Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
Introduction: Viewing the future through a glass, darkly, this program looks at extreme measures being proposed (and actualized) to deal with dire economic and social dislocation. Some of these measures are gambits sought by the privileged, in order to gain distance from the chaos that their policies generate. Some are proposed in order to impose anti-democratic ways and means on those affected by economic and social deterioration.
Before diving into the seastedding movement and the political philosophy (and philosophers) underlying that phenomenon, the program highlights an essential statement by Patri Friedman, grandson of right-wing economic theoretician Milton Friedman. In this defining presentation, Friedman distills the fundamentals of the seastedding movement–a “corporate state”–precisely how Mussolini defined his fascist system.
An Alternet post sets forth details and substance about the movement and, in particular, the formidable, far-right wing entrepreneur Peter Thiel, a driving force behind Silicon Valley commerce and culture. (Thiel, one of the seastedding movement’s backers is discussed at length in FTR #718.) Epitomized ideologically by his view that the United States began going downhill when we allowed women to vote, Thiel has used the powerful Koch brothers’ political and media apparatus to publicize their view that “democracy and freedom are incompatible.”
In addition, the post highlights the strong area of intersection between the Frontier Group (a major backer of the seastedding movement) and the Carlyle Group.
Thiel’s ventures are far more than theoretical. Thiel was instrumental in developing the electronic intelligence firm Palantir, whose primary application is counter-terrorism. Aside from positive application of its technology, however, the firm has apparently been engaged in political espionage and covert action against political opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
A terrifying glimpse of “things to come” has been provided by TV commentator Rachel Maddow, who has exposed a plan by the Michigan GOP establishment to, for all intents and purposes, eliminate democratic process in the Wolverine State. Ostensibly designed to deal with “financial crises,” the GOP proposes government by executive fiat, with delinquent areas to be turned over to corporations to be administered as–you guessed it–corporate states!
Of particular significance for our purposes is the apparent contemplation of these measures as necessary to implement “Shock Doctrine,” as conceived by seastedding maven Patri Friedman’s grandfather Milton.
Anticipating a global apocalypse, hedge fund managers have purchasing all the arable land they can, in order to cash in on global famine.
Program Highlights Include: Proposal to establish “Charter Cities,” which would enable foreign governments (and perhaps corporations) to assume governance of cities in other countries; Deutsche Telekom’s use of T‑Mobile to spy on users of that network (Deutsche Telekom–controlled by the German government–assumed a 5.5 percent stake in A, T & T in exchange for that company’s acquisition of T‑Mogile. Will Deutsche Telekom have access to the A, T & T database?)
1. Before diving into the seastedding movement and the political philosophy (and philosophers) underlying that phenomenon, the program highlights an essential statement by Patri Friedman, grandson of right-wing economic theoretician Milton Friedman. In this defining presentation, Friedman distills the fundamentals of the seastedding movement–a “corporate state”–precisely how Mussolini defined his fascist system.
. . . Backed almost entirely by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, the team plans to seastead, colonize the sea beyond the reach of existing nations.
Friedman’s mission is to open a political vacuum into which people can experiment with startup governments that are “consumer-oriented, constantly competing for citizens,” he says.
“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship,” the goateed Friedman says, wiggling his toes in pink Vibram slippers. [Italics are mine–D. E.] . .
2. An Alternet post sets forth details and substance about the movement and, in particular, the formidable, far-right wing entrepreneur Peter Thiel, driving force behind Silicon Valley commerce and culture. Epitomized ideologically by his view that the United States began going downhill when we allowed women to vote, Thiel has used the powerful Koch brothers’ political and media apparatus to publicize their view that “democracy and freedom are incompatible.”
(In his speech at the Industry Club of Dusseldorf, Hitler won the hearts and minds of Germany’s industrial elite with a presentation that portrayed democracy as inherently evil, because it allowed inferior people to structure society to their benefit. In Hitler’s view democracy led inevitably to communism. This speech is discussed in Miscellaneous Archive Show M11.)
In addition, the post highlights the strong area of intersection between the Frontier Group (a major backer of the seastedding movement) and the Carlyle Group.
