Poetry, Security

Another Tesla “Civil War” Cybertruck Destroyed Itself by Crashing Into a Toyota Corolla

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Before I get to the Toyota crash, let’s recognize that all the news lately about Cybertruck design failure has centered on a very high profile towing incident, from a social media personality’s durability test.

Allegedly the Cybertruck attempt to pull unstuck another truck, instead completely ripped the back of the Tesla frame off.

Big oops. That’s not going to buff out.

I probably don’t need to say more here about the video because it generated like 5 million views in 2 days.

Yet, I just want to say this hints at how any cheap tow line quietly strapped anywhere to a Cybertruck’s frame… might instantly damage it catastrophically. Who already knew the “apocalypse-ready” road warrior could be defeated by a $50 tow strap and a gentle tug? It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight, except the knife is made of Elon Musk white supremacist Technocracy-grade tinfoil and the gun is… well, just about anything else on wheels.

But hey, maybe the “WankPanzer” is actually a revolutionary self-disassembling vehicle. No need for a junkyard when your truck helpfully falls apart at the slightest provocation. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature that the thing can’t really be used without failure!

Remember everyone, in the race between “extreme survival” and “extreme embarrassment,” this stainless steel folly is breaking land speed records. At this rate, the only thing it has been towing is Tesla’s reputation – straight into the dumpster. But don’t worry, I’m sure there’s a software update coming to fix pesky laws of physics that break everything, even the lowly wiper, when the real world shows up.

A truck that can’t even wipe itself?

This chromed colossus is the ultimate accessory for the discerning dictator-in-training: a $100K bulletproof binky for budding Benitos.

Hear them wail: “Waaaah! The world’s so scary! Quick, Elon, swaddle me in stainless steel! I need my angular armor to fend off the diverse hordes!”

But wait, there’s more! Act now and we’ll throw in a free copy of “Mein Kampf-y Chair” – perfect for those long drives to Cyberstormtroopers rallies setup with xTwitter. Who did Nazi this coming?

Meanwhile, for the second time in just a few months, an inexpensive, simple and efficient Toyota Corolla just permanently wiped another Cybertruck off the road.

Notably I found the crash reported mainly through TikTok. Shocker, right? Turns out, folks prefer their vehicle fails without a side of racist rants and “Civil War 2.0” battle plans. While Elon’s digital hellscape echoes with calls for insurrection, TikTok’s busy showcasing his real-world engineering flop. It’s almost poetic – the “future-proof” truck crumbling on a platform he doesn’t control, while his own social media empire tumbleweeds into irrelevance. Once again proving that not all publicity is good publicity, especially when it comes with a garnish of sedition.

Why is he so weird?

Inevitable? No. Orchestrated.

Far-right American militias pose the greatest threat, and they are predominantly built from the bottom up, by mundane, practical drivers — for instance, as anti-vaccine activists become anti-government activists. There do not appear to be strong links between them and foreign organizations except among white supremacist groups, and even that is mainly online, through propaganda mechanisms…

Online propaganda mechanisms link foriegn funds to American white supremacists? No wonder Musk bought Twitter claiming he had a new “extreme speech” funding model.

Musk’s digital megaphone has been blaring civil war rhetoric for months, echoing suspiciously pro-Kremlin talking points.

They tried so HARD!

Former Russian President Medvedev Predicts U.S. Civil War & Elon Musk Becoming President In 2023

Musk’s Twitter posts seem tailor-made to sow anti-Western, anti-democratic sentiment and potentially incite domestic extremism. In April 2024, Russian military website topwar.ru eagerly amplified Musk’s ominous prediction:

[Dumb stuff Russia says will] cause large-scale civil wars in Western countries. American entrepreneur Elon Musk made such a rather gloomy forecast on his social network account.

The dire forecasts keep missing the mark, but Musk remains undeterred, relentlessly doubling down on his doomsday predictions while undermining public safety.

