Elon Musk said 2025 was there year his cars just wouldn’t crash anymore. Instead, every day I read about another big crash, like this one.
The crash occurred at the intersection of Eastmont Avenue and 5th Street NE at about 2:20 p.m. East Wenatchee Police Chief Rick Johnson told NCWLIFE the Tesla struck the bus in its front axle, but was unsure which vehicle caused the crash.
Johnson said the Tesla had extensive damage and was towed from the scene of the accident, and the two passengers of the car sustained minor injuries.
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?
The latest WHO bulletin on outbreaks says Ebola and Marburg have been ruled out, leaving researchers with an unidentified disease rapidly killing people in the DRC.
In related news, Trump has been flip-flopping on WHO like a slippery, slimy catfish gasping for air: simultaneously exiting and entering WHO in a superposition of self-interest, world suffering be damned.
This isn’t policy—it’s destruction of institutional credibility to replace it with a vacuum so devoid of intelligence only an air-pumping orange-faced charlatan can thrive: rapidly pivoting towards whatever enriches a Trump personal portfolio. Each contradictory pronouncement serves to exhaust attention, dismantling all governance towards quick illegitimate private gain. American corruption is ruthless, ugly scandal after scandal turning backwards into systemic imperialist-racist exploitation so brazen, so normalized that it becomes a policy of perpetual chaos. Trump is institutionalized corruption — rotating positions constantly, however contradictory — for a singular outcome of self-enrichment. The rest is only distraction from his relentless extraction of value, leaving the world poorer and worse off, if not rapidly killed from negligence.
People asking me today what they should do about American political rhetoric being so hateful and anti-immigrant, bring to mind how Germans have since tried to unwind Nazism. As just one example the Cologne section of an Alpine club has demonstrated their concerted effort, with the help of a historian, to confront an infiltration and degradation by hateful extremists.
They published “Antisemitism in the Rhineland-Cologne Section of the Alpine Club” (Der Antisemitismus in der Sektion Rheinland-Köln des Alpenvereins), which details exactly how Nazis did irreversible murderous harm to a sleepy recreational Cologne section of the German-Austrian Alpine Club.
Source: Der Antisemitismus in der Sektion Rheinland-Köln des Alpenvereins
Initially after its 1876 founding Jews were seen like any other members in the Cologne Alpine Club. In fact, 14% of founding members openly were Jewish and prominent citizens known for leadership, such as Moritz Seligmann. The infiltration of hate begins around the same time as the radicalized appropriation of the swastika by hate groups, around the 1890s. Vienna introduced a concept of “Aryan paragraphs” to deny membership based on racism alone. Then, due to the rampant antisemitism propaganda unleashed at the end of WWI to blame Jews for everything and anything, the Alpine Club failed to resist intensified racism. In Cologne, controversy erupted in 1921/22 when Jewish applicants suddenly were denied membership, which led to public protest by Moritz Bing and Ludwig Cahen. The club refused to admit it was about race, while making it about race. Then, when a few expelled Jews formed their own “Donauland” section as a means of compliance, it was attacked by Nazis in 1924 to force all Jews expelled as a group from the Alpine Club. After Hitler seized control and destroyed democracy in 1933, the Cologne section wrote its first “Aryan paragraph” in January 1934, and by 1936 it removed any exemptions, clearly denying club membership on race alone. Although some from the club who were Jews managed to flee Germany, others died in concentration camps, and some were murdered.
The modern German Alpine Club (DAV) acknowledges this history as their unfortunate role in progressively overt racism, a cultural group normalizing murderous violence against their own members. They offer documentation of the many wrongs over many decades as their expression of regret now.
The Cologne Alpine Club’s honest accounting of such a past demonstrates a helpful path forward through acknowledgment and documentation. They didn’t minimize their failures or hide within excuses of “different times” (although at times the tone used to describe Germans being persecuted sounds like a distant and extinct race, rather than just Germans). Instead, the club has meticulously documented individual stories and the institutional failures.
…the Alpine Club yielded to pressure from antisemitic sections and failed to protect its Jewish members and the non-Jewish members who supported them… In a time when xenophobia, violence and intolerance are again spreading in Germany, we must not only resist the beginnings. We must also honor the memory of all those women and men of the Alpine Club who became victims of exclusion, intolerance and persecution or who actively fought against such developments.
(…der Alpenverein dem Druck von antisemitisch eingestellten Sektionen nachgegeben und sich nicht schützend vor seine jüdischen und die sie unterstützenden nichtjüdischen Mitglieder gestellt… In einer Zeit, in der in Deutschland wieder Fremdenhass, Gewalt und Intoleranz um sich greifen, gilt es nicht nur den Anfängen zu wehren. Es gilt auch all jener Frauen und Männer des Alpenvereins würdig zu gedenken, die einst Opfer von Ausgrenzung, Intoleranz und Verfolgung geworden sind oder die tatkräftig gegen derartige Entwicklungen angekämpft haben.)
Their transformation path from inclusive and helpful in the 1890s to hatefully exclusive by the 1920s, and then genocidal by the 1940s, follows a simple pattern we should more easily recognize today:
Infiltration at the margins – rotten ideas in specific sections (e.g. Vienna) can spread throughout the organization
Exploitation of crisis – post-WWI economic drama spread with modern technology accelerating unregulated hate speech should have been blocked as inherently incompatible with timeless outdoor exercise, not rapidly embraced and interlaced
Normalization – what was once totally unthinkable for an inclusive club became policy of exclusion
Complicity through silence – even those who didn’t actively promote hate failed to oppose it as they should
Germany’s post-war reckoning with a Nazi past isn’t just about political change in government institutions, but about how our everyday innocent groups – from walking or book clubs to baseball games and parent meetups – also must resist complicity in enabling or causing mass suffering. The separation is purposefully evaporated by extremist groups forcing people to join or be killed, whether members like it or not. A comprehensive approach to accountability offers a model worth considering after the tragedy. However, sooner obviously is much, much better. An ounce of prevention… goes the saying, as any mountain climber knows well. It shouldn’t take decades to pass before meticulous investigators (historians) help climbers, of all people, to understand how holding a line (on human rights) prevents unnecessary deaths.
Acknowledge even simple and fun organizations are highly vulnerable to ideological capture
Recognize silence against extremism is a form of enablement
Document and preserve evidence of extremism to prevent normalizing it
Raise alarms with early warning signs of immoral exclusion
Support those who raise alarms, like Bing and Cahen in 1921/22 who wrote a letter that forced a club meeting, and chairman Günther publicly disavowed antisemitism as official policy (even though unofficially he then allowed it to grow far worse)
“Nur für Arier” (Only for Aryans), Botanical Gardens, Köln (Nazi Germany)
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