. . . . The floating castle is a longtime dream of libertarian oligarchs — a place where they can live their lives in peace free from the teeming masses of starving losers and indebted parasites and their tax demands. Since they’ve grown so rich off of America, they have enough spare change to fund projects like the Seasteading Institute, run by Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, and financed by the bizarre right-wing PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. . . .
. . . Both Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson see democracy as the enemy–last year, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” at about the same time that Milton Friedman’s grandson proclaimed, “Democracy is not the answer.” Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries. Friedman’s answer for Thiel’s democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules. It’s probably better for everyone if Milton Friedman’s grandson and Peter Thiel leave us forever for their libertarian ocean lair–Thiel believes that America went down the tubes ever since it gave women the right to vote, and he was outed as the sponsor of accused felon James O’Keefe’s smear videos that brought ACORN to ruin. . . .
. . . While Thiel and Friedman are busy cooking up their libertarian dystopia, the Frontier Group investment firm — an offshoot of the Carlyle Group — has already entered the realization phase with the Utopia floating castle. Frontier Group, was founded by some of the same big names from the notorious Carlyle Group–the private equity firm that brought together right-wing oligarchs like George H. W. Bush and other top American officials with their billionaire pals in Saudi Arabia like the Bin Laden family, who together raked in enormous profits thanks to the War on Terror that their kids Dubya and Osama launched.
While neither Bush nor the Bin Ladens are principals in the Frontier Group, its founding director, Frank Carlucci, is a name they know well, and you should too. Carlucci ran the Carlyle Group as its chairman from 1989 through 2005, right around the time that the wars started going undeniably bad, and floating castles started to look like a viable plan. But Carlucci’s past is much weirder and scarier than most of us care to know: whether it’s his strangely timed appearances in some of the ugliest assassinations and coups in modern history, or serving as Carter’s number two man in the CIA, and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, if Frank Carlucci (nicknamed “Creepy Carlucci” and “Spooky Frank”) is the founding director of a firm that’s building floating castles, it’s a bad sign for those of us left behind. . . .
. . . Carlucci may be the scariest of the Frontier Group bunch building the floating castles, but he’s among his kind. Other Carlyle Group directors who joined Carlucci at Frontier include David Robb, who headed up Carlyle’s investments in defense and aerospace; Sanford McDonnell, the former CEO of McDonnell Douglass and onetime head of the Boy Scouts of America; and Norman Augustine, another ex-president of the Boy Scouts, another Princeton alum, and former board director at the scandal-plagued Riggs bank.
Riggs bank became one of those dark unsolved mysteries of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror. After the attacks on 9/11, the FBI discovered that Saudi government officials used accounts at Riggs bank to wire funds to at least two known associates of the Saudi hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Riggs was also implicated in the Britain-Saudi $3 billion bribery scandal, in which British Aerospace bribes were wired through Riggs accounts to Saudi officials in return for lucrative contracts. One of Riggs bank’s top executives was Jonathan Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, after Riggs bought out Jonathan Bush’s bank in 1997, and appointed him as a director. In 2005, with Riggs embroiled in investigations and scandals–Riggs pled guilty to money laundering Augusto Pinochet’s stolen funds, and the funds of various Equatorial Guinea officials– it was taken over by PNC bank, with the approval of Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Even after the Washington Post revealed that Riggs’ billionaire chairman flew Greenspan’s wife, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, on the company jet. . . .
But the weirdest of all the Frontier Group directors has to be founding director Danny Pang. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pang embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from his private equity firm PEMGroup. Pang claimed he was investing money in “Dead Peasants Insurance” (life insurance policies for people considered likely to die), but in secret, Pang confided to PEMGroup’s ex-president that he ran it as a Ponzi scheme. That sparked a fresh FBI investigation into Danny Pang’s crimes–which led back to the unsolved murder of his wife, Janie Louise Pang, a 33-year-old ex-stripper who was shot to death execution style in their Irvine, California home in 1997, the same year Pang was accused of embezzling three million dollars from another fund he worked at. There was plenty of reason to suspect Danny Pang of murdering his wife: he beat her so often (breaking her nose on one occasion) that police were called in on at least four occasions before her murder. She’d had him tailed by a private detective who discovered Danny holding hands with another woman shortly before she was murdered. Danny had known ties to the Taiwanese Triad mob, he took the fifth and refused to cooperate in the murder trial, and reportedly threatened Janie’s friends after her murder, demanding to know what Janie told them about his business activities.