His track record with predictions is about as reliable as a Cybertruck about to tow something. Remember when he confidently promised Mars walks by 2018 or a million robotaxis by 2020? These weren’t just the musings of a man on a bender; they were projects he claimed were easily achievable under his direct control — yet they disappeared faster than tweets Musk censors when they don’t align with his views.

Musk’s continual prophecies of civil war might turn out to be as accurate as his many promises about the Cybertruck’s durability. False, yet extremely dangerous to prove for many of his followers willing to throw their lives away.

If he can’t even deliver on basic vehicle manufacturing — his supposed area of expertise — how trustworthy are his wild forecasts in fields he knows little about?

Musk’s dog whistle tries to reference 1929 as the rise of Hitler in order to incite racist violence today.

It seems the only thing Musk reliably produces is a deluge of hate speech, violent incitement, dead followers, broken promises and unfulfilled predictions… whether they involve “Mars Technocracy” (read: creating a white ethno-state like apartheid-era South Africa) or trying to inflame societal collapse (read: creating a white ethno-state like apartheid-era South Africa).

Maybe there’s a pattern here… apartheid guy is still trying to apartheid.

History, Security

Agent Zo: the Fearless Woman in a Flight Suit Who Secretly Led Poland’s WWII Home Army

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The deep misogyny of British culture really comes through in a new BBC retelling of Agent Zo’s work.

First, they misleadingly say she left Britain for Poland.

The woman who left Britain to parachute into Nazi-occupied Poland

Why not say the Polish woman who returned home to lead the liberation of her country? The headline is askew from the first sentence of the piece, which clearly says she was returning to Poland.

…a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis…

Next, they try to emphasize she parachuted without wearing trousers, even though she actually was wearing a flight suit. As if Scotland doesn’t have male veterans wearing skirts? As if wearing a flight suit doesn’t mean she was in trousers?

…a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis, a parachute strapped to her back and a blue dress beneath her flight suit. […] Branded “the captain in a skirt”… “I quite like the line she’s the only person to parachute back from Britain to Nazi-occupied Poland in a dress because she’s the only woman to do it,” [historian Clare] Mulley says.

She’s the only person to parachute into Poland wearing a blue dress under a flight suit? We should like this minor detail because… why?

Can we believe a blue dress matters at all, or that it’s even true? Did it have dark thread or light? Was it flat front or pleated? Cotton or wool blend? Seriously, this is the kind of tiny detail distraction that the historian’s bias invokes rather than anything important to the main thread of honoring Agent Zo (yes, pun intended).

My guess would be Zo knew she had to immediately appear normal, and was dressed ready to drop and walk. That’s a reflection of occupied Poland at the time, not her own fashion sense, which speaks directly to oppression.

Did Scottish men not wear skirts when they jumped for a similar, yet opposite reason of being distinct?

These men jumped in skirts. The Military Times says because it was “seen as extremely versatile military garments. Despite the contemporary view that skirts are feminine…”.

I suspect this historian spent exactly no time trying to find evidence of others wearing a dress underneath their trousers, as if such a getup would make any sense without a specific reason (e.g. trying to NOT standout or be noticed, on penalty of death).

In other words, it comes across as the historian saying she loves the fact that Polish women were expected to be wearing a dress always, no matter what, or be shot on sight. What kind of person likes that?

Also repeatedly there is an attempt to unfairly brand this fearless patriot in war as being too brave or too confident.

Branded … “a militant female dictator” as she confronted those in charge in London, her efforts would transform the status of women in the Polish Home Army, helping to save thousands of lives. …you look at some of the paperwork of her friends and they said: ‘Zo came and she terrified me. I couldn’t do anything else. I had to do it.’

Some of the paperwork says her friends were terrified by her into fighting against the Nazis? That sounds like war, where unfortunately people have to be motivated by fear early to fight against the Nazis to avoid being slaughtered later without any fight.

