Hugh Grant's Chivalrous Conduct and President-Elect Trump (and the NSA's) Brexit Tech Opportunity to Crush the Cults
Hugh Grant's Chivalrous Conduct and President-Elect Trump (and the NSA's) Brexit Tech Opportunity to Crush the Cults
Why Keir Starmer might just want to shape the next generation of American technology and crush the criminal Mormon cult
I’ll be in London (and possibly Paris and the Middle East) from November 13-26 before I return to Houston for Thanksgiving and then Philadelphia and Northern Virginia and Los Angeles in December. Should I get the money I need I expect to move to California right away.
I retained an attorney — Bernie Kleinman — to represent me in my lawsuit with Hal Lambert over the satellite company I introduced him to and which he proceeded to cheat me over.
Kleinman and I are discussing if we ought to expand the suit or what. Given that the suit is being financed by John Burbank it’s worth considering if we ought to countersue — John has a history of cheating people and being a front of foreign governments — or just let sleeping dogs lie.
To be honest with you I’m torn about it. I know what the right thing to do is and I know what the economical thing to do is. Decisions, decisions. Nobody ever tells you that choosing the right has a cost. As I get older I often think it’s my responsibility to fix these things but I can’t kick every junk yard dog. Still, if not me, who?
I know now that John Quinn has signed off on the scam suit given an email I sent him the other day. In addition to being graduates of Claremont McKenna College Quinn and I are co-religionists — he was raised Mormon and I’m from a Mormon dissident family — though from what I understand he’s a bit long in the tooth now that he’s a septuagenarian and doesn’t call all the shots at his firm.
When you have a Mormon firm suing me, a secret Mormon stealing from me, a current Mormon threatening me, an ex-Mormon ripping me off and trying to psyop me it makes me wonder if maybe the whole thing is just a criminal enterprise masquerading as a religion. It certainly vibes that way as the kids say.
In my darker moments I think about David Brin’s analysis of Robert Heinlein’s concern that an alliance of cults and TV evangelists might be sufficient to overpower the American republic. “The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed,” Heinlein wrote.
Heinlein was, like my grandfather, from a Missouri family. The two of them both attended the Naval Academy with Heinlein being class of ‘29 and my grandfather Dwight Lyman Johnson being class of ‘37. There’s always the question about how much Heinlein and my grandfather were secret Mormons and to what extent any of that really matters.
My grandfather Dwight Lyman Johnson was named for his ancestor and Mormon dissident Lyman Johnson.
Despite being one of the vaunted member of the Twelve Apostles Lyman Johnson helped the Union capture Mormon criminals after Joseph Smith decided to print fake money, engaged in slavery, practiced polygamy and even build a private army. Suffice it to say, none of that behavior is countenanced by the U.S. Constitution and I’m very proud that my ancestor chose the right side — the Union — over the cult.
I think a lot about the bravery that this must have took. Even Mormon historians noted it:
[Johnson’s] membership in the Church ended when he was excommunicated in April 1838 for opposing the institutional Church and was driven from Far West with other dissenters. He demonstrated his apparent contempt for the Mormons when he accompanied the victorious Gentile forces into Far West following the surrender on November 1, 1838. After attempting to recover personal possessions lost during his earlier rapid departure from Far West, he and his family briefly settled at Richmond, Ray County, Missouri, and then relocated near Davenport, Iowa. By 1840 the family settled permanently at Keokuk in Iowa Territory, where Lyman was a successful attorney, businessman, and community leader. In spite of his adversarial relation with the Mormons in Missouri, he visited Joseph Smith, former missionary companions, and family members at Nauvoo and became a Mason in the Nauvoo Lodge. Three months after the murder of Colonel George Davenport at Rock Island, Illinois, on July 4, 1845, Lyman was deputized to help apprehending a Mormon identified as an accessory in Davenport’s murder and was severely beaten by Mormons during the attempted arrest at Nauvoo. Less than a year later, he was reportedly among the anti-Mormon forces who attacked the remaining Mormons and the new citizens of Nauvoo. There is no indication that he had additional contact with the Mormons or joined any church following the Battle of Nauvoo. He spent the rest of his life pursuing business opportunities and engaging in Masonic activities with the same fervor he exhibited when he was a Latter Day Saint missionary.
Careful students will note that Keokuk, Iowa is also where Howard Hughes Sr. once lived having gone there from — you guessed it — Missouri.
Does this make Howard Hughes a Mormon too? It’s a very interesting question which we shall explore in a subsequent post. For now I can’t recommend enough the book Citizen Hughes. Thank you to my Polish aristocratic Buddhist friend for recommending it.
