by John Kendall Hawkins
This is a second round of ponderments on issues I believe are of important public interest. In my last installment I marvelled at Daniel Ellsberg's revelations in his book, The Doomsday Machine, especially his eye-opener that president Richard Nixon had a date set for tactically nuking North Vietnam, in addition to his concern that Nixon and Kissinger were considering having him killed. I considered the Games We Play and how they've grown up in my lifetime. I looked at the moratorium on gain-of-function research that Obama put into place and that Trump ended. I found it interesting that cybersecurity competitors Shawn Henry (Crowdstrike) and Kevin Mandia (Mandiant), who are virtually called into every national breach of a government or corporate system, started out together at a small company called Foundstone that was forced under after the software guardians were accused of software piracy. I was amazed when Ed Snowden wrote in his memoirs that his forebears owned a slave plantation that later got taken by the US government and became the home of the NSA. I recalled what so many want to forget -- that Mark Felt, the much-ballyhooed Deep Throat of Watergate fame, was an assistant director of the FBI who got disgruntled when Nixon passed him over after J. Edgar Hoover died. I considered what investigative journalist Greg Palast showed in a new book -- that Trump stole the 2016 election, not with the help of Russians, but by suppressed votes, and would have done the same thing in 2020 (and almost did) had there been no pandemic that forced mail-in votes to be seriously kept track of for the first time by the MSM. The f*cker almost won anyway.
It just goes and on. Stay thirsty for democratic socialism, my friends. Bottoms Up!
The Taiwan/Hong Kong/Korea ProblemRecently in these pages I reviewed 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Admiral James Stavridis, a former Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and an executive at the controversial Carlyle Group. He describes a WW3 that begins in the South China Seas, after an American flotilla, on a "freedom of navigation patrol," is tricked into helping a Chinese trawler in apparent distress. A Chinese fleet rolls, a confrontation ensues, WW3 begins. I posited that it was blatantly absurd that in 2034, with Climate Change well-advanced, we'd care much about saber-rattling in the Taiwan Straits.
The novel raises some continuing thought-provoking issues about the South East Asian region and the long-established British and American presence there. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea are all politically problematic today because of Western aggression and sovereignty-bashing actions. For all the West's hypocritical decrying of human-rights abuses in Hong Kong, few want to remember that Hong Kong was taken as a war spoil after the Opium Wars that the British (and Americans) forced on the Chinese. By all rights, the West had no say in what went down in China (a country itself named by the Portuguese). At the end of WW2, after the Japanese were forced to surrender and made to cede China and Korea (which they occupied), the Chinese were about to re-take Taiwan, formerly Formosa (named by the Portuguese), when an American-led international force entered South Korea and pushed the invading "resistance fighter" Kim Il-Sung back to the North, and frustrated the Chinese plan.
The Korean division of North-South is a product of the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans, not a choice of the people of the peninsula. If truth be told, Taiwan belongs to the Tsou aborigines of the island, who have been nutted over by Dutch and Japanese and Chinese mainlanders, and when rebel Chiang Kai-shek retreated there after losing to the Communist revolution in China, eventually setting up a "model" democracy, the stalemate ensued.
It's complicated now in Korea and Taiwan, but maybe it's time we draw a lesson from Vietnam, which won the war and normalized under a hybrid government that folks from all around the world visit today -- like any other destination in Lonely Planet -- and let the region decide its own fate. There's no real communism there any more. After neoliberal incursions, China is more capitalist than America is in some ways, and seemingly better at it, and it scares the sh*t out of us that they may set up an alternative global currency or cash in their Treasury Bonds and bankrupt America. A war would solve that problem though. We love a BOOM economy. Just look at the last 75 years.
Bottom line: the region is not worth fighting WW3 over. We just can't handle the Truth: Our Empire Burlesque is over.
