As you may remember, I’ve explained before why and how Elon Musk constantly stands accused of enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism (e.g. he’s racist).
Elon Musk increasingly has shown himself to be racist since illegally immigrating to America from South Africa to launder his family’s apartheid fortunes. Like many around the world, he was led to believe being racist still leads to a very successful career path in the United States.
It’s a wonder how such unsafe vehicles are allowed to operate on public roads. Uber had the good sense to terminate its entire driverless program after it killed just one pedestrian, while Tesla is so dumb it’s killing unprecedented numbers of innocent people and shows no intention to slow down. In fact, the explosion of serious safety complaints to regulators from new Tesla owners is shocking. Complaints even went up after attempting to do safety recalls, to give you some idea how bad Tesla engineers are at their job.
Tesla quickly rolled out an over-the-air update to address the issue, yet, since that recall reports of phantom or unintended braking are higher than ever. In fact, the single highest reported cases of phantom breaking analyzed by the Post occurred just one month after the recall.
Banning Tesla is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a ban will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
Now we’re watching Twitter being turned into a toxic white nationalist organization, to gestate and coddle terrible ideas even worse than Tesla.
Blocking Twitter thus is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a block will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
History is the right guide here. The unregulated empire of Ford (infamous for enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism) very noisily bought a newspaper to spread hateful disinformation, which led directly to the rise of Nazi Germany and genocide.
Arguably Henry Ford loved to breed hate so much he created an industrial engine for it that directly influenced and aided Adolf Hitler. Source: The Dearborn Historian
For those who don’t remember Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper (The Dearborn Independent) in 1918 specifically to viciously spread his vision of hate (e.g. personally promote baseless political conspiracies) such as a bogus conspiracy about America being “infected” by Jews. Ford pushed nearly 100 issues of his garbage ideas, bound them all into four volumes imaginatively titled “The International Jew,” and distributed half a million copies via his own network of dealerships and subscribers, not to mention by Nazi leaders in Germany.
Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his “inspiration”, explaining his reason for keeping Ford’s life-size portrait next to his desk.
Steven Watts wrote that Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany”…
50,000 American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protested Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State University
Henry Ford the rich automobile man thus bought a media company to breed and spread hateful disinformation that otherwise would have had far less authority. His tragic history and direct role in the rise of Nazism thus brings an obvious lesson in what to do now to avert global suffering from Elon Musk.
Banning Tesla and Twitter would immediately enable the market to produce far higher quality goods, as well as protect consumers, expanding the market for more ideas at the same time as improving it with better ones.
After all, we have seen courts clearly regulate online hate speech as equivalent to physical harassment, right?
…online campaigns of hate, threats and intimidation have no place in a civil society and enjoy no protection under our Constitution.
Or more to the point of how regulation drives innovation, after America occupied Japan and Germany to explicitly ban Ford-like fascism (remove violent cheaters and liars from the market) those countries rose rapidly to produce the highest quality and most trusted cars in the world. America shouldn’t have to contemplate what occupying itself means, in order to enforce laws against racists amassing power, but here we are.
Some have suggested to me recently that British fashioned their Operation Mincemeat in WWII after details in the book “The Millner’s Hat Mystery” (by Sir Basil Thomson, published 1937).
Thomson (1861-1939) was a solicitor who had worked for British Intelligence and in the Foreign Service.
During WWI he served as an Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police.
Such credentials definitely give a detailed and grounded approach to his writing.
The story-line of this book, a seventh title out of eight books about a particular investigator, kicks off with a couple people who duck into a barn during a storm and find a dead man.
The death is reported as murder because of a fatal wound by gunshot without any sign of the weapon. However the victim’s identity is a total mystery, challenging the protagonist.
This search for meaning in a discovered body could have been a reference for some aspects of Mincemeat. However, the operation wouldn’t have worked if identification of the victim had not been intentionally made very easy (disinformation). That’s basically the opposite of a mystery.
Thus it seems more accurate to say the methods pioneered in WWI, such as the Haversack Ruse for Beersheba, had set an overall objective of disinformation that was used successfully in WWII Operation Mincemeat. If anything, the book could have been based on intelligence from WWI, just like Mincemeat.
Around the 17th century (1600s) an experienced seaman was rated as “midshipman” because of the location of his duty, or his compartment below deck — it was the middle of the ship or midship for short.