Here is a description of the actual murder, from the L.A. Times:
“According to the family maid and two of Pang’s children, a clean-cut man with a pencil-thin mustache arrived at the door asking for her husband. The pair talked casually for a couple of minutes, until the man drew a semiautomatic pistol. Pang began running and the maid, terrified, spirited Pang’s children out the back door. Within minutes, the killer caught up with Pang, who tried to hide in her bedroom closet. The killer fired several .380-caliber rounds and left her to bleed to death as she lay in a fetal position.”
Somehow, the trial ended with a hung jury, and Danny Pang went on to join Frank Carlucci and the Boy Scouts presidents to start building the world’s first billion-dollar floating castle to spirit away all that stolen money in luxury. But Pang was apparently too careless for them. He was outted last spring in the Wall Street Journal, and in September 2009, Danny Pang was found dead of unknown causes in his Newport Beach home. . . .
3a. Thiel’s extremist political views may find expression through his financing of the Palantir firm. Note that Palantir CEO Alex Karp apparently has Frankfurt, Germany, roots, like Thiel. (For more on Thiel’s background see FTR #718.)
. . . Palantir CEO Mr. Karp says such criticism doesn’t trouble him. He says the company is already expanding rapidly.
Palantir’s roots date back to 2000, when Mr. Karp returned to the U.S. after living for years in Frankfurt, where he earned his doctorate in German social philosophy and discovered a talent for investing. He reconnected with a buddy from Stanford Law School, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of online payment company PayPal.
In 2003, Mr. Thiel pitched an idea to Mr. Karp: Could they build software that would uncover terror networks using the approach PayPal had devised to fight Russian cybercriminals?
PayPal’s software could make connections between fraudulent payments that on the surface seemed unrelated. By following such leads, PayPal was able to identify suspect customers and uncover cybercrime networks. The company saw a tenfold decrease in fraud losses after it launched the software, while many competitors struggled to beat back cheaters.
Mr. Thiel wanted to design software to tackle terrorism because at the time, he says, the government’s response to issues like airport security was increasingly “nightmarish.” The two launched Palantir in 2004 with three other investors, but they attracted little interest from venture-capital firms. The company’s $30 million start-up costs were largely bankrolled by Mr. Thiel and his own venture-capital fund.
They modeled Palantir’s culture on Google’s, with catered meals of ahi tuna and a free-form 24-hour workplace wired so 16 people can play the Halo video game. The kitchen is stocked by request with such items as Pepto Bismol and glass bottles of Mexican Coca Cola sweetened with sugar not corn syrup. The company recently hosted its own battle of the bands.
One of the venture firms that rejected Palantir’s overtures steered the company to In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital firm established by the CIA a decade ago to tap innovation that could be used for intelligence work. As Silicon Valley’s venture funding dries up, In-Q-Tel says it has seen a surge of requests from start-ups in the last year or so, many of which now see the government as an alternate money stream.
In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million in Palantir and provided a critical entreé to the CIA and other agencies. For his first spy meeting in 2005, Mr. Karp shed his track suit for a sports coat. He arrived at an agency — he won’t say which one — and was immediately “freaked out” by security officers guarding the building with guns. In a windowless, code-locked room, he introduced himself to the first official he met: “Hi, I’m Alex Karp,” Mr. Karp said, offering his hand. No response. “I didn’t know you really don’t ask their names,” he says now.
Mr. Karp showed the group a prototype. The software was similar to PayPal’s fraud-detection system. But instead of identifying and connecting cyber criminals, it focused on two hypothetical terror suspects and followed their activities, including travel and money transfers.