War: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Profits. Say It Again
Another thing that came out of my read of Stavridis's novel, 2034, is his connection to the Carlyle Group. They've been most controversial in the past both because of the bin Laden family investments into portfolios, even up to the events of 9/11, but more seriously concerning was their profiteering through a company called United Defense, manufacturer of, among other things, the Bradley tank. "United Defense [was] controlled by the Carlyle Group, the investment firm that symbolizes the marriage of politics and money in Washington," according to a WaPo piece. Carlyle "floated" the UDI in 2001, and in 2005 it was bought out by BAE, which has come under enormous scrutiny for its dealings with Saudi Arabia and for its blatant culture of bribery that Bush family friend Prince Bandar, when asked for comment on the bribery and skullduggery, shrugged at PBS' Frontline "Black Money" doco years back now, and said, "So what." Nothing's really changed.
Stavridis, in a recent interview, spent some time talking about opportunities to make a buck coming as a result of our new culture of rolling Pearl Harbor events. The Arctic, for instance, represents a chance to chase after oil fields up there as the thaw prevails. But he also drew attention to the need to develop revolutionary batteries, and indicated the need to secure lithium deposits. He talked water-condensation machines (grabbing it from the air). In his novel, electromagnetic disruption is key to knocking out the communications of US ships and jets. All of these technologies will be developed, at tax-payer expense, and then turned into profit makers in the private sector through partnerships with various industries.
It's disgusting in some ways to think of, but the pandemic allowed Big Pharma to realize huge profits from the simultaneous and miraculous development of vaccines -- what always had previously required a minimum of four years came within a year. Even the NYT must have been shocked. They wrote last year:
The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won't arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We've never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years - more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.
Takes the breath away. Further, the vaccines come out of a partnership with DARPA and their P3 program.
An alarming stat I read recently was the amount of pollution the military services have put out into the world since the War on Terror began. According to a Brown study, reiterated by a Boston University study, 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases have been released as a result of wars, often, ironically, in places that hold promise of new oil and minerals, and new gases. A Brown study finding: "The US Department of Defense is the world's single largest consumer of oil - and as a result, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters." The obvious thought that comes out is this: Let's have a global moratorium on War. All troops home everywhere. No more pollution.
As one account put it, "Since 1996, DOD was never held accountable for $8.5 trillion. On September 10, 2001, then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said: "According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." At issue is massive waste, fraud and abuse.
F*ck war! (Good God, ya'll)
The Mystery of Peter Thiel's Investments
Following on from the allusion to DARPA's P3 above, riddle me this: How long was Peter Thiel an investor in Abcellera (2002), the Vancouver biotechnology firm that had a premiere role in the pursuit of solutions to Covid-19, before he was brought on to the Board of Directors? What did he know and when did he know it?
Peter Thiel owns PayPal. He also is the founder of Palantir, a CIA start-up, and a controversial software package that helps fuse disparate databases, and is promiscuously used by the US Intelligence Community to fight "terror." According to TechCrunch:
The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir.
Palantir became controversial when it was used to subvert Wikileaks and to discredit journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was reporting on Wikileaks findings. Palantir is named after a "seeing stone" (nyuk, nyuk) from Lord of the Rings. Thiel was part of business blockade on Wikileaks in 2010 that made it virtually impossible for people to donate funds to the revelations factory. Follow the money -- and stomp on it.
In addition, PayPal is owned by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Who almost bought WaPo, but let Jeff Bezos have it. Instead, Omidyar founded, with Greenwald and Laura Poitras, First Look Media, producer of The Intercept. Ball of Confusion, that's what the world is today. Hey, hey.
The Mystery of Jeff Bezos's Space Trip
How's he allowed to go out in a hat like that? Doesn't he know they are not sized to your ego but your head? German helmet or asshat, you decide.
And who'd he borrow that quote about fragility from? A teary, fulfilled and centered Bezos said, through the press: "Bezos says space flight reinforced commitment to fighting climate change." Plus, not many days later, meanies on the Left started publishing how filthy Amazon is and a major polluter of the environment. The bubble wrap. It's plastic. It's oil. Doh.
