Category Archives: Energy

TechBro Farm Disasters: Vance, Musk and Ellison Couldn’t Grow a Pair of Nuts if They Tried

In 2011 I led a series of presentations and engagements about security as human survival infrastructure related to advanced farming concepts, based on the encryption and virtualization principles I was enmeshed in at the time (e.g. cloud).

Source: “A Cloud Odyssey”, BSidesLV 2011

To be fair, vertical farming was being heavily (deceptively) promoted as a new concept around then, so I was just pulling it into the tech industry as a natural confluence. The ideas go back, way back. Egypt’s Nile Valley was farming without soil at least 4,000 years ago. And we all know, hopefully, about Babylon’s famous hanging gardens in 600 BCE. But it was 1937 when the University of California, Berkeley proudly announced that a farm boy from Nebraska had grown up to make plants (including tobacco!) grow vertically, setting off a huge modern investment buzz not seen since 1859.

The business of growing plants in water is centuries old. Long before the Christian era it was believed that plants got all their sustenance from water. In 1699 a natural historian named John Woodward grew spearmint, potatoes and vetch in water from springs and rivers. First experiments which involved adding nutrient chemicals to the water are credited to a German named Knop (1859). Growing commercial crops in water is another matter. At Berkeley, Dr. Gericke aimed at producing tank crops which would economically compete with or surpass soil-grown crops. So successful washe that several California vegetable and flower growers have changed to water culture, more than a dozen branch experiment stations have been opened, and Dr. Gericke enjoys a “fan mail” of some 500 letters a week. […] When newshawks ask him whether he expects to make a lot of money out of hydroponics, he just smiles, shows two gold teeth.

That’s a lot of letters! If only he had invented databases instead, just imagine the plastic surgery and penis enlargements he could have achieved.

Speaking of shallow and selfish, in 2012 the Oracle founder and evil tech oligarch Larry Ellison bought Hawaii’s Lāna’i Island for $300 million to make the saddest attempt at industrial farming in history.

Eight years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering. …constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.

Ellison’s failure illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of place-based knowledge systems. How can someone who claims to understand technology fail at even the most basic farming, one of the oldest technology-rich industries? How he got started gives a HUGE hint. He didn’t give two cents about farming, he just wanted better eating. But gross unsustainable consumption is the opposite of cultivation, and appetite for destruction isn’t agriculture.

It all started right after the Oracle founder bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012. Ellison took his wife to a hotel restaurant and they found the food to be “inedible.”

“We had to drive to the grocery store in town and buy Snickers bars and Coke,” he told Departures magazine. “We decided that is ridiculous — we need to grow our food.”

Ellison floated the notion to his partner, a medical doctor and scientist with expertise in advanced cancer, David Agus.

Dumbest story ever. Billionaire doesn’t like one meal at one hotel restaurant and he decides to put a cancer doctor in charge of turning an entire island into a farming experiment? This approach exemplifies the extractive mindset that prioritizes abuse and control over ecological understanding and sustenance. Food sovereignty movements in Hawaii like Hoʻokuaʻāina were revitalizing traditional agricultural knowledge, but Ellison’s immediate reaction was to walk past coconut trees, past pineapple plants, through banana groves yelling “I’m hungry, help, get me a Snickers and Coke!”

Of course he can’t farm. Can a database peel a banana?

Hawaiian ahupuaʻa systems used traditional land management that sustainably divided resources from mountain to sea. Small groups maintaining loʻi (wetland taro patches) sustained island populations for centuries without external inputs. This isn’t hard to understand. It’s like Ellison and his army of wealthy white men landing with a colonial belief of “terra nullius“, staring at two rocks next to two others and saying “from this point forward we tell everyone 2+2 = 10, priced ten dollars each” and then they wonder why the fraud so effective on people doesn’t work for nature.

“The ahupua’a is the guide map to looking at Hawaii from a completely traditional Hawaiian point of view, taking you back thousands of years and offering you the thoughts of the people who have lived there and been stewards of the land all this time,” said Sam ‘Ohu Gon, senior scientist at the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific, a project of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s the doorway to accessing all that past knowledge that is completely applicable today.” In fact, Gon says, the ahupua’a system, also called moku, could model a way to feed and provide for the Earth’s rapidly growing population in the face of climate change. “With these intensively managed farming and fishing systems, Hawaiians were able to maintain a remarkably small ecological footprint, using less than 15% of their terrestrial ecosystem, while supporting several hundreds of thousands of people with no external inputs,” he explained.

