Waltzing Past The Real Problem... Apple, Oligarchy, Israeli Compromise, and Leaks Against America
Was it a sting? Should it have been one? Could it still be one?
I don’t think it was a coincidence that the case against Apple’s monopoly coincided with the reshuffling of the National Security Advisor role.
Over the years Apple has dodged claims that it is a monopoly when it so very obviously is. Apple, which says its products are “designed in California and manufactured in China,” might be the paradigmatic example of the China-California relationship.
To the extent that Apple is hemmed in its only because many of its board members are from Microsoft, which, given its cloud contracts, make it effectively an arm of the American government. The world’s first and second largest economies interact through California, which in some sense is shared between the two empires.
To get a sense of the size of the Apple monopoly it’s worth considering how seemingly inescapable Apple products actually are. It’s that monopoly and cult-like adoration of its fans allowed its leadership to misbehave. On October 5, 2011 I became one of those converted when I purchased my first Apple product — and then an hour later Steve Jobs died.
I never really bought the hagiography about Jobs, who struck me as a kind of cruel, psychopath who effectively ripped off other cultures as he built Apple.
Jobs himself was predatory toward employees, going so far as to bed them, intervene in their personal, romantic lives, and even ruin their financial prospects. You simply have to read Jobs’s anti-competitive email to Adobe CEO in 2005. All parties involved (Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe) got fined $415M, an absolute pittance given their market worth.
My dear aunt Linnea — a calligrapher who designed many of Adobe fonts — was among those affected. Today she lives in a trailer park, subsidized by the larger family, having lost her husband last year. This is the price of monopoly.
So no man, I’m not going along with the Steve Jobs nonsense. Jobs wasn’t a good guy and his fortune, which subsidizes all manner of weird stuff, including ought to be seized.
No more weird “publications” which are effectively fronts for foreign governments, OK?
Just pay your workers more.
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So yes, I was overjoyed when a federal judge ruled against Apple for effectively tolling the internet. One federal judge even went so far as to recommend an apple executive face jail time.
But this is not the only deleterious effect that Laurene Powell Jobs has had on our society. She was dubbed the best friend of Kamala Harris and she lavished millions on Harris’s campaign. In fact Laurene Powell Jobs’s money was even weighed in the decision to pick Harris for Biden’s running name.
Powell Jobs didn’t earn her money. To say she did is to accept a certain view of women who marry wealthy men that’s a bit crass, isn’t it?
But over the years she’s seen fit to spray it all over the media ecosystem, warping our national priorities in the way that only billionaires can.
There’s a kind of taboo here about writing about billionaires lest they knight you in their strange court. I myself fell prey to this kind of sloppy thinking and behavior but this is America and we have no kings here.
To protect American interests we have to turn all billionaires into foundations—and quickly lest our national security be imperiled.
Might it be the case that so much of Laurene Powell Jobs’ “philanthropy” is really just an excuse to pay off the foreign assets which helped maintain her family monopoly?
So without further ado: It's Time For Laurene Powell Jobs To Dump The Atlantic
One of the things that you’re not really allowed to talk about is how many of the foreign policy flacks, journalists, etc. ultimately work for foreign governments.
There are several ways of understanding the recent disclosure of an impending attack on the Houthis by American forces.
The larger question is why exactly is Jeffrey Goldberg, an Israeli prison guard editing The Atlantic anyway. What happened to that venerable WASP publication? Was it like so much of WASP America — surrendered without much of a fight at all? Did its WASPish editors retreat to the country club with their second wives, stale bread and gin and tonics?
Following the thinking a bit more.
Could it have been the case that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth knowingly brought in an Israeli “journalist”?
Or, more precisely, could it have been the case that Waltz and Hegseth wanted the Israelis to have eyes on the Houthi attack?
That they deliberately added Jeffrey Goldberg to watch who he would tell and talk to as a way of studying the inner workings of the Atlantic?
Reading the Signal messages now none of them gave the impression that that’s how people actually talk. It seemed positively scripted. In fact it seems a bit like a sting.
The Atlantic is a deeply compromised publication. I myself have messed about with it on at least two occasions — with Barton Gellman on Peter Thiel and with Elaine Godfrey’s piece on Matt Gaetz. Both pieces had glaring factual errors which just so happened to advance the Likud line.
There’s a lot of strange stuff around Gellman in particular. In September 23, 2020, Gellman published “The Election that Could Break America” in The Atlantic. In that piece, Gellman allegedly predicted Donald Trump's plan to thwart certification of the election. Predicted? Or did he have forewarning? Gellman has since left The Atlantic.
Consider for a moment the Houthis.
We know that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a secret alliance with Hamas. Might he also have had secret alliances with the Houthis?
For a long time Netanyahu and the Mullahs pretended to go to war. Iran would be sanctioned so China could get cheaper, black market oil from Iran.
As China’s economy has faltered China can afford to be more pro-Palestinian, which explains much of the pro-Palestinian shift on Tik Tok.
Israel has an interest in oil prices being higher but those prices aren’t going higher anytime soon. A higher price of oil isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary it could well lead to a faster decarbonization.
But are we really to ignore that yet another Israeli-connected source Mark Halperin who was himself the originator of the Michael Waltz departure and who was so deeply misbehaving with MeToo?
A friend of mine reading a copy of this piece before it went to press makes this argument:
Adding Goldberg is more likely A.) show of force; and B.) demoralization / humiliation operation on part of the Likud / Adelson / Lansky 2.0 organized crime complex. It opened up leverage to reshuffle cabinet as well as create instability. The fact that it was Waltz who was forced to add him and then also suffer the humiliation and demotion for it is a familiar modus operandi of these people.
There’s a kind of casual career killing cruelty that these foreign forces demand and display.
Waltz was no great loss but the country had better get a handle on the leaks emanating from within its organizations.
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