After the demo, he was peppered with skeptical questions: Is anyone at your company cleared to work with classified information? Have you ever worked with intelligence agencies? Do you have senior advisers who have worked with intelligence agencies? Do you have a sales force that is cleared to work with classified information? The answer every time: no.
But the group was sufficiently intrigued by the demo, and In-Q-Tel arranged for Palantir engineers to meet directly with intelligence analysts, to help build a comprehensive search tool from scratch. . . .
“How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade” by Siobhan Ghorban; The Wall Street Journal; 9/4/2009.
3b. Palantir is one of several defense contractors implicated in a case of political spying against opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
In February, ThinkProgress broke a story revealing that attorneys for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had communicated with a set of military contractors — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies — to develop tactics for sabotaging and spying on the Chamber’s progressive critics. The Chamber attorneys and the security firms discussed targeting ChamberWatch, the SEIU, MoveOn, ThinkProgress, and other groups. The proposals details efforts to steal private computer information, spy on the families of the Chamber’s critics, and plant false documents within organizations opposed to the Chamber’s agenda.
ThinkProgress has uncovered yet another presentation from one of the private security firms describing plans for the Chamber. Because of a technical glitch, a few emails of the 75,000 emails leaked to the public from one of the defense firms did not process. One of the emails now processed correctly reveals yet another proposal, created by HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr, and forwarded to the other security firms. Although it appears not to have been completed, the last slide in the presentation lists tactics — labeled “Discredit, Confuse, Shame, Combat, Infiltrate, Fracture” — to “mitigate [sic] effect of adversarial groups while seeking litigation.” . . .
4. Another indication of the shape of things to come may be found in the draconian measures being implemented by the GOP in Michigan. TV commentator Rachel Maddow set forth some of the delightful features of this program.
Of particular significance for our purposes is the apparent contemplation of these measures as necessary to implement “Shock Doctrine,” as conceived by seastedding maven Patri Friedman’s grandfather Milton.
. . . She described the threat to democracy in Michigan, “Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget in Michigan is expected to cut aid to cities and towns so much that a lot of cities and towns in Michigan are expected to be in dire financial straits. Right now, Gov. Snyder is pushing a bill that would give himself, Gov. Snyder and his administration, the power to declare any town or school district to be in a financial emergency. If a town was declared by the governor and his administration to be in a financial emergency they would get to put somebody in charge of that town, and they want to give that emergency manager that they just put in charge of the town the power to, “reject, modify, or terminate any contracts that the town may have entered in to, including any collective bargaining agreements.”
The bill also has the power to suspend or dismiss elected officials, “This emergency person also gets the power under the bill to suspend or dismiss elected officials. Think about that for a second. Doesn’t matter who you voted for in Michigan. Doesn’t matter who you elected. Your elected local government can be dismissed at will. The emergency person sent in by the Rick Snyder administration could recommend that a school district be absorbed into another school district. That emergency person is also granted power specifically to disincorporate or dissolve entire city governments.”
Maddow said Michigan Republicans want to abolish entire towns, “What year was your town founded? Does it say so like on the town border as you drive into your town? Does it say what year your town was founded? What did your town’s founding fathers and founding mothers have to go through to incorporate your town? Republicans in Michigan want to be able to unilaterally abolish your town and disincorporate it. Regardless of what you as resident of that town think about it. You don’t even have the right to express an opinion about it through your locally elected officials who represent you, because the Republicans in Michigan say they reserve the right to dismiss your measly elected officials and to do what they want instead because they know best.”
What’s worse is that this power to be abolish governments could be handed to corporations, “The version of this bill that passed the Republican controlled Michigan House said it was fine for this emergency power to declare a fiscal emergency invoking all of these extreme powers, it was fine for that power to be held by a corporation. So swaths of Michigan could at the governor’s disposal be handed over to the discretion of a company. You still want your town to exist? Take it up with this board of directors of this corporation that will be overseeing your future now, or rather don’t take it up with them. Frankly, they’re not interested.”
Maddow talked about the power grab behind the fabrication of a fiscal emergency, “The power to overrule and suspend elected government justified by a financial emergency. Oh, and how do you know you’re in a financial emergency, because the governor tells you, you’re in a financial emergency, or a company he hires to do so, does that instead. The Senate version of the bill in Michigan says it has to be humans declaring your fiscal emergency. The House bill says a firm can do that just as well.”