Source: University of Wisconsin, Madison. Click to enlarge and find the midships label.
In the 18th century the title of midshipman transitioned to anyone who was a candidate for a commission on a ship.
From there the term midshipman came to mean an apprentice officer on a ship, someone who aspired for promotion.
That aspirational role seems to be where an old English term from the 17th century comes into play. An apprentice or servant was called a cocc (“one who strutted like a cock”)
The middle of the ship where an aspirational officer apprentice would roam like a proud chicken of the sea… thus probably generated the term “cockpit”.
The word “pit” likely referenced the midship again, where work was done or maybe also because the decks of a ship were lower versus high stern and bow.
Today midshipman is still a term used to describe the entry level role for someone who wants to become commissioned as a naval officer. However, now it means an academy on land instead of constrained into the middle of a ship at sea.
Cockpit meanwhile somehow elevated way beyond the aspiring midshipman into the place on a vessel for command and control, such as the nose of an airplane or aft area of a sailboat.
One other thought on this topic is that chickens had a superstitious meaning at sea. “Pig on the knee, safety at sea. A cock on the right, never lose a fight” was one saying about where to put sailor tattoos. Another was that the cock tattoo on a right foot would prevent drowning.
It’s hard to find evidence for why such superstitions evolved. Some say it was because wooden crates often floated ashore after a shipwreck with chickens surviving despite them being unable to fly or swim. Some might say chickens were a source of food to ensure human survival, meaning they represented good luck after a wreck.
In any case I doubt midships with crates of chickens is where cockpit comes from. Perky ostentatious midshipmen seems the more likely story, given British sea humor and the fact that a term like “pigpen” was never used.
Recipient of a police chief’s valor award, Alex Mingus, speaks at his ceremony about racism and corruption in American law enforcement. Source: Twin Cities Pioneer Press
In a fast-trending headline from Minnesota, Alex Mingus points out hard truth about America:
‘They don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe.’ Good Samaritan criticizes police as he accepts award from St. Paul cops.
Mingus then gets right to the business end of the problem.
After Interim Police Chief Jeremy Ellison gave Mingus the award, Mingus took off his sweatshirt to reveal a T-shirt that read, “Smash White Supremacy.”
He said in an interview Monday that he wore it “because the police are one of the strongest arms of white supremacy in our world. They started as slave catchers and they haven’t changed much. All that the police do is protect rich white people’s property.”
Protect rich white people’s property? Mingus suggests it’s undeniable how slave catchers rebranded as police, thus making America into long-running white police state.
This seems right. It helps explain, for example, why a “Black lives matter” movement that emphasizes the importance of human life runs into opposition from angry whites who demand violent police protection for… just property.
General Sherman even warned about this exact thing as he demonstrably tried to end a Civil War in what the brilliant military thinker described then as the most humane way possible: his soldiers burning rich white racist people’s property to the ground in order to stop them from expanding and perpetuating a white police state that killed Black people.
“They set a thing on fire, glass was broken, property damage is unacceptable” is what slaveholders said in the Civil War. And it’s what today’s rich white people seem to bitterly complain as if proving Sherman’s moral warnings right.
Mingus is giving us insights into why rich whites from the 1800s and today would completely downplay a depressing fact that Black people needlessly are being killed by police who claim a mission to protect property.
History obviously plays a key influence and even may be an accurate predictor in these matters.
If we don’t see governments taking active measures to move away from racism, showing up with evidence of anti-racism, then expect to see more racism.
For example, the state of Minnesota was undeniably founded on systemic oppression and exploitation. Despite that they’ve allegedly engaged in some hard work of reversing their legacy. The police chief’s award ceremony in St. Paul for the clearly anti-racist Alex Mingus is just one example.
…slavery in western Missouri was often just as brutal as elsewhere in the South. […] Intimate relations… [caused] the worst forms of physical and psychological abuse. […] Owners continued to rely on slave patrols to monitor slaves’ movement but now sanctioned extreme violence as they worked to control an increasingly unruly slave population. [After] regular slave patrols became unreliable, many owners turned to Confederate guerrillas, who ruthlessly helped them maintain slavery.
And on that point, to date western Missouri has shown sparse if any signs of anti-racism or undoing their “ruthless” method for perpetuation of slavery (as opposed to say very obvious work in eastern Missouri)
Western Missouri police actually seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, the wrong side of history: stand accused of repeatedly and clearly perpetuating, enabling and ignoring slavery practices, if not simply failing to stop them.
