Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” presented what seemed an absurdist critique of automation and control systems. While most bombers in the film could be recalled when unauthorized launches occurred, a single damaged bomber’s “CRM 114 discriminator” prevented any override of its automated systems – even in the face of an end-of-world mistake. This selective communication failure, where one critical component could doom humanity while the rest of the system functioned normally, highlighted the kind of dangerous fragility that necessitates tight regulation of automated control systems.

The film’s “discrimination” device, preventing override and sealing the world’s fate, was comical because it was the invention of a character portrayed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist (e.g. a fictional Elon Musk). The idea that a single point of failure in communications could trigger apocalyptic consequences was considered so far-fetched as to be unrealistic in the 1960s. Yet here we are, with Tesla rapidly normalizing paranoid delusional automated override blocks as a valid architectural pattern without any serious security analysis or public scrutiny.

Traditional automakers since the Ford Pinto catastrophe understand design risks intuitively — they build mechanical overrides that can not be software-disabled, showing a fundamental grasp of safety principles that Tesla has glowingly abandoned. In fact, other manufacturers specifically avoid building centralized control capabilities, not because difficulty, but because engineers should always recognize and avoid inherent risks — following the same precautionary principle that guided early nuclear power plant designers to build in physical fail-safes. However, the infamous low-quality high-noise car parts assembly company known as Tesla has apparently willfully recreated the worst architectural vulnerabilities at massive scale that threaten civilian infrastructure.

Most disturbing is how Tesla masks a willful destruction of societal value systems using toddler-level entertainment. The “Light Show” is presented as frivolous and harmless, much like how early computer viruses were dismissed as fun pranks rather than serious security threats that would come to define devastating global harms. But engineers know the show is not just plugging trivial LED audio response code into a car. What it actually demonstrates is a fleet-wide command and control system without sensible circuit breakers. It promotes highly-explosive chemical cluster bombs mindlessly following centrally planned orders without any independent relation to context or consequences. It turns a fleet of 1,000 Tesla into automation warfare concepts reminiscent not just of the Gatling gun or the Chivers machine gun of African colonialism, but the Nazi V-1 rocket program of WWII — a clear case of automated explosives meant to operate in urban environments that couldn’t be recalled once launched.

Finland 1940:

Finland 2024:

Threat? What threat? Musk says it’s just a holiday light show. These are all just Tesla food delivery vehicles clustered for “throwing bread to us in their own way” like the fire-bombing of winter 1939 again.

The timing of propaganda is no accident. Tesla strategically launches these demonstrations during holidays like Christmas, using celebratory moments to normalize dangerous capabilities. It’s reminiscent of the “Peace is our Profession” signs decorating scenes in Dr. Strangelove, using festive imagery to mask dangerous architectural realities.

Tesla’s synchronized light shows, while appearing harmless, demonstrate a concerning architectural pattern: the ability to push synchronized commands to large fleets of connected vehicles with potentially limited or blocked owner override capabilities. What makes this particularly noteworthy is not the feature itself, but what it reveals about the underlying command and control objectives of the controversial political activists leading Tesla. The fact that Tesla owners enthusiastically participate in these demonstrations shows how effectively the security risk has been obscured — it’s a masterclass in introducing dangerous capabilities under the guise of consumer features.

More historical parallels? I’m glad you asked. Let’s examine how the Cuban Missile Crisis highlights the modern risks of automated systems under erratic control.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of humanity’s closest brushes with global nuclear catastrophe, resolution came through human leaders’ ability to identify and contain critical failure points before they cascaded into disaster. Khrushchev had to manage not just thorny U.S. relations but also prevent independent actors like Castro from triggering automated response systems that could have doomed humanity. While Castro controlled a small number of weapons in a limited geography, today’s Tesla CEO commands a vastly larger fleet of connected vehicles across every major city – with demonstrably less stability and even more concerning disregard for fail-safe systems than Cold War actors showed.

As Group Captain Mandrake illustrated so brilliantly to audiences watching Dr. Strangelove, having physical override capabilities doesn’t help if the system can fail-unsafe and ignore them. Are you familiar with how many people were burned alive in Q4 2024 by their Tesla door handles failing to operate? More dead in a couple months than the entire production run of the Ford Pinto, from essentially the same design failure — a case study in how localized technical failures can become systemic catastrophes when basic safety principles are ignored.

