exactly why Donald Trump calls himself America First when he invites Russian attacks and divisively blames “leftists” for everything. Separatist movements in 2016 America driven by foreign adversaries? Sounds like a memo straight out of 1916 Germany.
Public knowledge of secret German military plans abruptly destroyed best attempts by Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson to side with the enemy of America. Note how California was labeled as property of Japan, an often overlooked detail that foreshadowed internment camps 30 years later.
After the British vociferously exposed the public to German secret communications, Wilson no longer could sustain such devious German alignment meant to fraudulently blame foreign military attacks killing Americans on domestic political opponents.
In April 1917 the unpopular U.S. President finally had his hands tied and Americans very quickly joined the war against Germany, with thanks to the leadership of Roosevelt and England, not to mention poets such as Alan Seeger (American soldier in Foreign Legion of France) who in 1916 wrote “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Powerful stuff, and Roosevelt was a legend (pumping out preparedness books, movies, speeches), but nothing overcame Wilson’s secret executive alliances and elevated American public sentiment into active defense like that decrypted Zimmerman telegram.
Well done England.
Another interesting footnote is that the KKK had pushed for suffrage (white women voting) as a means to dilute Black votes, especially in “young” states like Montana.
This effect was seen clearly in 1917, after Germany had bombed major American cities, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana (first woman elected to Congress in her first term) voted against war authorization. Again in 1941, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Rankin voted against war (placing the only no vote). She expected America could align itself with Nazi Germany and Hitler.
Historians recently have pointed out something to better frame Rankin’s hard edge politics; “anti-labor” actions in 1917 were in fact planned attempts at ethnic cleansing or even genocide.
…after all of this research, the deportation was not a response to a labor action. It was that to a limited extent, but it was also in the nature of an ethnic cleansing.
Obviously she did not in any way represent Americans who weren’t white. She was especially toxic to Black women who had been rebuffed by racism of most white women’s organizations including Rankin’s suffrage groups.
Black women by comparison famously supported the war efforts and many served with distinction, despite attempts by Rankin’s carefully crafted role to erase them and their communities. This divide is what led into the tragic Red Summer and Wilson sending troops to massacre non-white Americans who had supported the war and even served in it.
Thus, one decrypted telegram from Germany also changed entirely the course of Civil Rights in America. Who knows what damage Rankin might have done if she hadn’t been exposed as part of American systemic racism.
The toxic America First platform in both WWI and WWII, a barely concealed front for the KKK, actively manipulated sentiment using highly targeted propaganda pushing white women to make their sons serve German interests instead. Obviously those efforts failed under the reality of German aggression that grew after WWI (modeling itself on Wilson and Ford), such that by WWII any mention of America First was labeled seditious.
Perhaps, with great subtlety, the fizzle and end of the historic German telegram thus signals something wider: the long overdue end to Wilson’s racist America First platform as well.
Elon Musk allegedly has citizenship in three countries and has served in none of them.
And he’s known for being a self proclaimed dumb blowhard, never knowing anything about what he’s talking about and not caring about consequences for being dead wrong.
His lack of experience, coupled with his lack of knowledge, coupled with his lack of accountability is on full display again as he tries to swing Twitter to support Russia (by interfering with smart military aid to Ukraine).
The mistakes Musk makes here are similar to all his mistakes. He tries to rush into shortcuts and drive at high speed off a cliff to the wrong conclusion.
Reports out of the Bay Area this morning say that a man and his 2014 were found at the bottom of a cliff off the 1A in Sonoma county north of San Francisco. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and represents the first owner fatality of a Model S driver. It isn’t clear yet if the crash was an accident. […] The crash represents the first owner fatality behind the wheel of a Tesla Model S though a stolen Model S that hit a pole at over 100mph and split in half killed the suspect who was then revived and died a few days later in Los Angeles. Tesla previously boasted how safe its Model S was including the 0 fatality record which will obviously have to be revised.
Tesla’s CEO “boasted… the 0 fatality record” in its first year with cars on the road. Since then it has gotten worse every year, allegedly killing more than all other EV companies combined. A death trap, by the numbers:
Deaths from a Tesla as of today have reached 348 (when using autopilot, 19), which is truly shocking when you consider just how fast that toll increases.
