How You Get Imprisoned Without Being In Prison--And How You Escape
Hotel California startups, Huis Clos, European politics, ambition and the American presidency
“I don't know whether it's the finest public housing in America or the crown jewel of the prison system.” – President Bill Clinton
In reading the Supreme Court opinion about immunity I found myself pondering: are these just the ramblings of our imprisoned judges wandering the passing scene? Who is really in charge, anyway? Does it matter? How much does any of it matter? Why shouldn’t the president be a criminal?
To be fair Justice Thomas and his wife Ginni do seem to be on the take — but only by degree, not in kind. Seemingly everyone in Washington DC is on the take, in one form or another. This is, in fact, what a consultant is — one who takes. We don’t have jail cells for all of them unless you consider DC in the summertime to be a prison. It is!
Some years ago a friend of mine and I were discussing federal prison. As one does, I suppose.
In much the same way that the pharmaceutical industry ended sanatoriums I suspect that mass surveillance will end most crime. To some extent I think this is already happening to violent crime and will soon happen to white collar crime as well. If you do interesting things you can be assured that you’ve caught the attention of at least several foreign intelligence services. I know I have.
And yet we each pick our prison through our choices — “that to be enthroned is to be enslaved” as the poet Kahlil Gibran. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is to get exactly what you want. Aristotle talked about the natural slave and the natural master. Who among us isn’t in some sense captive to our vices? Slave to our impulses?
What then shall we do with our fellow prisoners? I suggest we find them humane prisons.
I suspect what we will do is force them to behave themselves.
Politics once argued Milton Friedman isn’t about getting good men to do good things but about getting bad men to do good things.
Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden seem terribly free to make their own decisions, which, in some sense, makes them ideal candidates for the political machines that brought both men to power. No agency, no defiance. Perhaps this is why politics seem to converge.
Our presidents are not free in any meaningful sense; they are prisoners of fate and political machines, of political narratives. Our adversaries know this, too, which is why they target the family and friends of powerful people or work ceaselessly to blackmail our Presidents.
No man is an island and to some extent we are all indebted — and dare I say imprisoned — by our family and its expectations of us.
This reality is oftentimes why the freest players are their families and advisors. It’s altogether fitting that Hunter Biden, having accepted his sentence, is free to advise his father. The great lie is that our leaders are the most free members of our politics; the great comfort is that this is how it should be. We want them to suffer for wanting to rule over us and it’s hard to argue that Biden’s life is particularly glamorous.
You’re not supposed to ask if, maybe, his first wife and daughter’s death was a hit and what that might really mean.
CNN quoted an anonymous donor:
Another Democratic donor was more blunt about the state of play and the party’s choices.
“I don’t think (Biden) is going anywhere,” the donor told CNN. “This is the old horse we’ve got, and we need to ride him ‘til he’s ready for the glue factory.”
Giddy up, Joe. Or else!
If the way we punish old people is by forcing them to work long after they’re suitable for retirement, the way we punish young people is to tell them that their hopes and dreams might come true.
In early times we had cults. Or the U.S. military. “Causes greater than yourself,” as John McCain once put it after he spent time with Vietnamese prostitutes and did enemy broadcasts. You can hear me discuss that “Tokyo Rose” broadcast with Tru News in 2016.
Tokyo Rose was imprisoned after World War II. Was John McCain imprisoned in the U.S. Senate? If so, who imprisoned him? Was the payout to him? Or to his family and their weird media careers?
In thinking about all this stuff, I’m reminded of the Eagles’ singing “Hotel California” "We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave!" I’ve been thinking about that song a lot as I plot my return to California, a place I lived some of my more formative years.
There are quite a number of analyses of “Hotel California” and I won’t bore you with my own. I’ll say only that music once occupied that great American escape and part of the reason the Baby Boomers never get technology is that they had those kind of intimate social experiences that the other generations found too risky. Not a lot of #MeToo or social media policing the Boomers who laughed about a permanent record if they ever heard of one.
But perhaps the greater risk was going on social media to live our a simulated social life. Indeed, one of the conspiracy theories I have come to believe is that the social media companies collect information on the suicidal and then sell it to foreign governments to trigger their suicides. The evidence seems clear that Better Help, Facebook, and TikTok are all variations of a theme.
Nobody has a band anymore and the less time you went to a party was so long ago you can barely remember it. In current times we have the “start up” where all the energy of youth and none of the solace of experience is pressed into some sort of service for some sort of end. If it feels like a hustle or a cult, it likely is. Maybe this is how the American dream always was.
One of the things you’re not really allowed to know is that a lot of startups are in fact intricate prisons for their foreign-backed, foreign founders who will never get exits and be forced to pretend what they are doing has real value until they go bankrupt.
In the rare cases that what they do has real value they’ll be assigned a minder and be kindly retired. They can even become what they always wanted to be — an influencer. There are no exits here. Not with Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has become a national security agency as it helped cut down on espionage in the guise of startups collecting data right before they clean the books by being acquired by some large tech behemoth. Small wonder that the Wall Street Journal editorial page, itself controlled by the foreign-compromised Rupert Murdoch, can’t stand Lina Khan. Lina makes it harder to launder the foreign money and for that she must suffer.
And yet the propaganda of startup culture is so very strong that few want to hear that that’s not exactly how capitalism works. Paul Graham is a charlatan. So is Sam Altman. So is Elon Musk. Can we talk about this just yet?