Rachel Maddow concluded, “This is about a lot of things. This is not about a budget. This is using or fabricating crisis to push for an agenda you’d never be able to sell under normal circumstances, and so you have to convince everyone that these are not normal circumstances. These are desperate circumstances and your desperate measures are there for somehow required. What this is has a name. It is called shock doctrine.”
Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine” implies that man made crises are used to push the “free market principles” of Milton Friedman et al, which are pushed through while the citizens are reacting to disasters or upheavals. The perpetrators of the shock doctrine require a violent destruction of the existing economic order in order to achieve their means. In the case of the Michigan governor, Snyder positioned himself in a state already reeling from financial crisis, vulnerable and ripe for a takeover. . . .
5. Something that might be seen as an extension of the GOP plan for Michigan concerns proposals for corporate “charter cities.”
. . . About a decade ago, he walked away from academia, started an online teaching company, sold it and then turned to his next big idea: To create jobs to lift millions out of poverty, take an uninhabited 1,000 square-kilometer tract (386 square miles), about the size of Hong Kong, preferably government-owned. Write a charter: the all-important rules. Allow anyone to move in or out. Invite foreign investors to build infrastructure for profit. And sign a treaty with a well-governed country, say Norway or Canada, to serve as “guarantor” to assure investors and residents that the charter will be respected, much as the British once did for Hong Kong, and—with some oversight from the Honduran Congress—govern the city.
. . . “It’s a mixture of great creativity and great naivety,” says William Easterly, an NYU development economist. He doubts the city, especially if successful, could withstand pressure if the Honduran government turned hostile. Adds Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann: “It would be great if it happened, so we can take a look at the experiment.” He, too, has doubts , and recalls Henry Ford’s failed Fordlandia, which was to be an oasis of U.S. capitalism in Brazil.
Back while Mr. Romer was courting Africans, a group of Hondurans was pondering how to improve their country’s prospects. One idea, a turbo-charged version of existing free-trade zones, was to lure investors to a super-embassy, an area governed by another country’s laws. . . .
“The Quest for a ‘Charter City’ ” by David Wessel; The Wall Street Journal; 2/3/2011.
6. Deutsche Telekom’s spying tactics actualized through that company’s T‑Mobile subsidiary gives us a view as to the use the company might make of its potential access to the A, T & T database. Note that the company (Deutsche Telekom) is controlled by the German government.
The espionage potential of that company gaining access to the A, T & T database would be considerable.
FTR #152 sets forth the profound links between “corporate Germany” and the Bormann capital network.
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”
“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.
Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e‑mail. . . .
7. Meanwhile, hedge fund managers have been investing in arable land, seeking to cash in on anticipated global famine.
. . . But on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he’d met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. “A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay,” said the hedge fund manager. “He’s a year older than I am. We’re somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now.”
“We,” as in, his hedge fund.
It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone’s thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there’s something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad. . . .
The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich
Looks like you misspelled the name for http://www.palantirtech.com/. But a good listen!
@David M: Good catch! Hadn’t noticed it myself. =)
One thing I missed in my analysis of the seastedding movement is the similarity with the Ark of Noah. At least, that’s probably how they see those ships, as if a great flood is coming. It says it all.
Have a great day.
@Claude: Frankly, I see things the same way.......when will the American people wake up?
> when will the American people wake up?
The “American people” are the ones doing all of this mischief. The rest of us are either in their way or supporting and enabling them to grow their empire.
It looks like the Michigan Plan is just getting started.
http://news.yahoo.com/benefits-shut-off-41–000-michigan-welfare-recipients-220800423.html
Here’s an unintentionally comical peek into the inner worlds of the folks like Thiel guiding the shape of things to come:
Reading the news these days, it’s starting to feel like the more a society falls into the hands of folks like the folks we got running the show nowadays, the more that last line becomes a cosmic law.
