When the Child Stars Replaced The Child Prodigies...
Cosplay belongs in Congress. Let the Real Government get it done.
A friend of mine and I like to joke about how the real Washington isn’t in Washington but in its suburbs. The real government is elsewhere: the intelligence community is in Northern Virginia, the medical stuff is in Maryland, the business stuff is in Delaware, etc., etc. Your humble correspondent lives in and serve the real government even though I’m not technically a government employee. That I do so not entirely by choice gives you a sense of how it really works.
Washington is the stage. It’s for the tourists, the foreigners and the prima donnas.
You dismiss this stuff at your peril but it’s hardly all that serious. Stagecraft is statecraft, after all. You sometimes wonder if it’s all just a grift. The congressman performs for the cameras and he’s rewarded with donor cash. Cam girls, congressmen, what’s the difference really?
But I’m a glutton for punishment and stentorian displays of ignorance.
So naturally I popped some popcorn and watched the show unfolding before my eyes at the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a mouthful so I’ll just call it “the China committee.”
I take a backseat to nobody in being China skeptical — they don’t like me much because I actually invest in technology which helps the United States and I don’t just talk about it — but I draw the line at the elaborate anti-China cosplay. I’m what you might call anti-anti-China. I am certainly not a fan of the fentanyl or the dalliances with organized crime and clandestine organ harvesting but then I don’t support that sort of thing with the Israelis either or with anyone for that matter.
One of the ways to tell someone isn’t serious about the China conversation is that they like to control the conversation. They’ll say that they aren’t anti-Chinese but anti-CCP. Okay, but which faction within the CCP? Are they on the pro-Japanese side of the divide — the Xi Jinping and Deng Xiaoping world? Or are they more pro-American like Mao Zedong or Hu Jintao? And what does this matter when then Chinese state works closely with organized crime within the United States and indeed around the world? One of the key ways to tell if someone is serious about the Chinese problem is to look closely at how he makes his money. You’ll find that there are an awful lot of agents of China that get their money ultimately from access to the Chinese market.
To a large extent a lot of the anti-China tech people are anti-China merely because they weren’t allowed into the Chinese market as China built up its own products. This understandably irks American investors who fantasize about a global market.
But while China didn’t allow the tech people into its market it used its own investments in venture capital to control who got funding—and who didn’t.
The Varsity Blues scandal really revealed that Chinese have rather successfully compromised the admissions departments at elite schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Isn’t it interesting that Jared Kushner got into Harvard after his criminal Israeli spy father paid bribes at exactly the same time that Larry Summers became Harvard’s president? When the time is right, we will discuss the infiltration of spies into admission committees. I know what you’re thinking: “whattya mean…ya mean all these credentialed managers are just stooges?!”
Come on now you’re supposed to pretend that this is a meritocracy and not ethnic nepotism or score settling after the WASPs enforced a quota on Jewish enrollment at elite institutions. China being China, evidence of your having attended one of those schools was a surefire way to get funding if not directly from China than from the network of students who were so connected. We might call these people the PayPal mafia — to borrow a phrase — but there are quite a number of mafias and mafiaosas running around.
The tech mob is a mob where omertà runs deep. Yours truly, despite my occasional closeness with said mob, is a heretic. I have broken the omertà by speaking to law enforcement and the intelligence community about all the wild and weird foreign entanglements I saw around said tech mob. There were efforts to suppress my career and steal my work but these efforts failed because the intelligence community is ultimately capable of recognizing talent. Talent always finds its level.
What you’re learning is this:
Frankly the deep state is learning that they need the wayward sons of the American intelligence community a hell of a lot more than they need the sons of foreign oligarchs or spies. That’s a fight I’m down for. Not only are both of my grandfathers a part of this but so are my great-grandparents, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, and my brother. Intelligence community professionals, inventors, and school teachers and I ain’t a school teacher but I’m happy to school you about what’s really going on. This is what we do.
Naturally you get the sense that many of the tech people who are suddenly anti-China right as the China money runs out are trying to hustle us about how they were really anti-China all along. And why? Well, it’s because of China’s treatment of the Uighurs!
I note wryly that Congressman Mike Gallagher is married to a Broadway star and that perhaps they are both actors of a sort. Only a member of the bourgeoisie believes that the personal isn’t also political, that the choice of spouse doesn’t reveal more than is perhaps wise to comment upon.
