Police already have indicated the Tesla crossed a double yellow line.
The Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office said that it happened at around 5:45 p.m. in the 6800 block of Courthouse Road.
When deputies arrived at the scene, they saw that a 2022 Tesla X and a 2024 Hyundai Tucson had gotten into a head-on crash.
Preliminarily, it is believed that the Tesla had crossed the double yellow line and struck the Hyundai.
The Hyundai driver, Donna Pinnell, 76, died at the scene.
Following Poland’s report, invoking NATO Article 4, the Romanian military has published a their own report of Russian violation of airspace.
A Geran drone used by the Russian Federation in its attacks on Ukraine penetrated the Romanian airspace on Saturday, September 13th, at 6:05 p.m. and was intercepted by two F-16 fighter jets, which were conducting an air patrol mission in northern Dobruja. […] The German allies deployed to Mihail Kogălniceanu scrambled two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft in support of the Romanian ones, which monitored the area until 9:30 p.m.
Threat Response Calculation:
Rough Cost Ratio
NATO response cost roughly 20 times more than the drone itself.
Ouch.
We know Russia has adopted a doctrine to flood the Ukraine airspace, launching more one-way attack drones from September through December 2024 than in the preceding 23 months combined. Just one day on July 9 saw 728 Shahed-type drones used in a saturation attack.
This comes from the Russian industry producing more than 5,000 long-range drones each month, split between Shahed-type strike drones and decoy models (Gerbera – a flying cardboard box). It’s believed nearly 200 Geran-2 drones per day are made.
Notably, as a historian, this actually says to me that ex-KGB are executing on a 40-year old concept. The intelligence elites of yesteryear circling around Putin still are talking about America ruining their Soviet economy. They can’t think about current problems, a fundamental problem in dictatorships, so they are smarting about the huge military overspend that Gorbachev finally admitted was their failure.
Yuri Andropov, director of the KGB, created a secret department during the 1970s within the KGB devoted to economic analysis. What he eventually studied was CIA Director William Casey’s aggressive plan to undermine and destroy the Soviet Union through a combination of economic warfare and sabotage, hot and cold war, a punishing arms race, and sophisticated and heated psychological and political warfare.
The KGB veterans thus were on the front lines to see economic warfare as the sharp tip that brought down the USSR, and they’re hungry to flip the lessons against NATO. A staggering 20:1 cost ratio is a deliberate echo of the American economic pressures that bankrupted the Soviet military-industrial complex. Putin himself is a former KGB officer who lived through the Soviet collapse and understands precisely how forcing unsustainable military spending ratios can cripple an economy.
And it should be stated that swallowing such doctrine is what is rewarded by autocrats. The KGB veterans that Putin surrounds himself with have a playbook based on what they know worked against them. That’s their weakness. They can’t adapt or innovate beyond that framework because Putin would kill them the minute they exposed a truly independent thought.
So let’s dig into basic anti-fascist history and take this another possible path. Americans under normal circumstances would see a massive strategic opportunity for industry, where economic incentives are perfectly aligned with rapid expansion. The Romanian incident essentially handed the German government a half million dollar payment for a few hours of operations against a $30,000 target.
That’s math just begging for industrial innovation. But the Americans are MIA, and clearly can’t be trusted, drunkenly pouring billions down the drain on dumb military PR stunts like the Yemen and Iran “air power embarassment” of strategic bankruptcy (let alone pandering to “iPad on your face” guy selling defense lemons).
NATO has an immediate reality of three dozen countries facing a rapidly growing threat from cheap robot swarms. Layered defense systems are needed for both military and critical infrastructure markets. That’s basically another way of saying Russia just unlocked German industrial power with a potential $50 billion addressable high tech market over next decade.
Russia is taunting Germany to solve a manufacturing optimization problem, which is exactly what built the massive anti-Soviet automotive and machine tool dominance in the first place.
American engineering culture meanwhile is in steep decline, a corrupt political mess of anti-science bureaucracy pumping flashy, late, expensive, over-engineered PR as solutions nobody wants. Germany already has shown it’s perfectly positioned to pivot their quality control of “mass-producible minimum viable” engineering philosophy into independent and sustainable European commercial dominance of contested airspace. This is a made-in-EU moment.
Putin’s old man shouting at the birds grudge-fueled KGB-inspired economic warfare strategy, which he expected to weaken NATO, might end up creating the first truly independent European defense industrial base, powered by German engineering excellence. There’s real irony being funded by the paper robot threat Russia itself created.
