An absolutely beautiful new work of writing states much of what I’ve been saying in my presentations since at least 2016: driverless cars are being designed to promote a “hellscape” that nobody should want.

With autonomous vehicles it’s both: It can’t work, but the companies will create problems because they’ll pursue it anyway. If a surgeon does invasive surgery and it doesn’t work, he’s going to do a lot of harm to your body without curing you. The destruction of pre-automobile cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati to create space for cars didn’t mean that car dependency ever met its promises — but it did mean that the belief that it could was profoundly destructive.

Waymo likes to claim that autonomous vehicles are working right now. The reason it works is that there is a hellscape that these things have to go through, called Chandler, Arizona. Density is too low for anything other than driving to work well, every residential street is too wide, the non-residential roads are all multilane arterials with turning lanes, and every destination is surrounded by a vast parking lot. If that’s what you have to create for autonomous vehicles to work, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s not worth it.

It works because there is a hellscape. Couldn’t have said it any better.

In other words, if someone builds technology that can only be successful on the moon, don’t be surprised when they try to trick you into leaving your colorful alive world and going to a gray lifeless surface of the moon… so they can remain profitable regardless of your loss.

Jaywalking is a racist fantasy crime that was fabricated by car companies, for another angle on this same problem.

The new book is called “Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving” and it’s obvious it was written by a historian.

Cigarettes provide a historical lesson. When the Surgeon General’s report came out in 1964, the discussion the tobacco companies wanted to have was, “How do we make cigarettes safe?” That was getting the problem wrong. The real problem was, “How we can free ourselves from cigarettes?” […] It’s freeing ourselves from a world where if you don’t have a car you’re doomed, because you can’t get to work. The accommodation of car dependency is the perpetuation of car dependency.

Boom.

As I’ve been saying through every channel I can, history tells us that driverless cars will kill more people not less. They will cause more fatalities and do far more harms, not less. This is a function of centrally-planned and controlled decisions about human-life that values it less and less (e.g. jaywalking history) while fraudulently claiming to care more than anything before.

And so far my early predictions from five years ago have been sadly accurate.

Where does this go? Driverless will bring a “hellscape” where “…motordom has successfully prevented Americans from [freedom of choice]…”.

Giles Raymond DeMourot reminded me recently of when Robert Biggs (a terminally ill World War II veteran) sent President Eisenhower a letter complaining recent speeches had conveyed a feeling of “hedging and a little uncertainty”.

February 10th, 1959 the U.S. President a letter to Biggs with a very philosophical response:

I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed. Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.

The mental stress and burden which this form of government imposes has been particularly well recognized in a little book about which I have spoken on several occasions. It is “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer; you might find it of interest. In it he points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.

It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing or expertness except as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their own ideas or interests by resorting to statements more distinguished by stridency than accuracy.

This “breath of life” framing about debate and democracy wasn’t new for Eisenhower.

September 27, 1948 he gave an anti-fascism talk to the Jewish Theological Seminary:

I can see no reason why we ourselves, if we believe – as the dictators would have us – that men are merely animals, should defend equal rights for each other before the law. But we believe that because men have each been born with a soul they have inalienable rights and none can take them away. These rights can never be destroyed. That belief came from the ancient Jewish leaders. They taught and gave their lives in this belief. They taught us that although man is made of the dust of the earth, having had the breath of life breathed into him, he is a living soul. On this belief is based the doctrines that the American Army fought to defend.

The subtext here is that debate is a breath of life insomuch as it’s non-toxic.

Both of Eisenhower’s explanations say he believed there must be ample room for disquiet, while acknowledging he just led armies to destroy threats to peace — a seeming contradiction.

Really he was expressing tolerance with a limit, or a science of extremism, which has some way of indicating when things have gone too far. Eisenhower later evolved his philosophical beliefs along the lines of blocking extremism, expressing a need for measuring respect and trust.

Were his thoughts too late to stop the devolution of the GOP into a party of hate? Eisenhower seemed to be on the right path to protecting Americans against discrimination, albeit slowly and from within circles overtly committed to discrimination. By the time Ronald Reagan was seated as President, intolerance and racism (tyranny encoded as a “shining city”) became front and center to the GOP platform.

Looking back today I suspect Eisenhower probably would admit he should have blocked Nixon being nominated to be his VP candidate (he asked for alternatives but none were given). Waffling along and ignoring such a risk to the GOP and America was a mistake.

Today he might even admit Truman’s scathing warning was right in 1952 when he didn’t mince words about Eisenhower failing to stop the coming dangers to democracy:

The Republican candidate [Eisenhower] for the Presidency cannot escape responsibility for his endorsements. He has had an attack of moral blindness, for today, he is willing to accept the very practices that identified the so-called ‘master-race’ although he took a leading part in liberating Europe from their domination. I do not withdraw a word of that statement. […] …Senator Nixon [candidate for Vice President] and most Republicans, voted to override any veto of the McCarran bill, which is recognized everywhere as discriminatory.

Here’s some final food for thought.

Basically Eisenhower was a big believer in science, even writing letters about a thermometer being essential to grilling a steak.

Yet when it came to ideas for debate he might have lacked the necessary tools (no gauge on extremism when the McCarran bill was vetoed) and thus opened up America to an over-cooked extremist right-wing future.

