What If The Emiratis Worked With The American Deep State To Make the World Better?
We need our gangster friends on tap, not on top, of decision making.
Well, well, well.
Last week I talked about G42’s Chinese intelligence agent Peng Xiao and his problematic relationship with Sam Altman and Open AI.
This week The New York Times more or less reports exactly what I had said last week. (Here’s the relevant title, “Inside U.S. Efforts to Untangle an A.I. Giant’s Ties to China.”)
I’m not saying we are all the news that’s fit to print here but I am saying I am fit for something great. And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence and not the product of robust experience researching these matters as a confidential informant for several intelligence agencies. As you know I’m just a troll. Anyway…
Pay attention, dear readers, and do please steal my work, dear journalist friends. Just be sure to get it right. The world is counting on you and I’m at your service.
Yes, we can keep it on the DL. I remember what it was like to be the poor guy that the rich girl liked. I did, after all, go to prep school. We can keep it quiet. Shhh! As we know, high school never ends and I’m just happy to do the homework for the occasional favor here and there. Everyone and everything in its place forever.
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Now there was a curious detail in the New York Times piece about how G42 had opened an office in Israel. Careful students of Jewish numerology will know that the number 42 is a very significant number indeed. It is, after all, 42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabbalistic tradition.
And there’s this rather interesting detail as well:
G42’s name is drawn from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the science-fiction series by Douglas Adams, in which the number 42 represents the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.” (The G stands for group.)
“Forty-two is really our mission,” Mr. Xiao said in a promotional video for the company last year. “In that amazing book, 42 was the answer to the meaning of life.”
Uh huh. For what it’s worth I always took self-described “radical atheist” Adams’s 42 as a critique of this sort of weird thinking. Here, though, I think Xiao is making it clear that G42 is a Chisraeli project.
In any event if even the New York Times with its attendant problems being a mouthpiece for Likud interests is concerned here the sands are indeed shifting. One gets the sense when one sees obvious Mossad asset Jake Tapper moving steadfastly — and finally — against Bibi Netanyahu. (I remember when you worked for Mossad Jake and you smeared me. Do you want to apologize? Or are we going to need to sue you for acting as an unregistered foreign agent?)
Now back to the United Arab Emirates… “which has 0.1% of the world’s people and produces only 0.5% of its GDP, but contains nearly 10% of the world’s oil reserves.” (according to The Economist). In competent hands that wealth could do real good in the world. In dangerous hands it could cause real misery.
What if I were to tell you that the Abraham Accords was a means by which organized crime (like I don’t know Jared Kushner’s family) could move money more securely between China, America, Israel, the UAE and the other Arab countries? What if free trade isn’t really about “economic growth” but about exploitation? And what if the Biden administration is trying to work within that framework rather than try to build something more impressive and longer lasting?
Part of the reason I’ve resisted a full throated praising of Biden’s administration has been precisely this lack of imagination about resetting the entire Middle East. We don’t have a lot of time and our 81-year-old president — God preserve him — needs to move a bit more quickly. Perhaps there’s wisdom in the plodding policies of old men but it would be nice if there was a bit more derring do by our elders — a bit more willingness to train up and hand over the country before its too late. This’ll necessarily involve resource transfers and not merely mentorship. It’ll also involve understanding that time is of the essence. None of us are getting any younger. Cut the malarkey and put the younger generation to work, Mr. President. We’re ready.
The geopolitical question is who is going to be the Middle Eastern middleman between China and America and I suspect it’s going to be the UAE and not Israel.
In a high interest rate environment we care an awful lot more about real material resources — who got the oil? who got the farmland? who has the factories? — than we do about the fakery of the Startup Nation, an op which was brought to us by the very compromised Paul Singer of Fusion GPS fame. Propaganda and marketing — which are really the same thing — only get you so far and blackmail only works when you have the ability to enforce it. As my friend Arthur Bloom puts it — and which I have modified slightly —: “If the Israel lobby is unwilling to draw the line at handing our government over to mobsters and destroying American standing and standards abroad then they don’t have any lines and they’re a clear threat to our country.”