You think Zo is the scary one? Versus the Gestapo? Funny how you live to tell that story. I guess she terrified you in the right way. Because she was right, the other option wasn’t an option at all. For a historian to say fighting Nazism was not or is not a binary choice, is for that historian to be promoting Nazism.

…she sort of blithely assumes that everyone shares her very binary world vision – they’re bad, we’ve got to free Poland. “That’s it. That’s what’s driving her.”

It was a binary world because Nazism is the most binary system. Nazis kill anyone who doesn’t agree with Hitler, or his latest whim in a state of constant improvisation and chaos. I can’t believe I have to say this. This historian even admits as much when she says Nazis were illegally killing Polish women on sight in the most binary way.

“…Hitler has got this Commando Order… he said that anyone who is found fighting not in uniform will be shot without trial,” says Mulley.

Wear a dress and dare to disagree with Hitler? Get shot without trial.

Or publicly beheaded.

Zo didn’t assume that people shared this reality. She saw truths and knew a harsh toxic reality of Nazism. She knew her friends would be shot dead in a dress sooner rather than later, if they weren’t fighting along side her to end the binary world Hitler forced women into without any choice.

Let’s also not fixate on the voice of some offended man in London who branded Zo a militant dictator, when so many others did not. I’ve run into similar issues with Orde Wingate history, as well as the talented and beautiful “Night Witches”.

Take General Patton, as an opposite canonical example, regarding how tough men can be glorified over their terrifying methods of motivation. Was Zo’s methods as bad/good as Patton? And would she ever be judged in the same way?

Agent Zo is framed unfairly by the BBC, and by spurious voices, as though her confidence and competence as a resistance fighter was a terrifying dictatorship, instead of calm, calculated competency opposed to dictatorships…. Why not tell it always from a foundational story that Zo achieved mission objectives and an absolutely essential role for the success and safety of her troops in the liberation of Poland, despite overwhelming odds against her?

Security

OpenAI Giant Private Trojan Horse: Grave Dangers That CISOs Must Manage ASAP

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Scientists, not to mention digital ethics experts, are warning that OpenAI may still be up to no good. Apparently it is being run by a dangerous man whose continuous intentional deceptions now pose a direct threat to democracy.

Here, a scientist who appeared with Altman before the US Senate on AI safety flags up the danger in AI – and in Altman himself.

[…]

We simply can’t trust giant, privately held AI startups to govern themselves in ethical and transparent ways. And if we can’t trust them to govern themselves, we certainly shouldn’t let them govern the world.

That’s a general statement, yet also specific in using terms like “giant” and “private” and “startup”. Not many giants are startups. Not many giants are private. A giant private startup means… there’s a specific group of billionaires using loopholes to pollute power.

Organized crime unaccountably masquerading as industry comes to mind, but perhaps that’s because I read too much American history.

This article in the Guardian reminds me very much of well-heeled malware campaigns, let alone the Teapot Dome Scandal.

Preeminent among the many difficult questions facing [corruption investigators] was, “How did Interior Secretary Albert Fall get so rich so quickly?”

In many ways OpenAI is framed as far too heavily corrupted; invasive and pervasive like a rich man’s robotic worm trying to take over systems and affect data integrity inside the largest private and public institutions… to get rich quickly.

CISOs should already have been thinking of how they will detect OpenAI and prevent the scandalous system from infecting their operations.

Who is ready to tell their board they are completely free of OpenAI? Did they successfully kick out Palantir or Oracle yet?

The warnings are only getting louder on OpenAI, as many very bad private unaccountable practices and deceptions are just being uncovered.

What’s the alternative? The Guardian piece mentions that too.

To get to an AI we can trust, I have long lobbied for a cross-national effort, similar to Cern’s high-energy physics consortium. The time for that is now. Such an effort, focused on AI safety and reliability rather than profit, and on developing a new set of AI techniques that belong to humanity – rather than to just a handful of greedy companies – could be transformative.

Take that to your board, your representatives, your friends. And if you need technical guidance, look at the Solid protocol.