Source: tesladeaths.com
What is a death trap?
Ok, let’s start with what is a death trap in war?
Everything can be one in theory, because… it’s a war and by definition someone is turning everything they can into a trap.
A vehicle OR the lack of that very same vehicle could be a death trap.
It’s like Eisenhower recognized that under General Fredendall tanks were a death trap, so he dismissed him and promoted General Patton who turned the same exact tanks into a victorious revelation.
Berryman news cartoon, Washington D.C. Evening Star, March 25, 1945. Source: “The Ordnance Department: On Beachhead and Battlefront” by Lida Mayo. Center of Military History U.S. Army, 1991. Chapter 17, p. 336-338
This is where experience and expertise matter. Many factors are required beyond a yes/no question (is it a tank), and nobody should be satisfied with such simplicity.
And yet an anti-democraticcon-artist like Musk thinks he can step in and manipulate uninformed public sentiment for some political reason.
But this isn’t a game, and Musk’s right-wing extremism repeatedly shows up as though he’s intentionally using his social media platform to get Ukrainians killed by Russia.
Musk should be shamed for soiling himself everywhere in public on Putin’s behalf, making actual experts clean up all their mess.
The recent clarion calls were meant to prevent exactly this kind of defecation from Musk.
…the idea that tanks won’t have a place in future wars is incorrect, said Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning. They absolutely will, he said, but they won’t be working alone. As Doland said, a “tank is really good, but a tank by itself, in some woods? Not really good.” […] “[Combined arms] is what prevents the lunacy we’re watching of what the Russian Army is doing,” Donahoe said. “I mean, you’ve just got to watch some of the videos of their forces being ambushed — they apparently are a poorly trained army that cannot fight as a combined arms team.”
The tank isn’t an inherent trap, any more than a plane or a building is inherently in all cases a trap after they are shot down and bombed.
When does something become a trap?
Hint: the answer has to do with being prevented from successful operation in any other capacity. That’s the nature of the brain-dead Tesla being centrally planned and controlled, definitely not the case with a properly deployed Bradley.
Suffice it to say that Tesla has provably been trending towards being classified a death trap since at least 2016 — worse year after year.
Source: tesladeaths.com
Any EV on the road is likely far safer, which is why for example a best-selling EV on the road for a decade (e.g. Nissan LEAF) reported zero recalls and zero crashes compared with Tesla’s growing lawsuits, complaints, investigations and funerals from far too many preventable deaths.
The Tesla CEO, as if aiming to repeat the worst chapters from the past, has rushed dangerous shortcuts and repeatedly wrong decisions with zero care for human life; delivering perhaps the worst engineering in history.
The Ford Pinto killed half as many people in fires as Tesla, for example.
You’d be safer in a Pinto because Ford was forced by regulators to stop making deathtraps, whereas Musk clearly ignores the definition, flaunts safety rules and doesn’t care about truth or consequences.
He told everybody he’s buying Twitter because he wants it to be sort of apolitical, and on the eve of the election he says you should vote for Republicans,” Lasoff told Insider. “He can have his opinion, but the thing I really despise in people is hypocrisy.”
John Byrne, a software CEO in Maryland, hadn’t been a huge fan of his 2020 Model X SUV for some time. He said it was creaky, vibrated at times, and was of an overall build quality that didn’t justify its $95,000 price tag.
But Musk’s behavior since the Twitter saga — particularly his broadcasting of right-wing views and attack on Anthony Fauci — was the final straw. Byrne traded in his car for an electric Audi in late 2022.
At this point, someone surviving death in or around a Tesla is headline news.
And that’s why Twitter and Tesla both are tanking. Musk knows tanks.
Reports indicate now that top Twitter management willfully blocked security, undermined safety from violence.
Vice President for Trust & Safety Del Harvey is called out here.
Both committee staff and former employees who gave depositions singled out former Twitter Vice President for Trust & Safety Del Harvey as an obstacle to tougher enforcement against election-related extremism in the run-up to the insurrection. Harvey, the 120-page summary concludes, “personally obstructed” the creation of a coded incitement to violence policy drafted by Twitter Safety employees in the months before the insurrection.
