Two identical private jets took off, one returned and landed while the other lay in smoldering ruins. Yevgeny Prigozhin was said to be on board… one of them.

This detail popped into my head as I read the MI6 quote to the Independent.

[Putin is] making clear to everyone inside and outside of Russia that he’s not going to brook any challenge. If there’s a slim chance that he’s not dead and he wasn’t on that plane, he will be soon.

But does he really have to be dead soon? If he has a public death then lives in total obscurity, secretly retired on a Putin pension plan, what’s the real difference?

A slim chance of survival that MI6 mentions certainly could come from being on the other plane, which Russians seem to be talking about.

According to Russian sources, Prigozhin was well-known for trying to deceive any would-be assassins, and often “confused everyone” by running additional flights while he was officially checked in on another charter. The Readovka news agency, which has been linked to the warlord, even said it was “premature” to jump to the conclusion that he had died.

If Prigozhin is not dead, but everyone thinks he is… Putin not only gets what he wants with people assuming there must have been a targeted revenge strike (so very like Mike Pompeo), he also gets to secretly keep his loyal ally in his pocket in case of later need.

One thing that still bugs me about the “attempted coup” narrative that was puffed up around Prigozhin was the lack of any heated meaningful criticism directed at Putin. Blanks were being fired.

His comments were so candid and off-message for a Russian leader that it seemed as if someone had mistakenly handed him a speech… Prigozhin did not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, focusing instead on the broader Russian elite…

Mistakenly? More like intentionally.

The breathless commentary always read to me like Prigozhin was lamely following a campy coup script that was handed to him by Putin, not even trying to make it look real. Focusing heated rhetorical attacks onto Russian elites makes basically zero sense for any supposed campaign actually planning to dislodge Putin, and Prigozhin is no dummy. Lazy and greedy, yes. Stupid? No.

Plus the “exile” to Belarus plan sounded like an inside joke, given groveling obedience of that state to the Russian dictator. What better place for a fake exile script than a country that says and does whatever Putin orders? Imagine if Snowden tried to exile himself from the US by flying to Texas (the land of all hat no cattle), for a simple comparison.

I’ve studied hundreds, maybe thousands, of coups around the world and the Prigozhin news never sounded to me like he truly opposed Putin. It rang hollow.

Anyway, maybe that second plane has details worth digging into. Two bodies are missing and two have identification issues. “Keir Giles, Senior Consulting Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House” certainly seems to think it’s too early to judge.

Maybe Prigozhin is right now acting like a beached beluga under a palm tree in Africa, sipping banana juice and laughing about pulling a reverse-Hammarskjold by having his own plane sabotaged.

I’m just saying “Sir John Sawers, 68, who served as Chief of the MI6 between 2009 and 2014” doesn’t throw uncertainty about Prigozhin to the Independent readers without a very good reason.

And in relation to that point, it’s noticeable how Elon Musk consistently appears as a supporter of dictatorship and Putin in particular. The notoriously untrustworthy CEO frequently takes a stance against Ukrainian independence, not out of concern for Putin such as being assassinated, but due to a wealth-driven connection to China. The United States has not taken substantial actions yet to counter the influence of Chinese military intelligence, which has gained significant leverage within Tesla, SpaceX, and now, unsurprisingly, Twitter. This issue becomes apparent among high-ranking officials who oppose Putin; they now find themselves hesitant to engage with Musk’s three highly turbulent and declining for-profit geopolitical corporations. This hesitation stems from the way the Chinese consistently maneuver the coin-operated Musk towards aligning with Putin’s interests.

Tesla engineers have now confirmed what is being measured by safety experts outside, so it’s been proven to be no exaggeration to call the brand willfully negligent.

Let’s back up for a minute and admit that 2016 should have seen the end of Tesla’s “Autopilot”.

In January of that year, then again in May, Tesla’s bug-riddled software killed drivers in what has become widely known as a poorly engineered car that has an unusual propensity to crash into giant trucks. Instead of fixing the defects, or cancelling the project, the Tesla CEO dangerously instructed staff to blatantly lie (in a carefully planned deception) to generate rapid wealth from “Autopilot” sales promotions that drowned out escalating safety failures.

In April of 2018 when both Uber and Tesla each ran over and killed a pedestrian, only one of these ill-conceived “driverless” companies cancelled such ruthless public experiments. Tesla kept lying, people kept dying, and it cynically began advanced fee fraud (AFF) tactics to up-sell software with a “premium” charge even while it repeatedly failed to deliver what they promised.

2019 recorded another Tesla “Autopilot” fatality identical to 2016, despite hardware and software being different… raising the unavoidable conclusion that Tesla wasn’t even trying to fix dangerous safety flaws. This again should have shut it all down. Evidence that Tesla had been ignoring the very thing they were charging high-fees for, should have completely destroyed their competitive claims against other cars.

For at least the third time in as many years the 2019 Tesla safety claims fraud clearly should have been ended immediately by the market, let alone regulators, to prevent more lives being lost unnecessarily.

Instead, here we are still counting ever more unnecessary fatalities, documenting even more preventable harms.

Bernie Madoff went to jail for less.