Ukraine, Czechia, Romania and Poland have just made the innovation demand clear:
Russia deserves exactly what happens when you give German engineers a clear problem, unlimited market demand, and necessary freedom from the stupidity of the American culture war clowns grinding themselves down even faster than foreign threats ever could.
One of my least favorite phrases in history is geopolitical ouroboros – everyone was enabling everyone else in a circle that eventually came back to bite them all.
Specifically American pursuit of short-term profits and tactical advantages created strategic nightmares that lasted decades. Massive federal funding to develop radar technology in WWII, which birthed Silicon Valley, is a perfect analogy for this. It helps explain the latest news about surveillance technology transfer to China, since America seems to repeatedly arm future enemies with tools to attack them and their allies.
The system apparently runs on a fundamentally compromised culture where national security product engineers aren’t measured on safety but instead how insulated they can become from dangerous consequences of their own extreme isolation and wealth; the Stanford recruitment system seems tuned to artificially transfer costs using a “break things for someone else to clean up” mindset.
Historians Produce Pattern Recognition
The Associated Press investigation into Silicon Valley’s role in building China’s surveillance state reads like an old 1940s playbook. The birth of Silicon Valley was unlimited federal funding to develop radar technology for Allied forces. Eventually the results threatened American planes over Korea in a devastating turnabout. The cultural shock resuled in a “Top Gun” project that only escalated the cycles. This context matters greatly when considering tech giants like IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Intel spending over two decades essentially building the world’s most sophisticated digital prisons and handing the keys to America’s most obvious geopolitical rival.
The scale of stupidity is sobering. American companies sold billions of dollars in surveillance technology to Chinese police and government agencies, as if emboldened by repeated Congressional warnings that these tools were being used to crush dissent and target minorities.
Can you imagine a CEO at a tech firm giving an executive team presentation that “these elected politicians are telling us if we get rich helping China we also can destroy democracy and instrument racism globally, hell yeah!”
As one public example, researchers exposed an unauthenticated MongoDB instance in China was “regularly being updated” with nearly 7 million GPS coordinates every 24 hours. It was the surveillance backend for cameras in mosques, hotels, police stations, internet cafés, and restaurants. You know, everywhere a certain ethnic group were being monitored… without basic database authentication enabled.
It was during this context the CEO allegedly told the company “our tech doesn’t matter, I don’t care if we were making dishwashers, I would still sell the shit out of it.”
That’s perhaps how to think about IBM working directly with Chinese defense contractors to build national intelligence systems, not unlike the $1 billion/year operation IGLOO WHITE of 1968 for the Vietnam War. And consider Nvidia and Intel have partnered with China’s biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to camera networks. Dell, HP, and Microsoft likewise provided the software backbone that powers systems tracking tens of millions of people or more.
Moral Relativism
What makes this particularly galling is the moral hypocrisy being baked into deals. We know from history how amoral technology transfer cycles work. Take the Israel-South Africa nuclear partnership of the 1970s and 1980s. I mean Holocaust survivors literally worked with a regime led by former Nazi sympathizers, sharing nuclear technology in exchange for uranium and testing facilities. That same South African regime then used related missile technology to arm Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with billions of dollars in weapons.
The stupid result?
Iraqi missiles were fired at Israeli cities during the Gulf War with components allegedly derived from Israeli collaborations. American companies had enabled South Africa’s missile program through deliberate sanctions-busting, creating a circular nightmare where everyone was simultaneously arming and being threatened by everyone else.
Mirrors Made in China
The China surveillance story follows this old arms deal pattern, just with digital rather than kinetic weapons. American tech companies built the technological foundation for what became a system that:
And now?
China has become what some are calling the “surveillance superpower,” selling refined versions of American-developed technologies to Iran, Russia, and other adversaries. It reminds me of President Reagan removing solar technology from the White House and giving it to China, which now dominates the global industry that President Carter accurately predicted.
Reagan eliminated tax credits and federal support for renewable energy that Carter had established, making it economically impossible for American solar companies to compete domestically. This forced them to either die or move manufacturing to China where costs were viable.
In other words, Chinese innovations in solar powered surveillance systems are being deployed domestically now in the United States for “predictive” political detention and worse, as a result of extremist domestic political strategy.
Silicon Valley Blindness
Tech companies consistently claim they only care about the dollars and aren’t responsible for how products are used. However, internal marketing materials show this is disingenuous at best and they care, in the wrong way.