Well said but who shall do the task of neutralizing that threat when whoever stands up against it is blacklisted or ripped off? The federal courts are too slow and I still have my scars! I suspect it may well be other countries who, sensing the weakness of Likud and Israel, move into the better boyfriend position at least as concerns the United States. Türkiye already has and as Türkiye goes, so goes the rest of the Middle East. Çok harika! You can think of this a bit like the British and the mob taking out the American Nazi Party in the 1930s. Had to be done, I’m afraid.
The problem is that the UAE has aligned itself with Silicon Valley the children of mobsters in the United States and not its patriotic Deep State.
We will explore soon how the mobster and his children can be made more American but right now we have a situation where the American deep state is returning and looking for dance partners around the world.
There’s an obvious thing which could take place — the Arab world could help us build the sort of technology which moves our civilization faster and they could, in time, earn their seat amongst the great powers of the world.
Being Americans, we’ll look the other way on past misbehavior. In much the same way that the organized crime world helped America win the Second World War or the bootlegging syndicates helped us develop the American car industry or the Mormons helped us build the atomic bomb, so, too, could the Arab powers help us change the world for the better. There’s nothing more American than the here and now.
For what it’s worth I like the Emiratis in particular and the Arabs in general but I do find that they have lacked the kind of rigor which is needed to play in the big leagues. They’re often taken advantage of and treated more like ATMs than as real sovereign wealth funds with a real claim on the world. Of course I know what that feels like. Those who have taken advantage of them have also taken advantage of me. In fact many of the American companies that their assets have invested in were first discovered by yours truly. Why not cut out the middle man and go direct?
The companies always start to struggle when they get rid of Genius, as my old codename was. How curious! Maybe you guys could just not cheat me? Looking at you Hal Lambert! And Hoan Ton-That! And John Burbank! And Peter Thiel!
The Arabs know I’m the real deal. If they’re real let’s be real together.
The world is counting on us. We need men and women who understand that we need our increasingly technocratic states to work and the world to be stable and prosperous.
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I hope that changes are afoot with our Jewish friends.
For American Jews these are heady times. They’re confronted by the reality that there’s backlash to the Israeli policies that American Jewish elites favor. We’ve pointed out that there’s a second Jewish occupation — with Jewish-American oligarchs propping up Bibi and Bibi propping up Jewish-American oligarchs. Things have gotten so bad that he’s turning to Jew-ish billionaires like Elon Musk — never mind that there’s a long ugly history of Jewish antisemitism and Zionism and that Musk, the world’s most famous S. African, more or less confirms that Netanyahu’s Israel is an apartheid state.
Is Elon a prisoner, a guest, or a hostage in Bibi’s Israel — or some weird combination of all three?
At long last Jewish Americans are discovering that a lot of the ethnic nepotism that they’ve pushed on American higher education isn’t having the desired effect. It turns out that the reason a lot of Jews wanted to enter these elite institutions is to large extent because they were WASP institutions. As the WASPs flee so too seemingly does the prestige and excellence of that institution. You’re not going to get that prestige back by blacklisting young people. You’re not going to decrease anti-Semitism by getting them fired for their work. In much the same way that you can never bomb your way to peace nor can you threaten your way to Jewish acceptance.
Notwithstanding the efforts by Netanyahu and his ilk who finance terrorism against American Jews to get them to run to Israel, Jewish-Americans are kidding themselves if they think that America is becoming hostile to the Jews. It’s also frankly more than a little insulting to those of us who have made this country so hospitable to Jews, virtually since the American founding. Fortunately Jewish excellence can help us here. Calvin Coolidge reminded us the Jewish faith is the faith of liberty. George Washington referred to Jews as his countrymen — the first secular leader to do so.
We like you guys particularly when you work hard to make America work and keep your dual loyalties in the old country where they belong.
We are going to need to have a conversation ultimately about Jewish privilege and the Jewish mob as recent events with Open AI have taught us that the mobocracy is alive and well.