You may recall that Del Harvey was something of an intentional imposter.
Harvey has an unusual background for someone with so much power over public speech. She isn’t a lawyer and won’t say if she graduated from college. Del Harvey is not her legal name. She is secretive about her past but allows that she grew up in the South, where she spent a summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution working with troubled youth.
Nothing says people can trust your ability to protect them from abuse like you can’t even protect yourself from abuse. She was proudly saying she hid herself in a privileged and selfish way, not in a sustainable or healthy one. Imagine a police chief saying they couldn’t use their real identity. Absurd.
And grew up in “the South”? South of what? That’s a reference that sticks out like a sore thumb. Was she lifeguarding a whites-only pool in “the South” of Africa?
Is that meant to be a metaphor for her background in public safety being framed by America’s notoriously racist systems? Did she work at all to reverse the caste system she clearly benefited from (no school, no name, just “streets” experience… becomes VP so you know she has to be white)?
It wouldn’t be so bad that she refused to offer up anything resembling qualifications, if her work wasn’t also described both inside and outside the company as an abysmal failure for over a decade.
Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo declared in a recent leaked message to employees that the company has “sucked” at dealing with abuse and trolls.
She apparently wowed people with such insights as warning that the phrase “locked and loaded” could somehow have a self-defense context and therefore should never be moderated to prevent violence.
Source: TwitterSource: Twitter
There is scant evidence the phrase could ever be used in an actual self-defense context, as you should realize from reading the above examples.
For readers new to this blog, I’ll refer you here:
Trump repeatedly used language with the intention it would encourage others to commit a terrorist act.
There is even less evidence that Harvey understood this. Allowing imminent real attack violence was clearly worse than stopping it, especially when there is zero evidence moderating that phrase could have any adverse effects.
We know with certainty, for example, that “locked and loaded” was being used in specific encoded calls to gin up support for attack violence.
Source: Twitter
One simple explanation for the disconnect between attack and defense context is that the phrase “locked and loaded” isn’t based on anything even approaching rational self-defense behavior.
It’s a fantastical emotional tough-guy film reference at best (a fluffy 1949 John Wayne film about invasion, Sands of Iwo Jima), which does NOT rise to realistic defense speech at all or ever.
It was peacetime again when John Wayne appeared on the silver screen as Sergeant Stryker in ”Sands of Iwo Jima,” but that film underscores the point; I went to see it with another ex-Marine, and we were asked to leave the theater because we couldn’t stop laughing.
After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Wayne humiliated in person at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases, were sent there. The hospital was packed, the halls lined with beds. Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Marine Corps was being bled white.
Each evening, Navy corpsmen would carry litters down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a movie. One night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted and out stepped John Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit – 10-gallon hat, bandanna, checkered shirt, two pistols, chaps, boots and spurs. He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and said, ”Hi ya, guys!” He was greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody booed. Suddenly everyone was booing.
This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren’t going to listen to him. He tried and tried to make himself heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left. If you liked ”Sands of Iwo Jima,” I suggest you be careful. Don’t tell it to the Marines.”
Even more to the point, as explored in Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing, people who regularly confuse vapid John Wayne phrases with real life may be signaling intent to commit mass atrocities.
Compare it to the defense strategy phrase “keep your powder dry”, if you will.
When you understand that “locked and loaded” is primarily a “symbol of the fake machismo” used in force projection of white nationalism and thus emotive violence, then you don’t worry it might somehow end up in self-defense vernacular.
Donald Trump Hopes to John Wayne His Way Into the White House: Why the American Hero trope is so dangerous
Experts all pointing big blame fingers at Harvey make a very interesting point.
Even if she manifestly was unqualified to be in a safety VP role, and even if she had failed at safety for a decade already, at what point does she become responsible for violence enabled by personally blocking moderation?
Speaking of “loaded”, to me it reads like she was operating like a bar bouncer who intervenes to make sure that clearly intoxicated customers are still served… because she wonders what if they might be scientists studying the effects of alcohol on driving. And then people are dead.