Dell boasted about helping Chinese internet police “crack down on rumormongers.” Seagate marketed hard drives “tailor made” for Chinese police to “control key persons.” IBM, Cisco, and others directly pitched their technology using specific political oppression terminology about “stability maintenance” and controlling “abnormal gatherings.”
This wasn’t accidental dual-use technology marketing it was deliberate and tailored sales pitches to attract authoritarian buyers, often in direct violation of the spirit if not the letter of export controls.
Inevitable Blowback
Historians see the patterns that predict where this leads. Just as radar technology proliferated globally and eventually threatened its creators, surveillance technology is already boomeranging back to its source. China’s refined surveillance capabilities are being used for espionage against American targets. The “predictive policing” concepts pioneered for China are now being deployed against American citizens. Technologies sold to track Uyghurs are being adapted to monitor other populations worldwide.
The geopolitical ouroboros completes its circle once again: American companies created the tools, sold them to a rival power, watched that power refine and weaponize them, and now face the consequences as those same technologies are deployed against supposed American democratic interests and values.
A Culture of Cooked Cage Matches
Here’s the real tragedy of fight club fetishism: there’s little evidence anyone in the tech industry cared when Nixon announced he would pivot the flawed Igloo White surveillance technology of the Vietnam War into domestic use. How many Americans recall how wartime sensors were placed under the White House lawn and in the yards of President Nixon’s other homes in San Clemente, California, and Key Biscayne, Florida?
Nixon had believed so strongly in the new surveillance technology, despite it failing miserably in the field, that he had the same sensors deployed to his lawns and the border with Mexico complete with drones flying overhead.
The engineers who built billion-dollar-a-year surveillance systems in the 1960s were building a money hungry engineering culture. The same culture that today measures success in Silicon Valley’s nearly $1.1 trillion in aggregate household wealth, where less than 1% of the Valley’s population held 36% of the wealth. A culture measured in SF mansions valued at tens of millions, snow parties at Tahoe chalets, and yachts racing across the Pacific.
At their Carmel compound, Palantir execs threw weddings, AI founders did cold plunges, and a collector played host to generations of tech’s war-builders. The same moral detachment that allowed decades of engineers to shrug at their technology being turned on American protesters to deny Civil Rights now drives AI researchers to build surveillance systems for authoritarian regimes while retreating to $30 million-$50 million mansions in gated communities.
The problem expands beyond corporate structure or regulatory capture into a culture that sells out the technical-minded while insulating them from the consequences of their work through payouts. A father and son recently drove to the Mojave Desert in their airstream trailer to watch the Sequoia-backed startup Mach Industries test new high-tech missiles in the sweltering sands. It’s all just tinker toys for big booms, divorced from human consequences by layers of stock options and luxury real estate.
When I used to watch howitzers practice on retired machinery down range, I never thought decades later it would be something used for corporate meetups around beers and campfires.
Breaking Cycles of Detachment
The Silicon Valley surveillance subculture is of course corporate greed and regulatory failure, yet it’s also about a fundamental cultural inability to learn from history.
The same shortsighted thinking that led to nuclear proliferation, missile technology transfers, and arms dealing debacles has now been applied to the digital realm, but this time with a culture that’s even more divorced from consequences.
Despite being a high-priced technological failure for the US military, Igloo White was pivoted into the bedrock of border surveillance that’s ongoing today. The engineers who built were simply building expensive technology they hoped would make them wealthy, measured by their ability to afford 13,421-square-foot mansions with six bedrooms and guest cottages.
The pattern is depressingly familiar: develop technology for security purposes, sell it to the highest bidder regardless of consequences, use the profits to insulate yourself from those consequences, express shock when it’s used against you, then repeat the cycle by pitching sales for the next generation of weapons.
Until we acknowledge surveillance technology is like weapons, and that the culture building it is fundamentally compromised by incentives misaligned, we’ll keep feeding this ouroboros. The radar engineers of WWII probably never calculated themselves in the formula that would threaten Allied aircraft. Today’s AI researchers, safely ensconced in their Atherton compounds, should take note: the surveillance state they’re building, will be monitoring them tomorrow, and sending their family into detention the day after.
“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”
Imagine reading that the Taliban, after being empowered and armed by the U.S. military, are shooting down American military aircraft. Oh, wait…
But will they ever care as their plumped stock options are vesting and the Tahoe chalet reports a bluebird chowder day?