Tesla’s ignorant approach to connected vehicle fleets presents a repeat of these long-known and understood risks at an unprecedented scale:

• Centralized Control: A single company led by a political extremist maintains the ability to push synchronized commands to hundreds of thousands of vehicles or more
• Limited Override: Once certain automated sequences begin, individual owner control may have no bearing regardless of what they see or hear
• Network Effects: The interconnected nature of modern vehicles means system-wide vulnerabilities can cascade rapidly
• Scale of Impact: The sheer number of connected vehicles creates potential for widespread disruption

As General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove would say, “We must protect our precious vehicular fluids from contamination.” More seriously…

Here are some obvious recommendations that seem to be lacking from every single article I have ever seen written about the Tesla “light discriminator” flashy demonstrations:

1. Mandate state-level architectural reviews of over-the-air update systems in critical transportation infrastructure. Ensure federal agencies allow state-wide bans of vehicles with design flaws. Look to aviation and nuclear power plant standards, where mandatory human-in-the-loop controls are the norm.
2. Require demonstrable owner override capabilities (disable, reset) for all automated vehicle functions — mechanical, not just software overrides
3. Develop frameworks for assessing systemic risk in connected vehicle networks, drawing on decades of safety-critical systems experience
4. Create standards for fail-safe mechanisms in autonomous vehicle systems that prioritize human control in critical situations

What Kubrick portrayed as satire — how a single failed override in an otherwise functioning system could trigger apocalyptic consequences — has quietly become architectural reality with Tesla’s rising threats to civilian infrastructure. The security community watches light shows while missing their Dr. Strangelove moment: engineers happily building systems where even partial failures can’t be stopped once initiated, proving yet again that norms alone won’t prevent the creation of doomsday architectures. The only difference? In 1964, we recognized this potential for cascading disaster as horrifying. In 2024, we’re watching people ignorant of history filming it to pump their social media clicks.

60 years of intelligence thrown out? It’s as if dumb mistakes that end humanity are meant to please wall street, all of us be damned. Observe Tesla propaganda as celebrating the wrong things in the wrong rooms — again.

Military professionals love a good Clausewitz discussion, especially looking at this past week in Syria. His trinity of people, army, and government has become almost liturgical. It’s the kind of a comfortable framework we apply to everything from counterinsurgency to cyber warfare. But there’s an irony here that Clausewitz himself might appreciate: Our very reliance on his framework demonstrates the human tendency to turn dynamic thinking into static routine.

Perhaps Clausewitz’s best insight, not unlike what has been found in every other profession in the world, was that warfare exists in constant tension between:

• What can be systematized (tactics, drills, logistics)
• What requires judgment (strategy, adaptation, creativity)

But here’s the meta-lesson: The way we invoke Clausewitz has itself become a routine. We’ve turned his warning about the dangers of routine thinking into… a routine way of thinking.

The crystallization of dynamic thought into static procedure appears like a pattern everywhere in human endeavor. Scientific methods become checklist science. Medical diagnosis becomes search engine symptom matching. Strategic planning becomes fill-in-the-blank templates.

The true lesson of Clausewitz thus shouldn’t be reduced to his trinity or his maxims. It comes from recognizing a balance that is often lost, that even our frameworks for handling complexity can become cognitive crutches. His work should be a cradle for military thought, not its grave. The moment we think we’ve fully understood Clausewitz is the moment we’ve missed his point entirely.

I submit that the best way to honor Clausewitz is to recognize when we need to move beyond him, as he argued that each age must write its own book about war. The most dangerous routine might be our routine ways of thinking about how to avoid routine thinking.

The Journal of the United States Artillery once put it like this:

This quote perfectly captures a recursive rule about not following rules slavishly. And the source makes it even more powerful: Grant often was criticized by his contemporaries for being “unscientific” and not following accepted military wisdom, yet he was unquestionably the most successful general of the Civil War, if not all American history.

Even the way we think about thinking needs to avoid becoming dogmatic. The real art is maintaining the tension between structure and adaptability, knowing enough to be competent but remaining flexible enough to be creative.