Ten years ago a hostage crisis was exposed, which centered on a central Missouri group that captured a runaway woman to enslave her for many years.
Bagley allegedly forced the girl to sign a “sex slave contract” and branded her with an “S” tattoo for slave as well as a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for slave. Bagley allegedly told the girl that the sex-slave contract “never” ended, according to the indictment. Bagley then allegedly “beat, whipped, flogged, suffocated, choked, electrocuted, caned, skewered, drowned, mutilated and hung” the girl to enforce the contract… [in a] home indistinguishable from its neighbors save for the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from a pole in the yard. […] The woman’s nearly seven years in captivity ended in February 27, 2009, when she had a heart attack from the electric-shock torture and was hospitalized.
Seven years a hostage. How did Missouri police miss this gruesome slavery case, in the heart of a region created to expand and perpetuate slavery?
Golubski, whose investigation led McIntyre to prison, faces allegations in a lawsuit that he used his police badge to exploit vulnerable Black women for sexual favors and coerced some of them into fabricating testimony to clear cases he investigated. In at least one instance, he is accused of repeatedly raping a woman whose children he’d promised to help get out of legal trouble.
You have to keep in mind that “coerced” testimony is a huge deal, because Kansas City police used it to systemically oppress Black people.
In 1994, Kansas City, Kansas, Police arrested Lamonte McIntyre for a double homicide he didn’t commit — sending him to prison for more than two decades before he was finally exonerated. […] As it turns out, the only evidence police had to charge McIntyre was his first name, and the coerced testimony of two eyewitnesses.
In other words if the white supremacist police force even catches wind of your name, you are at risk of being sent to prison for decades for crimes you didn’t commit.
Trust is non-existent in this environment, given that being identified by Kansas City police at all immediately brings life-threatening risks.
We need to get into the gruesome details for a minute to see just how widespread and common the abuse of Black women is; an unbroken connection to Missouri’s deep history of slavery practices.
During two days of sworn depositions, S.K. detailed rapes, beatings and being forced to crawl on her hands and knees while wearing a dog collar. Her allegations led to federal charges for retired KCKPD detective Roger Golubski. […] S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school. S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school.
A white police officer was directly engaged in slavery of black girls, depicted as “rapes, beatings and…dog collar”.
The first point here is that a dog collar and beatings are relevant and important to other stories surfacing in Missouri news, coupled with police failure to investigate.
The second point is “across state lines” because that again brings us to… Missouri. While S.K. escaped and survived, testimony indicates other victims may have been killed and their remains hidden in the river on the Missouri side.
At one point, S.K. said she told her aunt. At first, she was supportive. The aunt forced S.K. to go to the police department. S.K. said she was scared and refused to get out of the car. The aunt went inside without her. S.K. thought “that day in the car was going to be the last day that I would ever feel any pain from this man.” But again, S.K. was let down. When her aunt returned from inside the police department, she was angry. “She said that I lied,” S.K. testified. “That’s a good man of integrity. He wouldn’t jeopardize his job…”
Here’s a sobering thought. His job also wouldn’t be jeopardized if he had compromised the police force into collaboration. Police detective Golubski doesn’t seem to be an individual acting alone.
Testimony from victims describes many police officers involved with him, and how he described himself as region-wide “boss”.
Nearly two weeks after a racist petition to bring back slavery circulated at her daughter’s school, Julie Stutterheim is still angry. She says it was yet another example of a racist incident at Park Hill South High School in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri.
Was the petition started by the Kansas City police department? Seems likely.
Speaking of starting trouble, do you know who won the war to end slavery? White people with white skin did.
General Grant was white obviously. So was Sherman. Celebrate them, right?
White racists falsely grouse they are worried that if they celebrate anti-slavery acts of white people (e.g. Grant destroying the KKK) then somehow that will make them hate white skin.
Holscher has been getting emails over the past couple of months from White parents complaining that they are worried about their kids being taught to hate their White skin.
Being taught to hate racists means you can still love white people, because those white people were and still are anti-racist.
It’s really that simple.
This is important context for the next chapter now unfolding in Kansas City. The police department refused again in 2022 to investigate reports of slavery.
Missouri [hostage detained with a dog collar] who escaped house of horrors told rescuers that sicko killed two of her friends
Remember the dog collar?