All of this would have been known to Heinlein. In his treatment of cults the old sci fi master makes explicit mention of “Smith’s Nauvoo.” It wasn’t an accident.
Like Joseph Smith who was fraudulently claimed many things, so, too, Mormon-backed Quinn Emanuel?
The law firm is being credibly accused of abetting fraud elsewhere.
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has won a London court order requiring Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to disclose the identity of a consulting firm that supplied it with an allegedly forged report intended for use in arbitration-related proceedings.
This is shady stuff and there’s a lot of shady behavior from Quinn Emanuel partner Alex Spiro, who I know, and who represents Elon Musk, whose right hand man is in with the criminal Mormons.
How will all of this go? One assessment has Musk winning but I’m not so sure. All Donald Trump has to do is do nothing and the criminal cases against Musk will proceed. How loyal do you think Donald Trump will be toward Elon?
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Anyway, should you happen to be in London or know anyone interesting who is there, do let me know if we ought to meet up.
I’ll be staying in the Notting Hill neighborhood, naturally. Notting Hill remains one of my favorite films. It’s about fame and the American-British relationship and how you’re never really in control of things, least of all your romantic relationships.
The real purpose of my visit is commercial and somewhat clandestine so I won’t be discussing too much of it until its a fait accompli. Fingers crossed. Salt thrown over the left shoulder. All that jazz.
Some years ago I hosted a series of dinner parties in Washington D.C. where one of the questions was what’s the greatest threat that America faces. You got the usual answers — Iran, Russia, China, North Korean nukes, etc — and a few exotic ones — bioweapons targeting food supplies and driving up food prices.
A British friend of friend suggested that the greatest threat to America was America’s love affair with cults.
You can get a sense that the British deep state is pushing back against these cults which nevertheless have their tie ins to the Tory cause. You could maybe think of American history as a long series of British attempts to regain what they lost by relying on the truly crazy among us. The British Invasion indeed!
You’re not supposed to think too much about the British connections to Joseph Smith and how the Tories relied on their close ties to the Mormon world to exert influence over American life, especially when it came to settling and managing the West.
This fondness for cults seems to be changing, though, and a Labour government has a lot less patience for the cults running America especially
Consider Heretic, a new A24 film starring Hugh Grant as old recluse who ensnares two Mormon missionaries in an elaborate game of cat and mouse.
I haven’t seen the film as yet — I don’t really watch movies lest I get on planes — and it’s a bit too scary for my tastes but still it’s revealing something about
The very aristocratic Grant is the face of Labour because of course he is. They don’t just let you play the prime minister in British film unless you have something else going on.
In 2019 Grant said he wanted “to do [his] bit to prevent a national catastrophe.”
But Grant had his revenge this past election. Grant called upon the British electorate to “destroy Sunak” and sure enough they did.
Grant’s even talked about running for office before thinking better of it after chatting with some of his family.
Here’s how CNN recounted it:
The actor recalled how he had been involved in a tactical voting campaign during the 2019 UK election in a bid to stop the Conservative Party being re-elected, saying he suffered “terrifying” abuse.
“What was interesting was the abuse that came in from the right. I never know if they’re real or if they’re bots. But they’re good. They’re brilliant at what they do. And it was absolutely terrifying,” said Grant.
The abuse “was really extreme and shocking and threatening to one’s family,” he added.
“So, I do see that you have to be either very brave or insane to go into politics in the digital age.”
I wish Grant would reconsider. His ancestors knew the score as a cursory glance at his Wikipedia makes clear. Grant’s grandfather, Colonel James Murray Grant, DSO, was decorated for bravery and leadership at Saint-Valery-en-Caux during World War II. Genealogist Anthony Adolph has described Grant's family history as "a colourful Anglo-Scottish tapestry of warriors, empire-builders, and aristocracy."
Doesn’t Grant know what that other famous Englishman said? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Perhaps I have misjudged him. To his credit Grant took on the Israeli-enabled defamation squads that have targeted so many of us. Grant accepted a settlement from Murdoch et al after he’d been subject to harassment:
“Murdoch’s settlement money has a stink and I refuse to let this be hush money,” Grant continued. “I have spent the best part of 12 years fighting for a free press that does not distort the truth, abuse ordinary members of the public or hold elected MPs [Members of Parliament] to ransom in pursuit of newspaper barons’ personal profit and political power.”
Well, alright then. Once more into the breach, my friend? Have your people call mine. We’ve work to do.
