The ridiculous Tesla cybertruck

You may have seen photographs of the Tesla cybertruck. It is a hideous vehicle that looks like something in a futuristic dystopia.

It is the brainchild of Elon Musk and has had to be recalled because of a dangerous problem.

Tesla recalled all Cybertrucks Friday after federal safety regulators contacted the company over malfunctions with the vehicle’s accelerator pedal. New Cybertruck orders have been reportedly cancelled or stalled. The news follows numerous reports of embarrassing Cybertruck failures.
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Cybertruck owners reported that their vehicles were at risk of getting stuck driving at full speed due to a loose accelerator pedal. Video showed the pedal itself falling off and the piece beneath wedging itself into the car’s interior, which would force the vehicle into maximum acceleration. One driver was able to save himself from a crash by holding down the brake pedal.
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The Cybertruck, which has long been a pet project for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, began deliveries in late 2023 after years of delay due to production problems and battery-supply constraints. Since then, numerous failures in the vehicle’s design and function have ranged from embarrassing to outright dangerous.

The trucks – which Musk once claimed would be the “best off-road vehicle” – have been shown getting stuck in sand, snow and dirt, with one towed away by a Ford truck. Some owners have reported their new Cybertrucks have simply stopped running completely. Many have complained the truck’s stainless steel exterior rusts easily, and one owner said the windshield broke quickly in a hail storm. Musk himself claimed the car was bulletproof at its unveiling before cracking its window with a steel ball thrown by hand.

It looks like the cybertruck will not meet the EU’s safety and quality standards and so will not be sold there. Lucky Europeans! We in the US will have to deal with this monstrosity on the roads.

Here is a brutally funny review of the cybertruck, explaining why only Musk fanboys who have bought into his shtick are likely to buy this piece of trash. Astonishingly, apparently two million people have paid deposits to buy one, that will take between eight and thirteen years to be delivered to them.

College presidents, student protests, and major political issues

There has been an outpouring of student protests at university campuses in the US as a result of the unfolding atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Many of those protestors have been condemning the horrific situation in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been bombed, shot, and starved to death. Since it is Israel that has been behind these attacks, there is always a thin line between protesting Israeli government actions and attacking Jews. Antisemitism is reprehensible and should be condemned as much as Islamophobia or indeed any attack on people that is not due to their actions but is based on their identity, whether it be ethnicity or religion or gender or sexuality or nationality. But it has too often been used to try and silence criticisms of Israel.

Some groups, including members of congress, have tried to shut down criticisms of Israeli policies and actions and of Zionism (which is a political stance) by equating those with antisemitism and have strongly pressurized university presidents to crack down on anti-Israeli protests and have refused to take seriously their difficulty in trying to balance the rights of students to protest while at the same time protecting individual students from harm. The presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania tried to make that delicate case but some members of congress were determined to make an example of them and they were forced to resign as a result of this pressure.
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How Trump can make money from his money-losing social media company

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has had his Truth Social company go public by merging with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. Under the deal SSAT owns nearly 79 million shares, about 58% of the total. While the share price peaked at $79.38 on March 22, making his shares worth about $6.3 billion, it has since dropped precipitously, and as of yesterday was trading at $33, making its worth about $2.6 billion.

David Cay Johnson writes that the true value of the stock in Trump’s company is zero since it lost $58 million last year and had revenues of just $4 million with no sign that revenues will rise. Johnson says that because the stock is highly over valued, it is the target of so-called ‘short sellers’, who make money by betting correctly that a stock’s price is going to fall.
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Arizona GOP digs an even deeper hole on abortion

The ruling by the Arizona supreme court that an 1864 law that purportedly bans all abortions even in the case of rape and incest has created shock wave in GOP politics. The only exception is to save the life of the woman but, as has been pointed out, this is not as clear cut as it appears to be. It is not always evident at which point the woman’s life is in danger and doctors fearing prosecution may wait until they think death is imminent, which could well result in death or serious complications.

Even serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and the GOP nominee for governor Kari Lake have said that they oppose the law although embarrassingly for Lake, just two years ago she enthusiastically supported the very same law, even referring to it as section 13-3603, its specific legislative number, showing that she knew exactly what she was supporting.
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John Oliver on executions

The program was especially powerful in making the case why the death penalty should be abolished. The practice is so shameful that the manufacturers of the drugs used in lethal injections have refused to allow them to be used for this purpose so states that implement the death penalty have resorted to extreme secrecy to hide the name of the companies that they have mange to persuade to give them the drugs.

The investigative team at Last Week Tonight have identified a company that is not an authorized drug manufacturer but is the secret supplier to states of one such drug.

What will Monday’s Trump trial bring?

On Monday, April 15th, the criminal trial involving 34 felony charges against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) for the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels is scheduled to begin. Since it is a criminal trial, SSAT is required to be present during it, unlike in the case of the previous civil trials involving the fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James and the two brought by E. Jean Carroll which he chose to sometimes attend, mainly to vent his spleen to the media outside the courthouse.

SSAT has been trying his mightiest to get this next trial, like all his trials, postponed since his entire legal strategy is to avoid any conviction before the election on November 5th in the hope that he wins and can thus shut down all prosecutions. With his federal cases, he can simply order his attorney general to drop them. With the state trials, it is a little more complicated but he could argue that as a sitting president, he has some kind of immunity and that the trials should not go ahead until he leaves office. He is already arguing that, in the federal case over his handling of confidential documents, he has immunity and the US Supreme Court is going to hear that case and will not rule on it until June or July.
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Film review: Scoop (2024)

Back in 2019, Prince Andrew agreed to an interview with the BBC news program Newsnight in an effort to tell his side of the story about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had just killed himself in prison, and the allegations that Andrew had had sex with Virginia Giuffre, one of the many underage girls who were a constant presence in Epstein’s world.

Apparently Andrew was very pleased with how the interview had gone and felt that he had performed brilliantly. But it was widely viewed as a train wreck and a few days later, Andrew had been forced to relinquish his official duties and has not regained them since. It is thought that the interview is what persuaded Giuffre to sue Andrew, a case that was settled out of court in 2022, reportedly for around $16 million.
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Dennett’s somewhat dangerous idea

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has recently published a memoir and in a review Matthew Lau accuses him of pursuing a ‘dead end social Darwinism’. He says that Dennett has defended the idea of ‘adaptationism’, the view “that all features of an organism must be adapted for some good purpose.” This has been rejected by other scholars of evolution like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin who argue that some features did not come into being to serve a specific purpose but were instead accidental byproducts of the evolutionary process. Those two authors gave the image of the spandrels in cathedrals.

In architecture, spandrels are a structural byproduct resulting from the placement a dome on top of four rounded arches. The spandrels fill in the empty space where the arch stops touching the top of the dome, stabilizing the overall structure. In finished cathedrals they are frequently painted and otherwise beautifully ornamented, as in the four famed spandrels of the Cathedral of San Marcos in Venice, Italy, that depict the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indue, and Nile).

For Gould and Lewontin, if we adopt the adaptationist perspective, we might mistakenly assume the San Marcos spandrels were initially formed to be part of the cathedral’s artwork and miss their origin as necessary structural byproducts.

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