Here’s a long and very interesting piece on Thiel’s background, his vision for the seasteader movement, and its underlying philosophy:
So all these corporate “citizens” are going to be leaving out in the ocean on abandoned oil rigs retrofitted with no building codes and few weapons restrictions...making this a quite possibly the first planned community ever that uses Mos Eisley’s Cantina as a fundamental building block.
And just FYI to the future inhabitants of these communities, you might want to google something called dead peasant insurance. Something tells me there won’t be many rules against it where your living.
I’d be curious to see the ratio of dictatorship/non-dictatorship proposals put out by these folks (and yes, I know, you can’t divide by zero).
I’ll bet every one of these Seasteader founds are planning their own personal dictatorship-lite paradise right now. I wonder what Thiel’s vision would look like?
@Pterrafractyl: If Peter Thiel is behind the seasteading movement, I wonder who’s behind Peter Thiel? =p
That said, TBH, I always thought floating nations on boats or artificial islands, or what have you, was a cool concept.....the truth about the seasteading movement kinda ruined that fantasy for me, though.
=(
@Steven L.: I know how you feel. I have nothing against assless chapped space pirate Cantina enclaves. But if they’re to be used as wedges to delegitimize democratic societies or create “safe spaces” for bad actors (think of Liechtenstein merged with Pakistan and launched into orbit), now I’m suddenly somewhat anti-assless chapped space pirate Cantina enclaves...at least those particular enclaves.
And now that I think about it, I’m actually opposed to assless chapped space pirate Cantina enclaves in general. I mean, the assless chaps with the pirate outfits probably work on some level, but space piracy just sounds like a bad idea (except when it’s not!).
@Pterrafractyl: Yep, yep.
On the other hand, at least we might be able to find a floating Vegas one of these days, LOL(hey, if it’s run by a legitimate business and not an Underground Reich mob outfit.......) !
It looks like HBGary might have some competition:
The prospect of mining in space is extremely tempting for a ton of reasons, including the avoidance of trashing the biosphere. But I am a bit wary of just who we’re going to allow to become the space robber barons when a single asteroid deposit could be worth more than than the GDP of most continents. Then again, a single find of the right rare metals could obliterate existing earth-based mineral cartels. I’m not looking forward to the property-rights battles. Maybe there really is a market of orbital space-pirate cantinas?
Wow, so NASA spends billions developing the technology required for robotic mining and then decides to “hand off” the mission of extracting those materials for
profitseconomic and scientific treasure to the private sector and even offers to do contract work for these contractors. I hope these companies remember that public sector kindness when it comes to taxing their treasure trove (ROFLMAO!)Egads, it looks like Newt was calling for lunar mining colonies back in 1984. It also looks like the the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 sort of allows mining, but it’s ambiguous, so that will probably change soon.
PayPal co-founder Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, just got an awesome boost today. Paul Allen wants to build the worlds biggest plane and launch those rockets from 30,000 feet:
I wonder how many they’ll make and what else they can carry. . You have to wonder what else that thing can be used to carry. I guess the closest thing to a rocket is a an intercontinental ballistic missile, so that’s one interesting possible application. And I suppose it could carry a really really big anti-missile laser. I some non-missile related stuff too I’m sure.
The AT&T/T‑mobile merger was just called off. I’m sure Deutsche Telekom is distraught:
More
floating villagesOceanic data collection platforms are hitting the seas this year:I don’t know why these billionaires are so worried about accusations of ostentatious living. It’s not as if ALL super yachts are covered in gold and platinum.
Newt has a Big Idea. I think it means he’s substantive or something:
Well, on the plus side, at least the Native Mooninite’s probably can’t catch smallpox
This looks like an “Uh oh” moment heading for Mitten’s campaign: it’s being reported that his old firm, Bain Capital (which still holds a huge chunk of his fortune), recently purchased a surveillance-camera division from a Chinese company heavily involved in the Chinese government’s “Safe Cities” (by spying on everything) program. At least Panantir will have some competition in the “Big Brother Tech” department and competition = “healthy”, right?