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Clever observers have noted the degree to which the National Security Agency has shaped technology. We don’t really talk about this stuff in American life but it’s very obvious if you look closely enough.
The relationship between the NSA and technology development is not often discussed, especially when it comes to Google though there are signs of it all over the place should you take a look.
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.
If the NSA helped to create Google does it still help create technology today? Oh you cheeky fool. Of course it does. I’d argue that it very much does and that the presence of the NSA in both building and taking over technology systems — Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter — is actually evidence of a much more dirigiste or state-directed economy than many of us want to admit.
You sometimes know things by their absence and I’d contend that the lack of the NSA involvement is oftentimes an indication of other country involvement and that indeed seems to be the case with Microsoft and its ties both to the IDF and to the Russians. We’re not yet ready to have the conversation about Microsoft yet — ProPublica is starting — but we’re going to need to if our system is to survive.
Recent events have made me all but certain that the NSA will take over genetic testing — there’s been a massive round of layoffs at 23 & Me — and facial recognition — two areas that I have studied and worked in quite closely.
I suspect that there’s a race forming between France, the United Kingdom, and Israel over who will help America build its next generation of technology now that the traditional challenges and alliances are shifting.
You could imagine a world where each of these countries specializes and works closely to help America get cleaned up of mob influence and to expand their technological offerings around the world.
Today I had lunch at Cecconi’s in West Hollywood with a former advisor to Ehud Barak. Unprompted he told me the future of Israel is that it becomes a “vassal state” of America. He bemoaned the emigration of Israelis from Israel and suggested that it portended dark things for the State of Israel. I agreed and said that to the extent that we bring over Israeli technology companies into the American system they have to be extremely vetted. The days in which we uniformly trusted Israeli technology are long gone.
(To highlight the absurdity of West Hollywood we were seated not far Herschel Walker’s son Christian Walker. Walker was very bit as magnificently flamboyant in person as he was on Tik Tok. To his credit the son stopped us from having the father as a U.S. Senator. Herschel Walker is “observably stupid” to borrow a phrase from Dave Chappelle.)
The integration with Israeli and American technology is coming into view. I suspect that ultimately such a relationship will force other countries chief among the Gulf States to help American develop technology, maybe with the quiet backing of the Russian or Iranian deep state players. Good. It’s long overdue.
Were I playing the game as our Arab allies I’d beat my chest and thunder on about oil policy this, oil policy that, and quietly do all I could to invest in the latest generation electric and solar mobility platforms. You have to have a hedge!
I’d also be doing everything I could to pick off the weaker oil producing countries — if only to reduce overall oil production in the world. Indeed we might have reached a moment in which Venezuelan oil is too uneconomical to develop.
Countries that embrace a post-carbon economy have much to gain — but only if they are first movers. France, which is arguably the most post-carbon economy in the world, is joining in on the revolution that American companies have started. Solar-powered plane Skydweller has built a close relationship with Emmanuel Macron. Can’t you see solar powered drones flying high about France’s overseas territories? I can.
Britain is doing its utmost to capture a lot of problematic American companies, notably Clearview.AI. Good on her. The United Kingdom very much does need to know who is coming and going. What is the United Kingdom if not a constant exercise in figuring out who is related to whom?
If you imagine a tariff world you also imagine a smuggler world. Smugglers need to always be detected lest a black market form.
I’ve often thought tariffs were used not so much as revenue generating measure but as a means by which countries jointly agree to do business in a third party country. If you have tariffs against China China will go through Mexico or Canada to access the U.S. market. China, America and Russia all have interests in developing Indonesia. We’ve discussed this already.
The obvious thing to do is use facial recognition on the undocumented.
Are we ready to have that conversation? Or is it going to more scaremongering by Stephen Miller whose family are slum lords out in West Covina?
You could have a guest worker program that works quite well with facial recognition but that means giving up a lot of nice nonsense about nation of immigrants and the human smuggling and all of that. Perhaps Democrats might even support such an effort given how much Latin Americans broke for Donald Trump! Stranger things have happened.
Of course to grow these companies to their full potential and to take market share these firms will need resources beyond what a lot of our allied countries can provide. Only corporate America and government have the capital reserves capable of growing outthink tech.
You can think of London-born Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan as the Pakistani intelligence service blocking an American and Chinese technology fusion. America is somewhat keen on that happening so they haven’t interrupted her.
Will that blocking continue under a Trump presidency? Or will we keep having Lina Khan do the yeoman’s work of making sure Corporate America isn’t just a bunch of Chinese and mob criminals? That’s something to watch for.