The fantasy politics that a lot of wealthy Jewish Americans indulge in of both the right and the left gets wrong the big question of which country is the most accommodating and hospitable? The answer is the United States of America.
Jewish privilege can only be overcome with Jewish gratitude for a country which has taken them in, largely with nothing more than the shirts on their back and has even left their shekels more or less unmolested.
What goes for the Jews goes for all groups, by the way. As Americans we’ve had it very good for a very long time where very little has been asked from us and very much has been given up by very few of us.
It’s time for Jewish Americans to break up with their abusive Israeli boyfriend and date Uncle Sam with a bit more vigor. Uncle Sam, not Sam Bankman-Fried or Sam Altman, is who you want to go home with. Your Jewish mother would approve.
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It turns out that apartheid and segregation and blacklists are what people are really resisting and perhaps the lessons of South Africa’s experience can teach us.
I was recently visiting a South African friend of mine who is a naturalized American citizen, a co-investor and a dear friend. He is, like me, something of a stranger in today’s America with our British-flavored education. He is, like me, looking for a mission beyond mere enrichment. I find it in my work on behalf of my country.
By some accounts the South African diaspora is among the most impressive, particularly when we look to the tech sector. There’s David Friedberg, David Sacks, Roelof Botha and of course, Elon Musk. Peter Thiel (born in Germany, grew up in S. Africa and Namibia) did his stint as well. Who are these strange South Africans populating our discourse? As with any Wild West we’ve noticed that they are spies and fakers, criminals and wannabes. These aren’t gods but frauds.
I’ve always been fascinated by South Africa. I’ve long resisted the conventional narratives around it or the lazy projection of America’s racial issues onto the South Africa’s.
In that spirit I read Rian Malan’s excellent My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience (2000) — a book which Thiel recommended to me — and I’ve had more than a few conversations with Errol Musk — Elon Musk’s father — about the situation in his native South Africa. It’s altogether tragic and I’ve tried to do my part backing and supporting South African immigration and immigrants in my businesses.
How you stack up on South Africa and the hypotheticals around it says a lot about how you think seriously about the world. If you’re a white person you have to answer an honest question which I think gets to the larger problems
Do you want your children to grow up under apartheid — or under modern South Africa?
Do you want your children to grow up under Rhodesia — or under Zimbabwe?
These aren’t really racist questions either; they’re human ones. Do you fight — or flee? Do you even try to fix?
Here’s another one.
Do you want your children to grow up in Gaza?
South Africa’s apartheid government collapsed when good natured white South Africans refused to send their sons to oppress black people. Israel will collapse when good natured Israelis refuse to send their sons and daughters to oppress Arab people.
The settlers hope by making life so undesirable for the Palestinians that they’ll give up, or run away, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
The recent decisions by President Biden to allow Israelis visa free travel while also sanctioning Israeli settlers is a recognition, I think, that the center can’t hold.
Where we go from here, it’s hard to say but I do know that Bloom is right about where we’re at.
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Sweep, sweep: Israelis are already starting to complain about enforcing the law and to some extent merely enforcing the law equally will seem as if you’re being singled out.
America has been unwilling to enforce the law against Israeli espionage for quite a long time now, as James Bamford has written.
Had we stopped Arnon Milchan from exfiltrating American nuclear technology to Israel and then bragging about it on Israeli TV and seated next to Robert De Niro …
Had we blocked Milchan from getting his 10-year visa after Netanyahu’s criminality was explicit…
Had we helped Israeli civil society jail Netanyahu for his corruption…
But we didn’t and now a lot of people are dead, Palestinian and Israeli alike.
What should our “never again” look like here?
Is America, having given up the role of world policeman, going to be the world’s prosecutor? Or its peeping Tom?
So far, it’s the peacemaker — as Hamas and Israel agree to extend the truce and Elon agrees to be paraded around.
Looking at Elon being dragged here and there what’s clear as we consider more our oligarch class is how unlike us they are.
This lack of empathy, lack of rigor in thinking, total impulsivity, total desire to be cult leaders or gods will be our collective end.
Of course I will do what I can do stop it. We must fight back and finally we are.