…though she hasn’t been told by the energy summit’s organisers why she was barred, she believes that “the fossil fuel industry is actually scared by having someone from Ukraine attend”.
She pointed out that the Stand With Ukraine campaign was not only calling for an end to the “global fossil fuel addiction that feeds Putin’s war machine” but also for countries to stop expansion of coal, oil and gas, and start phasing out. […]
“Of course, we are in stark opposition to the oil and gas lobby, and the push to expand fossil-fuel infrastructure is the opposite of energy security. We will be safe only when public money and state subsidies fully withdraw from the oil and gas industry and get to spend at-scale on renewables and energy efficiency.”
If the conference had let her in, we probably never would have heard about this important point.
It’s worth reporting widely that reducing overly centralized fuel systems would have a direct impact on regional political stability and wars, even though it feels like news from 70 years ago.
Someone is buying up old decrepit tankers, turning off any tracking electronics, and pushing huge amounts of Russian oil into Asia.
Industry insiders estimate the size of that “shadow” fleet at roughly 600 vessels, or about 10% of the global number of large tankers. And numbers continue to climb. …an estimated 25 to 35 vessels are being sold per month into the shadow fleet, according to another senior executive at an oil trading firm. Global Witness, a nonprofit, estimates that a quarter of oil tanker sales between late February 2022 and January this year involved unknown buyers, roughly double the proportion the previous year.
While allegedly hard to identify by modern standards, at the same time the age of the vessel and the fact that it is dedicated to carrying Russian oil makes it classically simple to find, track and… disrupt or disable.
Perhaps the title of the post is too on the nose? An interesting new survey of US Army information warfare history basically concludes that it’s hard to do new things while conveying them to people schooled in old things.
Information operations gained its strongest institutional acceptance when it presented itself as a set of technological capabilities designed to affect an adversary in a discrete conventional conflict. This understanding was in accordance with an American way of war that favors technological solutions over human ones and that favors conventional over unconventional conflicts. […] The history of Army information doctrine contains three additional insights that are worth discussing further. The first is that information itself is an extraordinarily complex concept whose application to war possesses infinite versatility and variation. […] A second insight concerns the tension between technical and psychological interpretations of information. This tension has been at the heart of Army information operations doctrine for the past 40 years and is one of the reasons why creating a single, unified doctrine has been so difficult. […] A final insight is perhaps the most obvious one: that Army information doctrine has experienced consistent, frequent, and often radically vacillating change since its inception. With the exception of the period from 1981 to 1991, when the doctrine was at its most primitive, the Army has never had an opportunity to build meaningful capacity around a single doctrinal construct.
In completely unrelated news a Psychological Operations Specialist assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group has been charged with assault and battery. His case spread quickly after a video was shared showing him verbally attacking two minority women and then quickly losing a physical fight.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it was hard to teach that young white man how to give up his obvious schooling in plain old American racism. Did his recruiters even check if he follows Elon Musk before letting him into boot camp?
It all reminds me of WWII information warfare reports that advocated censorship as a democracy preserving effort and holding a very narrow focus on anti-racism. It’s no coincidence anti-democratic foreign assets push Twitter into extremist uncensored racism. It’s all not really that complex.
[There are] three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
You think the Governor of Florida banning Black history and crushing dissent is new or different? Nope that’s someone using charismatic elections to control violence (Police) and then pushing hard to control information. Basically a regression to Andrew Jackson’s illegal annexation of Florida to crush Black emancipation and prosperity (things now made illegal to teach in school).
…Times story carried a quote from the closing arguments of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicholas Porritt: “This case is about whether rules that apply to everybody else should apply to Elon Musk,” he said. On the one hand, sure, yes, that would be nice and good. On the other, it has become so radically implausible to the extent that it’s borderline absurd.
A jury was meant to recognize the harm in obvious crimes like, you know, intentional fraud.
Elon Musk’s own defense was that not everyone became his victim, therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for people he harmed.
Seriously, he said some people didn’t believe his fraud as if that should mean those who did have only themselves to blame. Imagine every bank robber ever saying “but whatabout the safe I didn’t crack” in order to avoid conviction.
