The buried lede is that Tesla actively suppressed or destroyed evidence that would solve thousands of cases against them.
Is Tesla’s autopilot really as advanced as he says?
The Tesla Files suggest otherwise. They contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented. A separate spreadsheet on driver-assistance incidents where customers raised safety concerns lists more than 3,000 entries. The oldest date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022.
From the BBC comes an assessment of the original and real American Superman.
“…it blew my mind when I saw it. He’s essentially a violent socialist.” The earliest issues of Action Comics bear out this assessment. When there are wrongs to be righted, Superman knocks down doors and dangles suspects from fifth-storey windows, and he makes hearty jokes while he’s doing so: “See how easily I crush your watch in my palm? I’ll give your neck the same treatment!”
…of the people who are roughed up by this boisterous outlaw…the majority are so wealthy that they don’t need to rob banks: there is the mine owner who skimps on safety measures, the construction magnate who sabotages a competitor’s buildings, the politician who buys a newspaper in order to turn it into a propaganda sheet. Rather than being a typical costumed crime-fighter, then, the Superman of 1938 was a left-wing revolutionary.
The S was for being an American socialist, a super one at that.
There was a Supreme Court ruling in the 1960s that seems especially relevant lately.
In the ruling, Black wrote: “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”
Notably, exceptions to the ruling have been made where Americans are denaturalized for being too racist.
“Although its use has been substantially reduced,” Weil wrote, “since 1967 denaturalization is still available on two basic grounds. The first of these grounds applies to individuals who have committed gross violations of human rights.” This primarily focused on naturalized Americans with undisclosed [racist] pasts. “In contrast to judicial skepticism of expatriation in the 1960s and 1970s, courts have not challenged the authority of the government to denaturalize individuals responsible for committing human rights violations,” he adds.
That’s all very useful context when reading the news these days, where Trump’s well documented history (and current spate) of human rights violations make him the most obvious top candidate for denaturalization.
Mamdani took to social media hours later to slam the President’s comments, saying that Trump had threatened to arrest him “not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.”
“His statements don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you,” Mamdani said in his statement. “We will not accept this intimidation.”
Mamdani is right to stand firm and protect Americans against bogus claims, given Trump’s threats of denaturalization apply most directly and clearly to Trump himself.
The concept of proportionality in war can be complex and require careful analysis. And then, on the other hand, there’s the current reporting from Israel:
Gerry Simpson, of Human Rights Watch, said: “The Israeli military hasn’t said exactly whom it was targeting but it said it used aerial surveillance to minimise civilian casualties, which means it knew the cafe was teeming with customers at the time.
“The military would also have known that using a large guided air-dropped bomb would kill and maim many of the civilians there. The use of such a large weapon in an obviously crowded cafe risks that this was an unlawful disproportionate or indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Dr Andrew Forde, an assistant professor of human rights law at Dublin City University, said the strike was shocking. “When you see a situation where there are heavy munitions being used, particularly [in a] crowded civilian space, even with the best targeting in the world … that will necessarily create an indiscriminate outcome that is not in compliance with … the Geneva conventions,” he said.
[…]
Marc Schack, an associate professor of international law at the University of Copenhagen, said: “It is almost impossible to see how this use of that kind of munition can be justified. If you are talking about 20, 30, 40 or more civilian casualties, usually that would have to be a target of very great importance … For coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the accepted number for a very high-level target was less than 30 civilians getting killed, and only then in exceptional circumstances.”
Trevor Ball, a weapons researcher and former US army explosive ordnance disposal technician, identified a Jdam tail section and thermal battery which he said suggested either an MPR500 or an MK-82 bomb was dropped.
The Israeli MPR500 is marketed as a “enemy bunker” bomb, allegedly just used instead to destroy a beach-side cafe filled with civilians
Notably the law professor says 30 civilian casualties is the upper limit of high-value targets. The law is messy and requires complex thought by trained professionals. Israel, however, reveals an intentional lack of respect for the law by claiming they have only a binary approach.
On Tuesday, an Israeli government spokesperson said the IDF “never, ever targets civilians”.
When they say they would never do something it’s in fact the opposite, because they setup a false choice where they clearly choose killing civilians.
The huge and growing casualty reports from Israeli bombs thus indicate no respect for any boundaries of any kind, willfull ignorance of law and order, for purposes of causing harm to a particular ethnic population.
This is not as unbelievable as it may sound, given the above false choice fallacy, if we can simply acknowledge that a seditionist group assassinated Israel leadership in order to capture the government and enact genocide.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