The youth, denied normal middle class things like affordable housing or education or joining a union, imagine an escape through technology. They are sold that escape through Tories like investor Paul Graham who pretend to be radical while really favoring the status quo? Have you noticed, incidentally, how the Tories seem to really dislike Joe Biden? And how active Graham seems to be on social media? There are lots of schools of startups and there are even startup schools which offer to teach you how to be an entrepreneur (for a fee, of course). Draper University and the Thiel Fellowship have shown up to helpfully encourage you to follow your dreams—and join their cults.
The canonical view is the PayPal Mafia whose adherents include Elon Musk, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, among others. Those plucky foreign born immigrants have come to rescue us, don’t ya know. You can read all about it in Zero to One and if you don’t care to read about it, you’re a zero who will never escape competition!
A darker view is merely that PayPal was a money laundering service used to move assets around the world after the Cold War. There was a lot of that going on then. There’s a lot of it going on now. What do you think Stripe or Square really is? Search the archives!
PayPal’s acquisition by Meg Whitman at eBay freed a number of these miscreants to cause trouble in our system ever since. Daughter of the Deep State Meg Whitman has learned her lesson, though, and there’ll be fewer exits, thank you very much.
Having failed to become governor of California, Meg Whitman is now Ambassador to Kenya, our newest non-NATO ally. She, too, has been imprisoned, after a fashion. However nice Kenya is, it certainly isn’t California.
The French writer Jean-Paul Sartre imagined a different world in which we accepted that we are all in some sense prisoners of other people. He called it Huis-Clos, or “No Exit” and I think it’s increasingly true of a lot of startups in our economy.
Let’s turn to the Wikipedia for the synopsis of the three condemned souls.
After arguing, they decide to confess to their crimes so they know what to expect from each other. Garcin cheated on and mistreated his wife, and was executed by firing squad for desertion; Inèz is a manipulative sadist who seduced her cousin's wife, Florence, while living with them and convinced her to leave her husband—the cousin was later hit and killed by a tram and Florence asphyxiated herself and Inèz by flooding the room with gas while they slept—and Estelle had an affair and then killed the resulting child, prompting the child's father to commit suicide. Despite their revelations, they continue to get on each other's nerves. Garcin finally begins giving in to the lascivious Estelle's escalating attempts to seduce him, which drives Inèz crazy. Garcin is constantly interrupted by his own guilt, however, and begs Estelle to tell him that he is not a coward for attempting to flee his country during wartime. While she complies, Inèz mockingly tells him that Estelle is just feigning attraction to him so that she can be with a man—any man.
This causes Garcin to abruptly attempt an escape. After he repeatedly tries to open the door, it suddenly and inexplicably opens, but he is unable to bring himself to leave. The others remain as well. He says that he will not be saved until he can convince Inèz that he is not cowardly. She refuses to be persuaded, observing that he is obviously a coward and promising to make him miserable forever. Garcin concludes that, rather than torture devices or physical punishment, "hell is other people." Estelle tries to persevere in her seduction of Garcin, but he says that he cannot make love while Inèz is watching. Estelle, infuriated, picks up a paper knife and repeatedly stabs Inèz. Inèz chides Estelle, saying that they are all already dead, and even furiously stabs herself to prove that point. As Estelle begins to laugh hysterically at the idea of them being dead and trapped together forever, the others join in a prolonged fit of laughter before Garcin finally concludes,
"Eh bien, continuons..." ("Well then, let's get on with it...").
The best approach is to smile about your impending imprisonment.
After all, as Camus once said, “Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.”
Now where have I seen that smile before? Oh yes, here it is.
Macron and Biden know the score. “I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me” to quote an old comic book. Sometimes the best thing you can hope for is cohabitation.
When you understand that Macron wants the Front National exposed and that he could do a deal with Jordan Bardella, the son of an Italian mobster, as his prime minister even in the worst of cases. This is the real politics and Macron lives for it in much the same way that Joe Biden does. This is the real art of the deal not that preening performative debate hosted by two CNN weirdos.
Macron, tied as he is to America, knows that we can live with Bardella in much the same way that we’ve lived with Giorgia Meloni, the daughter of a convicted drug trafficker.
What you see before you is the alliance that won World War II — French technocrats, Italian mobsters, and can do Americans.
The reason Meloni doesn’t like Macron is that she knows the game he is playing. She has yet to break her silence on Le Pen’s apparent electoral successes. The daughter of Sicilian mafia doesn't care for the daughter of the French mob. It’s rude to cramp someone’s style — or expose their hustle.
In Europe there are games within games. Or do you still believe the propaganda about Nigel Farage? Farage, who worked for French banks Crédit Lyonnais and Natixis Metals, which would have benefited tremendously from leaving the European Union? That France?
Did you know that that Farage opposes the rise of the Front National?
Is Farage trying to win — or create a Labour supermajority?
Now ask yourself: Is Donald Trump trying to win?
Does someone who sends his sons to do a massive Trump tower deal with Saudi Arabia look like the sort of man who wants to win?
Or does he just want to keep the Saudi cash?
You know, we can work with that. Just give us Jared.
There’s nothing more American than the conman turned good.
"Eh bien, continuons..."
99.99 % of eligible voting Americans can make their voices heard at the polls. However, only a small percentage of these voters are properly informed by credible information. Just imagine the impact that a fully informed electorate could have on the future of our country and the world. Instead we are ruled and worship a class of people we will never be.