I’ve heard this as the healthy mental river flow, where we must avoid becoming tangled upon either bank. One is chaotic and forever giving way, the other is rigid and unforgiving. The irony is that this too could become a rigid formula if we’re not careful!

And for what it’s worth, the seditious Confederate General Lee’s rigid adherence to offensive doctrine, a fixation on decisive Napoleonic style measurements, led to several catastrophic decisions.

• Favored aggressive offense to expand slavery, instead of the defensive tactics that were far more strategic to preserve slavery
• Focused on his personal stake in Virginia theater operations despite the war’s center of gravity shift west
• Continued agitating for decisive battle outcomes even after Gettysburg showed this fatally flawed

Grant, by contrast, showed remarkable adaptability and thinking 100 years ahead of his time.

When Grant encountered a problem at Vicksburg, he didn’t just try a different tactical approach, he totally innovated into what was possible. After failed frontal assaults, he executed one of the most audacious campaigns in military history: he marched his army down the western bank of the Mississippi, ran gunboats and transport ships past the Confederate batteries at night (a move considered suicidal), crossed back to the eastern bank well south of Vicksburg, and then lived off the land while cutting loose from his supply lines entirely.

This was mind-bending for the era. Armies were supposed to maintain their supply lines at all costs. Instead, Grant’s troops carrying just five days of rations marched through enemy territory for two weeks, fighting five major battles and confounding both the Confederates and his own superiors. When Lincoln heard of this, he said:

I think Grant has a thought. He isn’t quite sure about it, but he has it.

At Cold Harbor, after suffering heavy casualties in frontal assaults (observing them as mistakes), Grant didn’t retreat to lick his wounds like his predecessors. Instead, he secretly moved his entire army across the James River — a force of 100,000 men with wagons, artillery, and supplies — using a 2,100-foot pontoon bridge. The Confederates didn’t even realize he’d gone until his army was threatening Petersburg.

The Overland Campaign showed Grant’s grasp of both operational art and psychology. Previous generals had retreated after tangling with the “monster” Lee. Grant, instead, kept moving southeast. After each battle, his troops expected to retreat north. Instead, they’d get orders to advance by the left flank. This persistent southward movement had a profound psychological effect on both armies. Union troops began to see they were finally heading toward Richmond, while Confederate troops realized this enemy wasn’t going to quit at first bluster.

Even his staffing choices showed innovation. While other generals relied on West Point graduates, Grant promoted talented officers regardless of background. He elevated leaders like William Smith (originally a civilian vigneron) and James Wilson (who became a cavalry commander at 26) based on demonstrated ability rather than formal education. Perhaps due to his own “self-made” background, he dismissed patronage as irrelevant to performance.

Then there was his approach to intelligence gathering. Rather than relying solely on cavalry scouts and spies, Grant made extensive use of freed slaves’ knowledge of local geography and Confederate movements. This wasn’t just innovative, it echoed his dedication to human value and talent as transformative, recognizing the strategic value of local knowledge that others ignored due to racism.

These weren’t just tactical innovations, they represented a flexible yet practical way of thinking about the world. A fundamentally different path than what came before.

Lee remained fixated on winning decisive battles in a Napoleonic style, while Grant grasped how the Civil War was changing everything, becoming what we’d now call a “total war,” requiring an operational art that combined military, political, and economic elements… not unlike what we’ve seen in Syria lately.

The campaign that best exemplifies Grant’s touch of transformation was his strategic March to the Sea led by Sherman. While Lee was still obsessing about sitting in his tent for his boots to be shined for future battlefield glory, Grant understood that Confederate resistance depended on both military force and civilian will. The March to the Sea was about demonstrating the Confederacy’s aggression as weakness, revealing an inherent inability to protect itself.

Grant had likely not been exposed to Clausewitz, but the Prussian theorist would have recognized in Grant’s strategy the targeting of the enemy’s center of gravity the key to his resistance.

The rise of cyberwarfare, AI, and hybrid warfare demands the kind of adaptable systemic thinking Grant exemplified rather than Lee’s routine and doctrinaire (e.g. racist) approach. So the next time someone waves an ISIS or Confederate flag, just think about it… because it stands as evidence they don’t.