Killing two of her friends suggests this slaver also is a serial murderer, which was exactly the kind of warnings that Kansas City police tried to dismiss.
TONY CALDWELL: I am a little upset right now. The reason I’m upset is because we got four young ladies that have been murdered within the last week here off of 85th and Prospect. We got a serial killer again. And ain’t nobody saying nothing. CHANG: The Kansas City, Mo., Police Department called these reports, quote, “unfounded.” But a horrific discovery is now raising new questions.
Why did the police refuse to properly investigate reports of a serial killer? They set out to silence and push back the community, more specifically to undermine protection of Black women who were being victimized as a systemic level.
The Kansas City Police Department made a statement addressing the community testimonies and called them “completely unfounded rumors,” dismissing the concerns. Local news outlets followed suit, in essence, silencing any ongoing community voices which maintained concern of the missing Black women.
One would think given the high profile Golubski case that “unfounded” would be exactly the wrong word for police to hang their hat on.
The Kansas City Defender highlights how local newspapers breathlessly parroted the word “unfounded” into public relations, allowing police to ruthlessly chill concerns about a serial killer.
“Local and national news outlets unquestioningly parrot KCPD statement claiming reports of missing Black women and possible serial killer are ‘completely unfounded rumors.'” Source: Kansas City Defender
As the story unfolds now, Kansas City police look a lot like Golubski again — actively denying evidence about modern day slavery, that was in fact accurate and of an emergency nature.
“That was the description of the guy we were talking about and that was the location we said they were being taken from. That’s exactly what we were telling people. I’m just sorry that it took so long, but I’m grateful that she found a way out. I’m sorry people didn’t act on it sooner, and it’s absolutely tragic that the other young ladies didn’t make it. It’s horrible.
Golubski should be the back story to every single article on this new case. His outrageous abuse of Black women appears to be something of a norm in Missouri political circles, not an exception — state-sanctioned slave catchers obviously drag their heels on reports of Black women being abused by white men (including by the slave catchers themselves).
Is anyone really looking into whether the police were actually involved in this case and covering it up like Golubski would have done, not just turning a blind eye with “unfounded” comments?
The Kansas City Defender asked the police how “completely unfounded” was an exact phrasing chosen by police instead of something more like “no evidence” (opening the possibility of more evidence).
We base our investigations on police incident reports of criminal activity. We do still maintain that there is no indication that what you guys reported was accurate and there was no indication that there was anything that supported that claim. We share what information we can publicly, many times from the scene, of incidents of violent crimes when there is a report or an investigation underway, there had and has not been anything that corresponded to your reports on social media and the web which is why we refuted that report and said that the claims were unfounded.
This response reads to me like it was written by the disgraced detective Golubski himself, it’s so tone-deaf, patronizing and ruthless.
Kansas City police are basically insinuating that if Golubski doesn’t file a report on himself enslaving a Black girl then it can’t be investigated as a crime.
After all, anyone saying they have an absence of evidence does not mean they have some kind of evidence of absence. “Unfounded” was the wrong word given that reports were based in something… which turned out to be TRUE.
Kansas City police seem deeply implicated in the systemic disappearance, torture and death of Black women.
When you think about an epidemic of missing Black women in America it makes it all the more depressing. For police to sit back and do nothing, claiming an absence of evidence in the face of a national crisis, sounds like police sealing fate, pounding the nails into innocent victim coffins.
Data from the National Crime Information Center found that 19,545 Black women ages 18 and over went missing in 2020. Nearly 71,000 Black girls ages 17 and under went missing last year. “The numbers are spiking,” Natalie Wilson, a cofounder and the chief operating office of Black and Missing Foundation Inc. (BAMFI)… As with hate crimes and harassment, vulnerable communities may not come forward to report missing cases out of misunderstanding and fear. A common misconception is that people need to wait a specific amount of time before reporting a missing person. But this is not the case.
In conclusion, there seems to be a systemic problem in Missouri when you look at the quantitative and quantitative reporting of racist crimes against women there.
And while that problem is clearly related to deserved mistrust and confusion in police reporting procedures, a far more troubling question that nobody seems to be reporting in this new story about an escaped slave is whether modern-day white supremacist threats to national security (even serial killers) are in fact collaborating with police…
…something that Alex Mingus just warned us about in his police award ceremony.