Here is some telling history from an article about Russia’s approach to media control and its “rage” against YouTube.

The history of media subjugation in Putin’s Russia reaches back to the early days of his regime, and to his first Press Minister, Mikhail Lesin. “I don’t agree with the thesis that the state is more dangerous to the media than the media is to the state,” he told reporters in 1999, “I believe quite the opposite.” By 2003, most major domestic media lay in the hands of state enterprises, while CNN and the BBC remained “information weapon[s]” beyond state control. Lesin countered with the establishment of Russia Today, now RT, in 2005. “It’s been a long time since I was scared by the word propaganda,” he said of his creation.

That same year saw the founding of YouTube.

The real money quote comes much later, expressing just how critical data integrity is to Russian concepts of information security:

Tens of billions of times, YouTube has brought Russian propaganda into homes worldwide and has made millions in the process. For the U.S. company, that may represent little more than a boost to growth and engagement metrics. But for the Russian government, that represents a keystone of “information security.”

Integrity is a keystone! And yet American security professionals rarely work on it, let alone build tools or try to solve for vulnerabilities.

Food for thought, given how American police have been arresting children…

…a video had appeared on YouTube… The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video…

Information weapons. Who controls them?

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Update October 18: Police are not yet arresting people caught on train surveillance video doing nothing to stop rape.

A woman was allegedly raped on a suburban Philadelphia train last week while police said there were “a lot of people” around who “should have done something.”

Police said they had arrested a man connected to the rape that allegedly happened on a SEPTA El train on Wednesday. Fishton Ngoy, 35, has been charged with rape and several other counts.

According to authorities, the incident was caught on surveillance video that showed bystanders on the train when it happened who “did nothing.”

After Soviet soldiers had walked on foot an estimated 2,500 km from Stalingrad to Berlin, their sentiment went something like this:

Commandeering a bicycle from Nazis (who literally had stolen everything while initiating illegal war) wasn’t entirely unexpected even if unapproved.

In fact, it was reported that Soviets inside Berlin would not take anything let alone a bicycle away from someone if that person clearly was a victim of Nazis.

I say this all up front because an archival photo below represents something of a de-nazification problem within a constant false victim narrative by fascists.

What do you see here?

Note a crowd stands aside and looks silent (a failure to Raleigh — pun obviously intended), which gives a rather obvious clue about this woman.

Nazis were notorious for stealing bicycles even before and throughout WWII, particularly in rural areas and from elderly women (people who needed them most).

Or as they say in Dutch…

“Hé, waar is mijn fiets”? […] Het klopt dus dat de Duitsers de fietsen van veel Nederlanders inpikten. Want in laten leveren en niet teruggeven is een vorm van stelen.

Roughly translated:

On July 28, 1942 the Nazis stole all the bikes in Amsterdam by demanding the Dutch “surrender” them forever. Allegedly after invading and occupying a city Nazis would forcibly collect all the bikes not least of all to monopolize mobility and send metal back to Germany to be melted into weapons to invade more cities… a vicious cycle (pun obviously intended).

In Copenhagen when Nazis stole all the bikes it was reported as being luckier than those in Amsterdam:

…Hitler personally approved mass bike theft in Denmark. And it could have been worse as his original orders had been for all bicycles to be taken.

Sentiment about Germans stealing bikes is particularly bad because very overt campaigns intended to centrally control all rights including freedom of movement.

Liberating Soviet soldiers thus were seen as restoring freedom in Germany by prying hands off bikes where there was no proof of ownership (e.g. stolen by Nazis). Credentialed owners of bicycles, especially the victims of German crimes, were allowed to ride again thanks to this process of denazification.

For more insight into the situation after liberation, a book called “Unbroken Chain” by Holocaust survivor Henry Oertelt explains from a personal view — in Berlin he rode one around without any hassle from Soviets.

Guess where that “beautiful shiny bike” came from? Probably stolen.

More to the larger point about Nazis, they had given Germany a reputation of being lazy, petty thieves who hated hard work and invaded neighbors in every direction to loot everything.

Also consider this WWII photograph:

Who today looks at that horse-hitch-looking thing and thinks “taking a hand off the bars of a stolen bicycle to hold onto short rope with no room to ride (instead of just pedaling) seems like a great idea”? It’s like a bad joke from someone whose army in 1942 was 80% un-mechanized and relied on horses.

How would these men scatter? It’s actually a good illustration of bicycle formations in war leading straight to failure.

…when a Japanese bicycle unit of about 300 moved on the Luzon Plain on Manila in December 1941 they were easily handled by defenders. Filipino riflemen accompanied by American armor made quick work of Japanese cyclists as they attempted to ride into withering fire. Even as bikes scattered or turned to ride in retreat nearly all were eliminated.

Seriously, anyone with an ounce of common sense would never do this. Instead they should just stack people and bikes on a motorized/armored rack/trailer. It’s not like Nazis didn’t know how to rack and stack bikes for a long haul since that’s exactly what they were doing when stealing everyone else’s. Of course that goes back to the problem that the Nazis didn’t even know what to do with the bicycles after they stole them, as they had the least modern military in WWII — only about 1/4 mechanized.

Now what do you see in that first image?

The German woman appears to be a common criminal in Berlin refusing to give up a stolen bike. It’s a good lesson for disinformation analysts.