When British soldiers liberated Berlin in 1945, they encountered something both heartbreaking and illuminating: German children hiding in Nazi bunkers with weapons, terrified of the world, were unable to articulate what they were actually afraid of. These children had been indoctrinated through Hitler’s propaganda platforms to believe that Allied soldiers would kill them if they surrendered.
The battlefront solution, as one British veteran recalled, was surprisingly simple:
You put a bar of chocolate in their hands and it alters the whole war – as far as the children are concerned.
A Catholic priest who spoke German would calm these remaining Nazi adherents down, and suddenly the existential threat they’d been taught to fear dissolved completely in the face of basic human kindness coupled with overwhelming force.
This historical moment offers a crucial lens for understanding contemporary political rhetoric, in terms of parenting fundamentals, particularly Elon Musk’s recent inflammatory militant-like statements at a far-right rally in London.
Engineered Fears Lack Specificity
Speaking via video link to a “unite the [white] kingdom” rally organized by political extremist Tommy Robinson, Musk deployed weaponized disunity language that follows a familiar pattern.
Musk… told the crowd that “violence is coming” and that “you either fight back or you die”.
He said: “I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long.
“Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”
On the face of it he is calling for an end of government. It is the most anti-unifying tactic possible.
And also note the overt ignorance displayed with “four years, or whenever” and “something” as his demand for immediate action.
Such statements of weaponized disunity represent the systematic deployment of rhetoric designed not to reform government policies or win electoral victories, but to collapse the shared foundations that make democratic governance possible.
Normal political opposition seeks to change who governs or how they govern within existing institutional frameworks. Musk’s call for “dissolution of parliament” bypasses democratic processes entirely – he’s not advocating for policy changes, candidate support, or even constitutional amendments, but for militant extremists to immediately destroy Britain’s elected government.
This call to arms mirrors the text of Golding’s famous novel Lord of the Flies, when institutional authority collapses, the result isn’t liberation but an intentional state of chaos that inevitably exploits anyone vulnerable to abuse by a small authoritarian cabal. Just as Ralph’s democratic leadership in the novel protected Piggy until the system broke down and constant violence took over, democratic institutions – however flawed – provide a framework within which peaceful conflict resolution remains possible.
Musk’s rhetoric encourages people to abandon safe protective structures without offering any viable alternative governance model, creating the very power vacuum that historically leads to authoritarian capture or societal breakdown.
The “weaponized” aspect thus lies in using democratic freedoms (free speech, assembly) to advocate for democracy’s elimination – exploiting the system’s tolerance to promote intolerance, precisely what Popper so clearly warned against in his paradox of tolerance.
This intentional abuse of language has in fact been studied extensively by historians of disinformation warfare (e.g. social engineering attacks):
This rhetoric creates what security experts might call a “crisis of meaning” to bypass unity and falsely generate feelings of existential threat despite the lack of concrete, specific dangers that would justify the extreme responses being advocated. “They” are coming to get “you” is how bogus “caravan” rhetoric was used in 2016 to drive national security fraud (illegal redirection of funds) for Americans involved in the disasterous Maginot-like “wall” campaign.
Historical Basis in Today’s Nazi Endgame
The parallels between Musk’s rhetoric and Nazi Germany’s final propaganda push reveal identical patterns. After 1942, when military defeat became inevitable, Nazi messaging abandoned rational policy arguments for purely apocalyptic themes designed to prevent surrender.
The regime’s massive construction projects exemplify this delusional mentality. Structures like the absurd Boros bunker in Berlin were built by Nazi slaves in 1943 as “shelters,” yet it functioned more like an above-ground prison, where thousands of Germans were crammed to cower in fear rather than meaningfully protect them. The Nazi propaganda sold death camps as freedom, entrapment as safety, total desperation as preparation for victory.
General Erwin Rommel exemplified this tragic mindset of self-destruction – when given the choice between suicide or having his entire family killed in front of him, he chose the poison pill instead of a fight, telling his family he could not bear to live under Allied occupation while condemning them to it. This selfish binary thinking – death or dishonor, with no middle ground and totally devoid of care for others – became the genocidal regime’s final message.
German children were indoctrinated with binary thinking in order to force an unnatural and inhuman choice. Hitler estimated that any ray of sunshine at all would disinfect even the youngest minds and so the binary was absolutist: fight to the death against liberation or face annihilation. And this, when Allied soldiers actually arrived offering chocolate, fresh air and daylight instead of violence and isolation, the entire ideological framework collapsed instantly.