A former elite gymnast who claims he “tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria” now wants to be the definitive judge of “where criminals come from” in America. Let’s talk about what his Peregrine-themed company really means…

Adrenaline. Not calm and reasoned thought. Not justice and transparency. Adrenaline.

His Peregine code has leaked, revealing the same dangerously flawed logic as used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria… to create ISIS.

def surveillance_feedback_loop(population):
while True:
# Step 1: Deploy mass surveillance
# Just like COINTELPRO watching breakfast programs
targets = identify_potential_threats(population)

# Step 2: Create pressure on communities
# See: Every failed counterinsurgency campaign ever
surveilled_groups = apply_monitoring(targets)

# Step 3: Generate radicalization
# Creating tomorrow's threats ensures today's profits
new_threats = fragment_communities(surveilled_groups)

# Step 4: Use new threats to justify expansion
# Capitalism meets Kafka
population = expand_surveillance(population, new_threats)

# Results: Mission Accomplished
yield {"surveillance_expanded": True,
"threats_increased": True,
"public_safety": None,
"quarterly_profits": "Record Breaking"}

To put it plainly, there were four Palantir profit models used abroad to increase dangers, which are being transferred domestically to America by a spin-off called Peregrine.

1. Initial Deployment
   • Claimed: “Identify ISIS recruits”
   • Actually: Targeted entire communities
   • Result: Created collective punishment… PROFIT!
2. Community Impact
   • Claimed: “Prevent radicalization”
   • Actually: Fragmented social structures
   • Result: Increased isolation and alienation… PROFIT!
3. Threat Generation
   • Claimed: “Reduce extremism”
   • Actually: Created conditions for recruitment
   • Result: Generated the terrorists they claimed to be tracking… PROFIT!
4. System Response
   • Claimed: “Adapt to threats”
   • Actually: Expanded targeting
   • Result: Accelerated the cycle… PROFIT!

The playbook is clear:

• In Syria: Label communities as “ISIS suspects”
• In America: Rebrand activists as “extremists”
• The result? Same as Nixon’s era, just with AI-generated PowerPoint slides.

The rising cost of floggings will continue until morale improves.

Peregrine isn’t just replicating an abroad failed system domestically. They’re replicating a system that succeeded at:

• Generating own justification — the infamous self-licking ice-cream cone (SLICC) of military history
• Creating the threats it claimed to prevent
• Expanding control through manufactured crisis

The Syria deployment revealed an unstated goal of expanding surveillance infrastructure through threat generation.

A User’s Guide to Hidden Success in Overt Failure

Hey Peregrine people, let’s talk about this exciting new “integrated law enforcement platform” vacuuming up citizen data across the nation like Woodrow Wilson’s nationalization of telephone lines to disenfranchise his opponents (e.g. non-whites, labor unions) from government.

But first, a quick pop quiz about how integrated law enforcement platforms work in practice:

Q: The FBI had MLK under comprehensive surveillance for years. How’d that work out?

A: They recorded his conversations, tracked his movements, infiltrated his organization… and completely failed to prevent his assassination. But hey, they did manage to send him a letter suggesting he commit suicide, so there’s that “data-driven impact” for you.

Speaking of surveillance and psychological manipulation, do you remember when Russian intelligence surveilled Olympic athletes and sent them targeted messages to destabilize their mental health and knock them out of competition?

In 2016, Russian military intelligence selectively leaked medical records and sent personalized messages to athletes, trying to push them to mental breakdown or even suicide.

Can your system yet convince people to kill themselves? Russia really wants to know.

They’ve already demonstrated how surveillance plus competitive targeting equals psychological warfare. I mean I’m very sure a hyper-aggressive competition-minded gymnast’s “integrated law enforcement platform” would never be used in such a way that we already have seen over and over again…

Greatest Hits of Peregrine Predecessors

Let’s review some other spectacular examples of safety technology succeeding at being used for oppression while failing at… safety:

COINTELPRO (1956-1971): Meticulously documented Black Panthers feeding children breakfast

SHAMROCK (1945-1975): Read millions of telegrams to harass civil rights leaders

Today: Exxon contractors hack climate activists. Because nothing says “public safety” like targeting people trying to prevent planetary disaster.