[Laws] won’t be enough unless we change the culture that allows assault to happen in the first place.
And that touches on the thorny problem in American history, its sad record of injustice.
When British corporations in 1740s, and even the King, started abolishing slavery the Americans revolted to find a way to legalize crime against humanity and keep it their primary source of wealth. President Washington used his lawyer to exploit loopholes and preserve slavery after he was ordered to abolish it.
And we all know how the American courts treat black women plaintiffs let alone any woman.
What’s so bad about Musk undermining all inherent value to replace it with an arbitrarily controlled dictatorship that cruelly destroys society? And is it any wonder, as if mocking the American court system, his big project was announced as a robotic black woman to serve him?
It’s pretty obvious to anyone with expertise in cars that Tesla is a worthless company, yet experts have zero influence over Wall Street manipulation and related fraud.
History says it’s terrible to allow crimes like Musk’s, the worst because trust is erased by selfish predators, but then who is to say any American jury knows anything about history? (PDF of Killing Hope)
Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things
about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank. And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.
Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat the worst of it.
Enron executives used fraud to inflate revenues and hide debt. The SEC, credit rating agencies, and investment banks were also accused of negligence—and, in some cases, outright deception—that enabled this massive fraud.
Now we can add jurors to that list, again.
In Musk’s case it seems to be taking a lot longer to convict someone for fraud than others like him. Maybe in the end Enron Mask will be like Ford and use his purchase of media to spread hate speech into every dashboard, even directly backing his loyal follower Adolf Hitler, yet get away with it all.
American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford for enabling his most infamous follower Adolf Hitler. Source: Wayne State
The key to this breaking news story seems to be that while seven different cars brands were being moved on a shared trailer, the Tesla burst into flames and has to be isolated as the worst of all.
The Tesla will remain in isolation for 30 days, per expert advice, according to the towing company.
Perhaps it should have been isolated before too? Perhaps Tesla should be banned?
It’s a good reminder that while electrical failures have been a top cause of car fires since forever, Tesla fires are the worst in car history and risk dragging the entire industry down. The towing company has been posting infrared sensor data and video evidence:
You’d think every car company would be entirely focused on preventing fires.
Wierdly it’s been the opposite with Tesla, as they seem to think they should be allowed to have “mysterious” fires and ignore the victims.
in an interview with KCRA, siblings Sunit and Dilpreet Mayall described the terrifying moments their car’s battery component suddenly burst into flames on Saturday about 4 p.m. driving eastbound on Highway 50.
“We could have died in that moment,” Sunit Mayall told the TV station. “I was really scared. I was panicking a lot and just re-living it. I’m getting emotional right now. But it was really scary.”
[…]
Dilpreet Mayall told KCRA that they reached out to Tesla multiple time, but haven’t heard anything back.
Tesla often uses whataboutism claims of combustion engine fires being common… without mentioning that a top cause of car fires is electrical systems. By that fact alone Tesla brings increased risk unless it can demonstrate special precautions and response (e.g. what we’ve seen from Chevy).
In the long, wide-ranging message, [Michael McConnell, an emergency response technical lead at Tesla] explained what assistance Tesla could and could not provide. He offered online training sessions but could not arrange in-person training because, McConnell explained, he had “just too many requests.” A diagram for the Model X implied there was magnesium in a part of the car that did not, in fact, contain magnesium. There was no extrication video guide for the company’s Model Y car (extrication is the firefighter term for removing someone from a totaled vehicle). It would be difficult to get a training vehicle for the Austin firefighters to practice with, McConnell added, since Tesla is a “build to order manufacturer.” Most of Tesla’s scrap vehicles are recycled at the company’s Fremont plant, he said, though a car could become available if one of Tesla’s engineering or fleet vehicles crashed.
Tesla says they are overwhelmed with requests for training, while not knowing how their own car works, yet then somehow falsely believe that there aren’t enough wrecked Tesla available yet to train on. Where do they think all that demand comes from? Can any car company really be any worse at engineering?