Ellison ignored ALL of that.

Instead he pranced around with an open checkbook, built on decades of horrible cheats, to mint a completely dumb 900-pound hammer that only works with expensive rusty nails his buddy makes using federal grants. The Silicon Valley bro culture of government funded vicious attacks and hyper-aggression may work against other humans like in a war, but it doesn’t wash at all with nature. The earth doesn’t play that. Patrick Wolfe famously wrote “invasion is a structure not an event“, which frames perfectly why and how Ellison’s project is a pathetic rehash of failed colonial patterns in land misuse.

In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism… strives for the dissolution of native societies. …it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event…

Gisèle Yasmeen’s “foodscapes” theory also easily predicts the failures from the start, given a total disconnection of food production from cultural and ecological relationships.

But wait, it gets worse. Ellison supplied his colonial aspirations using fraudulent products of a Nazi-loving apartheid guy!

Six hyper-technological and Tesla solar-powered greenhouses sit on a sliver of what was once the U.S.’s largest pineapple plantation, owned by Dole. After pineapple production ended in 1992, decades of soil neglect followed, leaving the red earth dry, nutrient-deficient, eroded and peppered with black plastic…

Sad history fact: Dole cynically convinced the U.S. government to invade Hawaii and seize it in a staged-coup, destroying a sovereign country and their land, just so he could maximize profits. Ellison sounds just like the same kind of American idiot.

Ellison said the greenhouses, totaling 120,000 square feet, would be off the grid, powered by solar panels thanks to its partnership with Tesla. But the panels often didn’t work. The high winds showered them with dirt and debris, and there were questions on whether they were installed properly, according to one of the people. Instead, the greenhouses’ fans, water pumps and other needs were often powered by diesel generators.

Tesla didn’t work? Talk about a redundant phrase. Their top engineers flown from around the world to a tropical paradise didn’t even design for wind, on a very windy island. Why am I not surprised? Elon Musk snake oil is the stuff of true fraud, a failure at every level. Next you’ll be telling me his promise to land regularly on Mars by 2018 and colonize it by 2022 didn’t happen, yet he kept all the billions?

Way to go Elon. SpaceX/Tesla couldn’t design for or around obvious island weather patterns, let alone the centuries-old knowledge about sustainable production of native plants, despite detailed instructions being published since at least the 1990s.

RTFM guys!

Anyone with half a brain could have planned a beautiful Polynesian cuisine farm of pineapples, bananas, sugarcane sweet potatoes, mangoes, taro, yams, breadfruit, coconuts, arrowroot… not to mention William Herbert Purvis’ macadamia nuts!

Try to grow a pair, Ellison.

The island has to import food because it has lost its roots, literally. Extraction and exploitation by unsustainable self-serving fools is proving to be an undoing of the racist white men who tried to pour their ill-gotten wealth into agriculture in an attempt to hedge food (corner the market) and profit on artificial scarcity.

Both Vance and Musk’s startups have largely failed to achieve their aims—AppHarvest, the farming startup that Vance was a major investor in, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Musk’s Square Roots laid off most of its staff the same year. […] Things may ultimately work out for Sensei if Ellison’s friend President Trump manages to wipe out all the migrant farm labor across the country, as he seems hoped to do…

True security, especially food security, comes from relationship with and understanding of land rather than forced technological control over it by men blind to concepts of compassion and care. My 2011 presentations were all about today’s failed tech-farming ventures, which certainly feels weird to reflect upon. They should and could have done much better. Billions wasted on egos and excesses, as millions of people starved, and nobody is better off. Like Dr. Gericke, today’s tech billionaires are fundamentally motivated by profit rather than sustainability or genuine security. Shall we look at those two gold teeth again?

