A Few Quick Eric Schmidt Questions Now That He Wants To Save America Or Something

Associated Press, April 13, 2006

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“I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate,” — Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, Associated Press, April 13, 2006.

One of the things which seems to be happening is the U.S. intelligence community leaning on our oligarchs to provide drones for the Ukraine War effort.

Peter Thiel backed the very Chinese German startup, Quantum. So reportedly is the very Chinese Sequoia. (Just read the hilarious write up of Russian frontman—and new Trump donor! —Shaun Maguire.)

But all these efforts pale in comparison to Eric Schmidt, whose efforts were chronicled in the Australian Financial Review, the paper of record for the Australian deep state.

The mission of remaking Ukraine’s drone fleet has captivated former Google CEO Schmidt.

“Ukraine,” he said in October, between trips to the country, “has become the laboratory in the world on drones.” He described the sudden appearance of several hundred drone start-ups in Ukraine of “every conceivable kind”.

But by the autumn of 2023 he began to worry that Ukraine’s innovative edge alone would not be enough. Russia’s population was too big and too willing to sacrifice, oil prices remained high, China was still supplying the Russians with key technologies and parts – while they also sold to the Ukrainians.

And while Ukrainian pop-up factories churned out increasingly cheap drones, he feared they would quickly be outmatched.

So Schmidt began funding a different vision, one that is now, after the Ukraine experience, gaining adherents in the Pentagon: far more inexpensive, autonomous drones, which would launch in swarms and talk to each other even if they lost their connection to human operators on the ground. The idea is a generation of new weapons that would learn to evade Russian air defences and reconfigure themselves if some drones in the swarm were shot down.

It is far from clear that the United States, accustomed to building exquisite, $US10 million drones, can make the shift to disposable models. Or that it is ready to bring on the targeting questions that come with fleets driven by AI.

“There’s an awful lot of moral issues here,” Schmidt acknowledges, noting that these systems would create another round of the long-running debates about targeting based on artificial intelligence, even as the Pentagon insists that it will maintain “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force”.

Chief among these “moral issues” is whether or not the “Made in America” technology is, in fact, made in America. Yes, there are lots of conflicts of interest here on the part of Eric Schmidt.

Arthur Bloom rightly asks how Chinese America’s drones are.

Anduril's Chinese Drone Parts

Is it really a good idea to be reliant on Chinese parts in American drones?

No one in “Defense Tech” seems to be bothered—least of all Schmidt whose conflict of interest knows few bounds. “Ethics and Eric Schmidt are rare bedfellows,” writes Binoy Kampmark of Counterpunch. “The former Google/Alphabet CEO/Chairman exudes a sense of predatory self-interest, always making the point that what he wants aligns with what is supposedly good for the United States.”

This “defense tech” boom started in earnest when the New York Times detailed Eric Schmidt’s efforts to ingratiate himself into the U.S. military-industrial complex. “You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Schmidt purportedly told Raymond Thomas, a four-star general and head of U.S. Special Forces Command, in July 2016. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.”

Isn’t that nice of him?

Frankly, I think there’s something far darker going on here.

I think that Schmidt works for the Chinese, not for America.

Interestingly Eric Schmidt’s family were Tories who moved to Canada after the American Revolution. (He is of Hessian and Tory stock). Fittingly Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to convey British honours on Schmidt.

Schmidt’s grandfather, Emerson, was director of research for the American Chamber of Commerce and acted effectively as a paid shill for the business interests. He testified against increasing welfare benefits before the U.S. Senate in 1945. He studied the fabled “Albert Lea Plan” which transitioned the American economy from a wartime to a civilian one.

Schmidt’s father, Wilson Schmidt, worked in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. He joined Scholars for Reagan in 1980.

He was appointed by Reagan to be executive director for the World Bank before dying in a suspicious fire. Before he died Schmidt described himself as a “free-market conservative economist.” A professor at Virginia Tech, Schmidt worked as a consultant for USAID and had traveled to Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

How suspicious was the fire? Very.

Here’s how the Roanoke Times described it on July 23, 1981.

Washington fire officials found Schmidt unconscious Sunday night in the bathroom of his room in the Cosmos Club, a private Washington men’s club where he was staying.

Jim Lucas, the club’s general manager, said a chair in Schmidt’s room apparently caught fire when Schdmit was smoking while sitting in it. Schmidt evidently got up from the chair and ran into the bathroom, where he passed out.

Mind you that Schmidt was a hard economist and that his role at the World Bank enabled him to dole out untold billions. He was put forward in June and dead in July 1981.

In the Schmidts, we have essentially a right-wing family masquerading as a patriotic one.

The fatherless 26-year-old Eric Schmidt went to go work for Sun Microsystems in 1983 — itself a deeply compromised company started, in part, by Vinod Khosla, who we have covered elsewhere, and German national Andy Bechtolsheim, who recently paid a massive fine from the SEC.

You might think that Schmidt moving to California occasioned the compromise, especially when you consider his time spent at Novell, a very Mormon answer to Microsoft. We’ve treated this Novell-Mormon question already.

A Few Disturbing Thoughts About How Every Major Technology Company is Really Financed...

Schmidt was recruited to Google by the very Chicago firm, Heidrick and Struggles, which had a considerable pay day when Google went public.

You might wonder if, perhaps, the CEOship of Google was a payoff for taking out Novell, which soon thereafter filed for bankruptcy.

All of which brings us back to Eric Schmidt’s efforts in the drone war.

Might it be that Schmidt, working for his Chinese benefactors, is merely fronting as a pro-American player?

A friend of mine went to St. Petersburg in March 2003 on a school trip.

On the last leg of the trip the American students were taken out to an academic seminary. The topic was very math but related to a new way of web search that was way faster than normal.

You’re not supposed to think too hard about Sergey Brin, born in the former Soviet Union, or how Jeffrey Epstein, tied in with Russian-Jewish cash, attended the very same Interlochen summer camp that Larry Page credited with his intellectual upbringing.

That’s right. Page’s parents sent him to music summer camp—Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, and Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. “In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me,” Page once said. “In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing… If you think about it from a music point of view, if you're a percussionist, you hit something, it's got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second.”

Fast enough to break society, perhaps.

No problem! Eric Schmidt can fix that too… allegedly.

Don’t think too hard about any of that, okay? Don’t think about how Larry Page was subpoenaed in the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and that shortly after news of Epstein’s relationship with Google broke, Google became a lot more friendly to the U.S. intelligence community — and a lot less effective as a company.

Aside from its DeepVariant software and half-baked ‘cloud’ offerings, Google is sleepwalking into the genomics revolution while following Open AI off the cliff with generative AI.

That’s a subject for another time, of course, but it’s sad to watch a company trip over itself when it still has so much to offer.

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