The latest case in 2023 looks like a sad repeat of the 2019 disaster, which was a repeat of the 2016 disaster. There obviously have been many more of same or similar crashes (millions of people and more are at risk presently without any warning), yet these three crashes seem to have produced the best documentation yet facilitating easy proof of an intentional deception conspiracy by Tesla.

When I first saw the new crash report, and that police had filed charges against the truck driver, I immediately suspected Tesla software would be implicated.

Crashing into trucks is a weird class of Tesla error all of its own, notably different from the growing “veered” class of Tesla crashes.

In other words, the truck driver had likely anticipated any other car would have reacted to his giant obvious broadside crossing the road. This was a notable finding from the 2016 crash, when the truck driver watched and wondered why a Tesla would suddenly change lanes to drive under his trailer at full speed and decapitate the driver.

And in 2023 a truck driver might also have read the news and innocently assumed that Tesla engineers with blood on their hands would have worked to prevent more tragedy.

These unfortunately were not two assumptions he could make, given the intentionally cheapened, blind, deaf and dumb suicidal Tesla products. The police want trucks crossing highways to keep altering behavior, when really they should be throwing the book at Tesla for operating unsafely on public roads by design.

And the NHTSA has indicated Tesla engineering is again under investigation, likely to be found at fault again.

While police are plausibly correct that a truck driver’s math didn’t calculate properly for any cars unwilling to apply brakes to prevent a crash, it’s a pedantic application of law obscuring the abject intentional failure of Tesla safety to apply brakes instead of killing someone.

Drivers and their automation experiments should be under an obligation to at least attempt to avoid certain death.

Tesla engineers say quite literally the opposite:

Tesla’s Autopilot engineers have claimed the automaker’s leadership not only knew the software was unable to detect and respond to cross traffic, it did nothing to fix it.

DID NOTHING TO FIX IT.

The Tesla CEO ordered staff to lie egregiously about safety in 2016 and has obviously continued the practice every year since even as the tragic data grows.

Lance Armstrong lost everything for less.

Communities repeatedly mourn loss of life and property after the gross negligence of a Tesla comes to town.

Why are they even allowed to sell, or keep operating on public roads? Again, let me remind you that Uber cancelled their operations in 2018 after just one fatality exactly like a Tesla, while Tesla has only increased the risks from rapidly ensnaring more victims into a giant fraud (e.g. the Bernie Madoff of car manufacturing).

It’s pretty obvious to even the casual observer that Tesla designs not only are seriously defective and subpar, but that the safety record of the brand has precipitously declined as time goes on.

According to a new lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, Jiyoung Yoon claims her late husband, Jyung Woo Hahn, died when his 2020 Tesla Model 3 malfunctioned, crashed into a tree and burst into flames. […] She claims the Model 3 was defective in design, manufacture, and warning … she says it was not crashworthy, making it “unreasonably dangerous for its designed and intended purposes.”

Her claims sound correct to me.

More and more people die in Tesla crashes just like this lawsuit documents, the fatalities piling up faster than ever. This is quite unlike how other car brands have rolled out (e.g. Nissan LEAF and Chevy Bolt both sold hundreds of thousands of cars with close to zero fatalities).

The simple explanation for the uniqueness of huge Tesla failures is they were “gaming” test scenarios and regulations (e.g. getting an artificial high score in a closed room), while ignoring known critical fundamentals of physics in the real world. And then they refused to improve or react appropriately after deaths started to skyrocket.

A dummy mannequin in a crash test isn’t going to try and locate a hidden emergency handle to simply open the door, for example. And yet Tesla continues to build hidden, almost impossible to use, emergency door handles. In fact, defects are often buried in Tesla’s “closed loop” proprietary service model that prevents transparency and accountability.

Wait, it gets worse… Tesla engineers say they were ordered to NOT FIX known “Autopilot” safety failures, while Telsa lawyers ran a coverup campaign (publicly observed “Autopilot” tragedies were reclassified to private secrets) in order to deny the public knowing about rapidly increasing dangers to anyone in or even around a Tesla.

“Tesla requested redaction of fields of the crash report based on a claim that those fields contained confidential business information,” an NHTSA spokesperson told Insider in a statement. “The Vehicle Safety Act explicitly restricts NHTSA’s ability to release what the companies label as confidential information. Once any company claims confidentiality, NHTSA is legally obligated to treat it as confidential unless/until NHTSA goes through a legal process to deny the claim.”

Tesla cared about getting five stars from an agency they disrespected, covering up defects, and not at all about the hundreds of people soon dying in their hands.

Far too many people have been killed by Tesla management decisions, in other words. This is a repeat of the callousness documented during the Ford Pinto lawsuits. It’s easy to believe today, because we’ve seen it before in America.

Families and friends seem to grieve over the same set of Tesla circumstances (sudden erratic car control loss, trapped in a fire, burned to death while trying to escape): any other late model car brand, engineers would have ensured people had a far higher chance of survival.

Friends and family shouldn’t let anyone they know ride in a Tesla. Don’t wait for a ruling to confirm what the data shows, because many lives already can be saved.

Meanwhile we will have to wait and see how courts catch up to what has been known, given more than a decade of evidence pointing to the gross negligence of Tesla.