Let's see. A few years back now, the NYT ran a front-page image of Navy pilots in pursuit of a UFO and admitted for the first time we may be visited by aliens other than oligarchs. They call them UAPs, in order to take command of any future narrative. Not long afterward, we hear talk of the need for a new military branch, the Space Force. Actually, it goes back to Reagan and his SDI (Star Wars) program. (Maybe even further back if you count that scene from James Bond, You Only Live Twice (1967), which proves that the fascist Elon Musk's idea for reusable rockets is just not original.)
We don't need a Space Force. NASA and the USAF can handle it.
But a Space Force will allow us to pass on billions of dollars to private space "pioneers" who can do sh*t up there beyond public scrutiny. Why, just today ArsTechnica, and the wider MSM community, was reporting on Bezos being rewarded again for his futuristic business model by offering a $10 billion taxpayer pie for cloud services that Bill Gates fwowned about. "After all those backdoors, and intrusions built into automatic updates, this is the thanks I get," a high, rank official said he said.
The most important chapter in Ed Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record, was "Homo Contractus," where he explains in great detail how taxpayers unwittingly support a system of private contractors, beyond normal public scrutiny, who poach government workers, especially in the IC, with top-secret clearances to do spy "work" (probably illegal) under the guise of private doings. More of the same here. Bezos is not only an asshat, he's an asset. For all intents and purposes, Jeff is a spook.
How DJ Trump Was Almost A Prophet
DJ is gone. Good Riddance. But what's amazing about the phenomenon he represented is how close he was to being right about some things. He scourged Fake News and we lefties laughed, but it's all around us, and he wasn't far wrong about the MSM and their corporate-deep state partnership agendas. Even the continued coverage of his asinine post-Jan 6 doings -- the Voter Fraud silliness -- is cover for the fact that most elections are rigged -- through disenfranchisement and ballot rip-ups. (See Palast.)
DJ was right about conspiracies to keep people down, beginning who gets to say what counts as a 'conspiracy theory' or not. That was a super, meta conspiracy theory -- DJ, the conspiracy theorist. It's good cover for things like blaming the Russians for hacking into our system, when we ourselves are doing that (Palast, et alis). It may even have been the IC who arranged for Trump's ascension to create the atmosphere we have today that always favors them (Be the Chaos. Be the Solution.Ã "ž ).
After that IdLib blasting of Bagdadi, with the play-by-play he provided of the terrorist leader clutching 'loved ones' to protect himself being almost a parody of the account CIA director John Brennan provided (and had to walk back) of the bin Laden raid at Abbottabad. Followed by the silly conference room shot with grim countenances (and a sh*t load of ethernet cabling all haywire sprouting out of the conference table). It was like a wink. Americans, by and large, and especially older Americans who grew up in the '60s, are 'conspiracy theorists'. There's good reason for it. Unfortch, not even Trump could wrestle away the last tranche of still-classified JFK docs. The 'conspiracy theory' trope is aimed at the hearts and minds of the new generations, who are being counted on to undermine the cynicism of old farts -- like me.
Trump was a moron who sometimes uttered near-profundities. That close. Definitely the wrong messenger for any other system but an idiocracy.
Searching for the Lucy Link to AIs
Nietzsche described a continuum from Beasts to the ÃÅ"bermenschen, with Humans more or less in between, leaning one way or the other. For a long time -- well, okay, since 1974 -- anthropologists have pushed the notion that Australopithecus darling "Lucy" was the missing link between modern humans and apes, essentially the tightrope itself between the ancient past and the future to come. Forty years later, in 2014, Hollywood produced Lucy, a sexed-up version (cum virgin) of a missing link of the future, a yummy tart placed between humans and the Next Step, maybe an uberfraulein. Compare them.
See what I mean?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again (because it can be a lot of fun to repeat things over and over -- ask any committed Buddhist or positive nihilist), that if we want to get to the Singularity quickly, without a lot of extra research and development on exoskeletons and the like, probably only useful for future colonies on the moon in the cheese-mining industry there, all we need to do is round up the psychopaths and reprogram them (for benign work!) and we're there. The money saved on R&D can go to, you know, infrastructure. Or the democratic socialist project. Power to the People -- rat own!
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