Yes, We Are Sweeping Your Foreign Ops From The Commanding Heights
With apologies to my friend Arthur Bloom (subscribe to his Substack!) I thought I might write a short post about things to keep in mind and to watch. None of these constitutes a post in their own right but the are worthy of attention all the same.
FTC’s blockage of Grail-Illumina deal portends Icahn-brought changes to the San Diego-based sequencing company.
This is really a counter-Chinese play masquerading as an anti-trust play as is so often the case these days.
Only fools at the Wall Street Journal editorial page believe it has anything to do with markets. (Hey, don’t blame me! I was just an intern there in 2011!)
We’ll go more in detail on Francis DeSouza and Illumina soon. In a post-covid world it is imperative that Illumina—the world’s largest genetic sequencer—be controlled by America. Britain has Oxford Nanopore; China has BGI. We need our firm in our hands.
Carl Icahn is right. I firmly believe that Jay Flatley, who could well return to the position, could be genetics’ Steve Jobs. Of course he needs a different strategy and a rethink for how genetics can move beyond just mere medical matters. He needs to embrace the GWASes. More on that soon.
I think Flatley could help us sweep the Chinese-penetrated companies of Ancestry and 23andMe.com. Did you know that 23AndMe lost $90 million last quarter? And that it’s two earliest investors were Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein? Yikes!
You’ll recall that all the usual morons were in favor of the deal. Joe Lonsdale wrote a puff piece calling for the FTC not to get involved. He heralded Grail as “truly revolutionary.” Uh huh.
He should know. After all, Lonsdale was heavily involved in the scammy company, Ubiome, which smacked of an Israeli-Chinese intelligence operation and whose founders — Stanford naturally — are still at large in Germany. (They scammed German immigration services, too, apparently.)
Frankly how Lonsdale dodged the SEC there I’ll never quite know.
It’s time for the Emiratis (and the Saudis) to get better constructs. We can help them retake their rightful place in the community of nations but only if they ditch the clowns and frauds.
Then again, I recently told a mutual friend — and Substack fan — that Joe’s real job was being a surrogate son to old Republican men.
Hey it’s a living. OK? But it’s not the future. It’s the past pretending to be relevant.
Donald Trump, perpetual defendant? Remember the process is the punishment.
And then there’s this.
Aging like a fine Trump wine…
Disney rolls back DeSantis shakedown—and removes Israeli intelligence officer-turned-DeSantis/Trump donor Ike Perlmutter. Can we finally prosecute him for all the weird stuff he did with the VA?
Facing renewed pressure by the U.S. government, C.Z. has been posting photos with his acolytes holding up the number four.
You may not be as a close a watcher of Chinese numerology or fortune-telling as I am (don’t ask) but the number 4 means “fated to die.”
You better believe that Coinbase will be next.
Chief auditor John Peters of Silicon Valley Bank worked for an Israeli company — Mercury Interactive which was sold to Hewlett Packard in 2006. There were all kinds of financial irregularities at Mercury but you kind of knew that already didn’t you? Say, is it a bad idea to have an “auditor” also being responsible for brining in foreign money into the bank?
NVIDIA’s CEO admits that cryptocurrency is fake. Is AI? We’re not allowed to ask. We will soon ask anyway.
For what it’s worth I’ve come to believe that the whole AI thing is a Chinese op designed to get major American companies to use up software chips before the CHIPs Act goes into effect. Crazy, I know. But I’m not usually wrong.