Again, the Nazi propaganda used known effective social engineering:
Musk Grew Up on a Diet of Hitler Propaganda
Musk’s rhetoric follows this template with remarkable precision. We know his Grandfather was arrested in WWII Canada for sympathies with Hitler, and fled to South Africa to lead apartheid. We also know from Musk’s father that Elon was raised in an environment promoting Nazism. It should come as little surprise that Musk statements still create a sense of imminent civilizational collapse while remaining frustratingly non-specific about actual threats or solutions. What exactly is the “violence” that’s coming? Who specifically represents “the left” that he claims celebrates murder? What concrete policies justify dissolving an elected parliament? Isn’t this all just like South African apartheid or Nazi German rhetoric all over again?
Indeed, as with Nazi messaging that terrified German children into taking up arms, this rhetoric again asks people to believe the Hitler doctrines to act on fear rather than evidence, urgency rather than deliberation.
A God and Chocolate Test of Our Time
The British soldiers’ success in Berlin suggests we know a powerful antidote to extremist messaging: persistent human decency protected by rule of law (or overwhelming force) that contradicts the propaganda narrative of fascism. When people discover that the supposed monsters are actually offering genuine acts of kindness, the entire fear-based worldview can collapse. Is the human mind open to receive help if being trained on imposed scarcity to react always in trauma mode?
The question isn’t about ignoring real political disagreements or legitimate concerns about social change, it’s about enabling safe disagreement. That’s why Popper describes the healthiest boundary development as an intolerance paradox, where ideas can be encouraged by flagging ideas of intolerance for restriction. It means recognizing when rhetoric crossed from political argument into known propaganda techniques that have been designed to bypass rational thought in order to cause intentional discriminatory harms.
Think of it as a test not whether someone is racist, but whether someone exhibits genuine anti-racism. Claims of population decline and “white genocide” from intermarriage, also claims of color blindness, are proto-typical proofs of someone failing to demonstrate genuine anti-racism.
The “chocolate test” for contemporary political messaging might ask: Does this rhetoric encourage people to see fellow citizens as fully human and deserving of human rights? Does it promote specific, achievable solutions? Does it allow for complexity and nuance? Or does it demand immediate, extreme action against vaguely defined existential threats, dehumanizing specific targets?
Breaking the Pattern
The children in Berlin weren’t inherently extremist, given that they were responding to a traumatic narrative that told them the world was ending and only violence could save them. When that narrative was gently contradicted by reality, they could return to being children.
The tactics of using children as weapons weren’t limited to Nazi Germany’s final days. After Rhodesia lost its colonial war in 1979, white supremacist forces shifted to covert destabilization operations in neighboring Mozambique, where British-trained SAS units supported Renamo rebels in a campaign that killed over one million people – 60% of them children.
These operations deliberately targeted schools and kidnapped children, forcing them to murder their own families before being used as child soldiers in raids against civilians. The psychological warfare under the regime adopted by Musk’s Grandfather was identical to Nazi methods: create absolute terror, destroy normal social bonds, and force impossible choices between violence and death. Over 250,000 children were separated from families, 200,000 orphaned, and half the country’s schools destroyed – all under the false flag of “protecting” civilians from the legitimate government.
The parallel is unmistakable: white supremacist forces consistently use children as both weapons and victims while claiming to be their saviors.
The same pattern appears across many conflicts, from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire defusing a child soldier with an AK-47 at his nose in Rwanda by offering chocolate, to Dutch children receiving their first taste of chocolate from liberating Canadian soldiers in 1945.
I’ll say it again, that people drawn to apocalyptic political messaging aren’t necessarily lost causes. They’re often responding to injected anxieties about normal social change, regular economic uncertainty, or predictable cultural shifts. The challenge is addressing the many underlying concerns with concrete solutions and social science rather than exploiting them with fear-based mobilization. The Fabians understood this intimately when they responded to industrialization by laying the groundwork for modern data science.
As William Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” How we allow outsized characters claiming paternal authority to speak to people’s fears – whether nurtured with artificial scarcity into extremism or offered surplus and conversation – shapes the society we’ll inhabit today into tomorrow.
History has already run this experiment many times. We know how Musk propaganda ends, just like he does and refuses to believe. The question is whether he can learn before he generates another global disaster of hate.
Many people struggle to articulate why certain rhetoric feels dangerous beyond normal political disagreement, so I hope to have provided some expert vocabulary and historical context to make the threat identification clear.