This is what you get from Marine intelligence, I suppose. Say, how much of the Iraq War itself was a bit of elaborate dress up anyway? Looking closer at Gallagher you notice that he went to disgraced Catholic high school and that he studied at Princeton under Frederick Hitz, a CIA officer who has his own role covering up Iran Contra and smearing a woman station chief. Gallagher wrote his thesis under Hitz, "New Approaches to Asymmetric Threats in the Middle East: From Fighting to Winning." Did the U.S. win in the Middle East? Nope!
OK Mike, whatcha got for us?
You’ve got Josh Wolfe, the founder of Lux Capital, play acting at being anti-China. You mean the same Josh Wolfe who was put into business by the very Chinese Carlyle Group? OK.
In the spirit of full disclosure I met with Wolfe when I was raising for a genetics company that is revolutionizing solving all of the murders and rapes in America, Canada and Australia. Wolfe spent the lunch meeting playing on his phone. Oh well. I guess you can’t win them all.
Josh Wolfe mentioned Morris Chang, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductors. In Wolfe’s telling a major reason Chang started Taiwan semiconductors was because he encountered discrimination in Texas. It should have been Texas Semiconductors, Wolfe says. In fact Taiwan Semiconductor owes its existence to the environmental damage that a lot of semiconductor manufacturing does here in the United States.
From Taiwan’s perspective this effort worked out brilliantly and made America dependent on Taiwan—which is why we have to care about whether or not China will invade. (They won’t invade because you don't invade what you already control.)
Wolfe goes a little hard on pushing the narrative against China’s mistreatment of the Uighurs and indeed they are mistreated. Is it a genocide? I don’t know. But I do know that Wolfe is doing precisely nothing about it.
Instead it is all a performance — an exercise in moral preening.
“Imagine in a year or two or five, there’s a cure for Alzheimer’s… but what if we found out that was tested on a million Uighurs…” he tells Congress.
What if Josh?
Does anyone serious think that we would resist using that cure?
There’s a long history of the U.S. government looked the other way on a number of communists to help build the bomb. They also conveniently looked the other way on the Nazi pasts of the V-2 rocketeers. Hell, even the Mossad looked the other way when they recruited ex-Nazis to help the fledgling state. You can read about it in Haaretz, “Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents.”
Serious nations take these things seriously. And serious people take themselves seriously.
Wolfe has nothing to say about the Israeli maltreatment of Palestinians but in this he’s not alone. This is the original sin of Silicon Valley and its ties to the Chinese through Israel.
Nor should we allow Israel to steal cutting edge American technology only to sell it back to us at inflated prices.
To Wolfe’s credit he is quick to note that Elon Musk is a con man. But sometimes it takes one to know one doesn’t it?
Wolfe is a fundraising machine. At least he learned how to hustle.
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A few quick thoughts on the UFOs.
It could also be the case that we have built too many air places and that we have too many airbases. You might have noticed that we are putting a lot more things into space and we’re building submarines. There’s a reason. We can turn airplanes off from space or from drones.
Apropos of nothing in particular I commend to your attention the Wes Anderson film, Asteroid City, which is itself something of a play within a play. All the denizens struggle to make sense of the arrival of an alien being in their neighborhood.
This is the ultimate fear isn't it? That we, Americans, meet the same fate as the Native Americans we displaced.
China’s Henry Kissinger Wang Huning talks about how Americans fear losing their technological edge and that that’s what holds Americans together.
But what if the technology is all fake? And what if the investors pushing it are fake too?
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So you want to get a handle on the UAPs…
One thing you notice is that many of these UAPs fly over U.S. military installations.
But we don’t need as many planes as we once did. Nor do we need as many battleships.
We do need more drones. Turkish, not Chinese or Chisraeli like DJI. In this way, we could build a closer alliance with NATO’s second largest army.
A way of thinking about the venture capital industry is that it houses a number of foreign spies on U.S. soil so that they can be watched more readily.
That is, indeed, what seems to be going on with Neal Stephenson’s recent visit to Varda and Wolfe’s sycophantic praise of Stephenson and Varda founder Delian Asparouhov. Do you think these guys understand what’s really going on here?
When the company gets too big we seize it. Hence SpaceX’s treatment in the New York Times.
Let’s play a little smarter, shall we?