Technology Changes, Patterns Don’t

The Palmer Raids (hat tip to a comment by “Not Nick Noone“) used then-cutting-edge telephone surveillance and census data to round up political dissidents while actual bombers remained at large. Sound familiar, Peregrine?

Remember when IBM’s punch cards made the Holocaust more “efficient”? But don’t worry, this time the data lives in micro services not punch cards, so it’s totally different.

Austria’s census data enabled perfect targeting of Jewish communities. But hey, at least their data integration was on point.

Syria’s surveillance infrastructure came with great Western tech support. Those monitoring centers had excellent uptime!

Peregrine’s Innovation in White-washing

Now here’s Peregrine, with glossy brochures selling a shiny future of policing like nobody remembers:

• Multi-agency data sharing (like Operation MINARET’s illegal intel sharing)
• Automated targeting (like Japanese internment’s IBM cards)
• Real-time surveillance (like COINTELPRO’s activist tracking)
• Predictive analytics (like McCarthy era blacklisting)

But don’t worry, this time it’s different because… failed disastrously in the Middle-East first? Cloud computing? Machine learning?

A nicer font?

Show me some actual safeguards against abuse. None of their story adds up to a better future.

The Peregrine Product: Foreign Spying Failures Applied at Home

Want to know what this technology is actually really good at, and not by accident?

• The census helped round up Japanese Americans for internment
• Telegraph monitoring helped harass civil rights leaders
• Phone tapping helped suppress labor movements
• License plate readers helped target immigrant communities
• Exxon’s hackers helped disrupt environmental litigation

Watch the Peregrine CEO, a former elite gymnast, start to tell press that he really wants to push beyond rushing criminal convictions through courts and into becoming the definitive judge of all societal ills, defining “where criminals come from“…

I try to have a lot of adrenaline for the competition.

Historians, this is your cue. We’ve studied this many times before, and it never ends in happy ever after or “and then everything was fine.” A former gymnast honed in adrenaline-fueled competition… applies his training and “embedded” militarized experience into mass domestic surveillance and predictive policing. What could possibly go wrong?

Notice the tired and sad pattern here? Every single adrenaline-driven “innovative” surveillance system excelled mainly at controlling targeted populations to “win” in rushed competitions, while failing at its stated security purpose.

The gymnastic co-founder proudly boasts he tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria, which means he hasn’t been held accountable yet for creating the terrorists he claimed to be preventing.

No joke. Not an exaggeration.

The Peregrine co-founder literally could be charged with unsubstantiated accusations abroad. Just think, if he hadn’t been able to get away with Palantir harms like causing a rise in terrorism, and instead held accountable, he wouldn’t be hawking a domestic version of the same system expected to end in yet another societal disaster.

Learn History or the Results Never Change

1950s: “Wire taps will stop communists!”
Result: Blacklisted actors, missed spies

1960s: “Surveillance will prevent violence!”
Result: Harassed civil rights leaders, missed terrorists

2024: “Peregrine will transform data into impact!”
Coming Soon: Targeted activists, missed threats, record profits

The Only Thing We Learn…

The NYPD’s demographic unit spent years mapping Muslim communities after 9/11. Did it prevent any terrorism? No. Did it destroy community trust and create detailed data for targeting minorities? You bet!

Now Peregrine wants to “optimize resource allocation” with the same capabilities that have consistently optimized oppression while failing at safety.

Peregrine’s Future is Written in the Past

Every single time we’ve built these systems, they’ve failed at their stated purpose while succeeding spectacularly at political control. But I’m sure Peregrine’s version is so different because they were born out of Palantir’s total failure and pivoted on terms like domestic “data-driven” and “real-time analytics” to more quickly incarcerate citizens into a Kafkaesque fever dream.

Here we are in 2024, watching a gymnast who helped create the threats he claimed to prevent in Syria perform his next routine: selling that same failed system to control Americans. The military-industrial-congressional-complex judges might give him perfect scores, but history already knows how this performance ends.

But hey, at least the dashboards destroying society are pretty.

…right?

Just ask Syria.

Remember: These systems don’t fail at threat detection.
They succeed at threat creation.
That’s not a bug.
That’s the business model.