Report: DOGE Breached U.S. Critical Infrastructure and Left the Door Open

A February 9th investigation reports that since January 2025, numerous critical U.S. government systems have become exposed to the public internet, coinciding with DOGE’s access to federal networks.

Over the past month, an unprecedented number of critical government systems, including those at the nation’s nuclear research labs, have been exposed to the open internet. This exposure jeopardizes both U.S. national security and the privacy of millions of Americans. Notably, this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.

[…]

Between January 14 and February 8, servers belonging to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory have been found with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services exposed to the public internet. This grants malicious actors the opportunity to hack into servers hosting sensitive nuclear research data, a golden egg for spy agencies across the globe.

Alarmingly, a Department of Energy server allowed anonymous login with write access, raising the risk of hackers uploading malicious code or installing backdoors for persistent network access.

The investigation suggests these exposures, attributed to the DOGE skids (script kiddies), may violate multiple federal laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Federal Information Security Management Act, potentially creating significant cybersecurity risks to national security and Americans’ privacy.

Soon after this was report was written exposing the DOGE insider breach of national security, the White House abruptly terminated hundreds of critical systems high-level security experts.

The Energy Department is seeking to bring back nuclear energy specialists after abruptly telling hundreds of workers that their jobs were eliminated, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The employees, responsible for designing and maintaining the nation’s cache of nuclear weapons at the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), were part of a larger wave of workers dismissed from the Energy Department, drawing alarm from national security experts. Between 300 and 400 NNSA workers were terminated, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The agency’s quick reversal was announced Friday in an all-staff meeting. The NNSA is seeking to recall the workers because they deal with sensitive national security secrets, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk about the matter, which is not public.

[…]

The firings — part of a wave of terminations across the federal government this week spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — underscore the chaos…

…some workers who were told they were being fired, received a second message telling them that they weren’t being terminated and that their jobs were safe — only to receive a third message telling them they were, in fact, out of a job.

The NNSA firings were part of a wider swath of dismissals across the Energy Department, which included … the group responsible for preventing cyberattacks against the power grid, and the department’s general counsel office.

GM Cites Quality Control in Huge Jump of 2024 EV Sales

Best EV value of 2024? Many people seem to believe so. The Chevy Equinox is poised to give EV market leaders Hyundai and Kia a run for their money.

I see a nugget of security analysis as a buried lede in the news of GM crushing 2024 EV sales goals.

In 2024, GM’s EV sales surged 50% to 114,432, its highest ever aided by the new Equinox EV…. That made it one of the fastest-growing players in the electric space.

…investing more than $1 billion in companies making graphite and lithium, as well as deals with South Korea’s LG Chem to produce cathodes for it in Tennessee. That results in big savings related to shipping battery components from China, a multiweek process, as well as fewer quality control headaches.

Like “having product on the water for five weeks that you’re financing, only to find out there’s a reject in that part,” [Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery operations] said. “There’s a lot of costs that are not included upfront.”

Moves to set up a lower-cost battery supply base were cited among reasons Deutsche Bank equity analyst Edison Yu raised GM’s shares to a Buy this month, noting that its EV strategy wasn’t “entirely dependent on volume but also on battery and materials cost savings.”

What an important supply-chain integrity point in an otherwise great report about GM’s already fruitful plans for EV growth. It reminds me of this 2024 chart, showing just how hot the California EV market was last year and where top talent has been going (Hint: reverse correlate with recalls).

Chart: Michael Thomas. Source: CA New Dealers Association

Update: 2024 EV registrations in CA versus 2023. GM is up over 1000% while Tesla is failing so hard their negative bar literally is falling off the charts.

The Security Professional’s Guide to Alien Science and Gravity Drive Claims

I was sent a very lengthy hours-long commentary about my earlier blog post on gravity propulsion claims:

Gravitic Drones From China: Classic Counterintelligence Pattern in Livelsberger Case

Honestly I’m impressed people have been reading my little security blog, let alone using their studio for hours of video to respond. The dedication to exploring complex topics with a desire to understand advanced technology is commendable. When someone comments on my blog post I’ve done my best to reply. So with this video sent to me I figured I’d also try to engage constructively by posting a response with some of the video’s key points while clarifying concepts that maybe will help advance the discussion. Here’s a sample of the video tone:

Davi Ottenheimer is a um cyber security specialist so he’s not not a physicist not really an expert im physics or uh hasn’t done the research that I’ve done or dug into the people and the scientists or talked to the physicists that I have or engaged with with that that type of information but let’s let’s hear them out… very few people are actually talking about anti-gravity technology and even reporting on it this guy did a decent job thank him for his work and and and send him this video I’m going to I’m going to do that right now flyingpenguin that’s his name all right

I’m not the expert this guy is, I get it. In fact I don’t think I ever said I was an expert anywhere on this, for better or worse, so his perception makes sense. I sure do appreciate the general sentiment expressed to help me understand better, not to mention the effort to reach out with the video for me to review and study.

Let’s start with the most important points that came through loud and clear:

  • Scientific consensus can sometimes be wrong (I’ve updated my post to make sure it is abundantly clear I agree)
  • Classified research programs do exist (hopefully that’s already clear enough in my post)
  • There may be interesting physics we don’t yet understand (also hopefully clear enough already that I agree)

These all reinforce my central thesis about how scientific breakthroughs develop and manifest. And notably he gives examples about classified research at Battelle and Wright-Patterson, which provide excellent support for the key point in my original post that real technological breakthroughs, even when classified have these notable features:

  • Generate observable patterns in research
  • Require substantial infrastructure
  • Leave traces in supply chains
  • Build on established physics principles
  • Can’t completely hide fundamental discoveries

Here’s a typical example of documents declassified decades ago that reveal “secret” research and observations at Wright-Patterson and Selfridge.

11 July 1950. Source: Secrets Declassified, USAF

The distinction between engineering secrets and physics breakthroughs is crucial. In fact, as the video notes regarding metamaterials (engineered materials with unusual electromagnetic properties), new capabilities often emerge from creative applications of known physics rather than hidden fundamental forces.

So we all agree that extraordinary engineering breakthroughs can and do happen, even while obeying known physics principles! I have spent decades working on breakthroughs in engineering that depend on physics, so it’s hard for me to disagree with this tenet.

At this point you, like me, are maybe thinking ok so what? What’s the deal with a massively, massive two hour video response then?

Well, dear readers (hi mom!) I took the time to carefully wade through the whole thing (transcript) so you wouldn’t have to. What I actually was being given was a shining example of the kind of misunderstandings of basic physics, attachment to conspiracy theories, and unsubstantiated claims about suppressed technologies that likely fueled a Green Beret with PTSD and traumatic brain injury into tragic levels of anxiety and fear.

Below I’ll walk through specific technical errors I found in the video, with timestamps so you can verify the context yourself. I’ve organized these by physics domain to make them easier to follow. For each error, I provide both the mistaken claim and a brief explanation of the correct physics. While the list may seem long, understanding these fundamentals is crucial for anyone seriously investigating advanced technology claims.

Fundamental Constants and Special Relativity

  1. Speed of Light Misunderstanding (00:17:26)
    • Error: “if you change the variable refractive index you can change the speed of light so all these theories and and are based on constant c”
    • Correction: The speed of light in vacuum (c) is invariant. Refractive index changes light’s phase velocity in materials but doesn’t modify the fundamental constant c. This is a cornerstone of special relativity.
  2. Metamaterial Properties Error (00:17:52)
    • Error: Claims metamaterials can modify fundamental constants
    • Correction: Metamaterials alter effective electromagnetic properties but cannot change fundamental physical constants or modify gravitational fields

General Relativity and Gravity

  1. Dielectric Properties and Gravity Error (00:43:13)
    • Error: “If you modify the dialectric and ferromagnetic constants as part of Einstein’s field equation which is part of K which is part of G”
    • Correction: This shows fundamental misunderstanding of the Einstein field equations. Electromagnetic properties don’t couple to gravity in this way – the interaction is ~40 orders of magnitude too weak for engineering applications
  2. Quantum-Gravity Confusion (00:16:43)
    • Error: Using QM-GR incompatibility as evidence for hidden physics
    • Correction: The theoretical tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity actually demonstrates why proposed gravity modifications would leave clear signatures in current physics frameworks. The very public nature of this theoretical challenge demonstrates how fundamental physics questions can’t be hidden – thousands of physicists worldwide are working openly on these problems.

Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics

  1. Matter Constitution Error (01:47:57)
    • Error: “…matter is not made up of matter you know matter is made up of these things called you know fundamental particles you know electrons and positrons I mean electrons and protons and neutrons right mainly and those electrons neutrons and and protons are all made of quarks which are made of stuff that is not matter what the stuff that makes up matter is is rearranged spacetime”
    • Correction: Misrepresents quantum field theory and particle physics. Quarks are fundamental particles, not “rearranged spacetime”
  2. Vacuum Energy Misconception (01:48:41)
    • Error: Description of “unra radiation bath of space”
    • Correction: Misrepresents quantum vacuum fluctuations and zero-point energy. The vacuum state has properties but not in the way described

Electromagnetic and Nuclear Forces

  1. Plasma Physics Errors (00:26:22)
    • Error: Claims about plasma spheres controlling gravity
    • Correction: Confuses electromagnetic plasma effects with gravitational interactions. Plasma confinement is an electromagnetic phenomenon, not gravitational
  2. Cold Fusion Misunderstanding (00:55:20)
    • Error: Linking cold fusion claims to gravity modification
    • Correction: Nuclear fusion (strong force) and gravity are entirely different fundamental forces. Success or failure in one domain says nothing about the other

Classical Physics and Engineering

  1. Maritime Casimir Effect Misapplication (01:49:24)
    • Error: Comparing boat waves to quantum Casimir effect? “…in a maritime casimir effect right that shows that in a in a long in a harbor um the boats if you had two boats in a wavy ocean the waves are damped between the two boats so that there’s less waves between the two boats”
    • Correction: Macroscopic wave mechanics and quantum vacuum effects operate on entirely different scales with different underlying physics
  2. Crystal Structure Claims (00:25:32)
    • Error: “some of the crystal structures require uh micro gravity environment”
    • Correction: While microgravity can be useful for some crystal growth, the statement fundamentally misrepresents crystallography and materials science
  3. Supercavitation Physics (01:25:38)
    • Error: Conflating atmospheric and underwater supercavitation effects? “…you create this Super cavitated Bubble around the torpedo so that it can travel in a vacuum instead of through a viscous fluid like water which slows you down a ton and it’s you know hard reason you can paddle a boat right water is viscous it’s hard to move but you create this Super cavitated Bubble in front of it and boom you got super cavitation in this frictionless”
    • Correction: Misapplies fluid dynamics principles across different mediums with very different physical properties
  4. Energy Conservation Claims (02:08:36)
    • Error: Suggestions of “over Unity” effects
    • Correction: Violates First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy conservation cannot be violated through clever engineering

Scientific Method and Evidence

  1. Experimental Verification Error (00:15:30)
    • Error: “We’re showing the experiments about the tests that break these theories”
    • Correction: No peer-reviewed experiments demonstrate violations of fundamental physics principles claimed
  2. Classification Logic Error (00:19:50)
    • Error: Using classification as explanation for lack of evidence. “…the scale of such an Enterprise would be completely impossible to hide from the global scientific community. No it wouldn’t I show you exactly how they’re doing it they manage all of the National Labs.”
    • Correction: As demonstrated in the blog post, fundamental physics breakthroughs leave observable patterns even when specific applications are classified

Context and Implications

The real story of scientific discovery is often more interesting than hypothetical hidden physics. The errors above demonstrate consistent misunderstandings of:

  • Fundamental force interactions
  • The relationship between theory and experiment
  • The distinction between engineering challenges and physics principles
  • How scientific breakthroughs develop and manifest
  • The difference between classical and quantum effects

Furthermore, as stated at the beginning, while I may not be the expert this guy is I noticed the examples he cited actually support my thesis about how real technological breakthroughs develop and leave observable traces, even when classified.

The response and analysis here isn’t meant to discourage investigation of advanced technologies. Rather, it aims to help establish a more rigorous foundation for such research based on actual principles. When we conflate engineering possibilities with physics-defying claims, we risk not only misleading ourselves but potentially harming vulnerable individuals searching for answers.