@Pterrafractyl: Romney is such a f****** hypocrite, claiming that he’s against suppression in China while giving cold hard cash to a company BASED IN CHINA, that is helping their government with the universal surveillance program! Unbelievable. Romney? Hah. Somebody at Democratic Underground, btw, invented a nickname for him(purely by accident believe it or not!)....and that would be ‘Rmoney’. Makes sense to me....LMAO. xD
Apparently, as part of an inevitable societal reconsideration of our rights to privacy, the dishwasher gets to spy on you for the CIA:
So in addition to turning our appliances into the stasi, the CIA also wants to develop technology that will be able to wipe the internet of all info related to a target individual. Nothing creepy about that.
So are calls for sovereign libertarian space colonies going to become a permanent fixture in our political discourse or is this just a phase?
I’ve sometimes wondered if one of the long term strategic objectives of destroying the environment while simultaneously pushing overpopulation of the planet was to eventually force humanity into a situation where all societies have to make the decision “who lives and who dies? We have no choice, there’s just no enough left to go around” (the eugenicist’s dream). But as this article suggests, we might be asking “Who lives? Who Dies? And who gets modified?” (the high-tech eugenicist’s dream).
The authors of the published paper appear to be taken aback by the controversy that erupted over their proposal to have humanity embrace a slew of genetic modification to adapt to a rapidly change environment. As they point out, their proposals include the precaution that all individuals would be free to choice which modifications they want. The article doesn’t indicate if their proposal also involves making the modifications themselves free. Aside from all the other ethical concerns about this proposal, a “free-market of genetic modifications” doesn’t seem like the best solution for a degraded ecology. I bet Peter Thiel just loves these guys.
It’s worth recalling that yesterday’s Facebook IPO had some folks near the Kremin smiling too:
So a figure close to the Kremin owns a sizable share of Facebook, and Facebook happens to be one of the main outlets used by the anti-Putin protesters. I’m sure there’s nothing for the protesters to worry about.
Big Brother just got another excuse for his voyeurism obsession...apparently we’re better people when we know we’re being watched by security cameras according to a recent study that focused on security cameras in public settings. It will be interesting to see what happens to peoples’ behavior on the interwebs once everyone finally realizes that it’s all being watched. While there might be a reduction in some bad behaviors — like calling our control-freak elites nasty names like “control-freak elites” — there’s also a distinct possibility of the collapse of the global digital economy...something like this, but in reverse. ;)
A recent NY Times investigative report on the trend of for-profit prisons, jails, and halfway houses in the US found a rather surprising problem with a private company running halfway houses in New Jersey: prisoners escaping with apparent ease from halfway houses with only months left on their sentences. Dangerous conditions were a frequent reason given by recaptured prisoners. Now, if there was actually competition in this type of privatization, there might be an incentive to improve these conditions. But, of course, there isn’t, so the private prison industry looks like it’s going to continue having a problem with escaped prisoners(blustering aside). Fortunately (for the industry) it looks like some innovative entrepreneurs have come up with a brilliant way to ensure an endless stream of new prisoners into the system: criminalize the poor on probation profitably:
With the way things are going with this privatization mania, you almost have to expect to see towns start privatizing their entire governments.
Ah, there we go.
Great. Climate researchers just found that the ice sheet melt in Greenland was going at an unprecedented rate in July. At first they thought the data showing melting across 97% of the ice caps was was a mistake. It wasn’t. Let’s hope we can say the same about the glaring mistakes humanity is making in our stewardship of the entire biosphere:
Nothing to worry about here. All those protestors in Bahrain were no doubt criminal terrorists:
Awwww...poor FinSpy. After the Mubarak regime collapsed they lost a customer (if only Mubarak had bought FinSpy earlier). Oh well, I’m sure Egypt’s new government will still be interested in FinSpy’s services:
Posted here (see Pterrafractyl’s March 18 post above) as the only Spitfire mention of ex-CIA chief General David Petraeus:
Some questions about the General’s 11/9 demise:
Theory: Did Petraeus resign due to Benghazi — OR was Benghazi itself a set-up to eliminate Petraeus?
Petraeus could easily have run for President in 2016.
Ostensibly, Petraeus was a Republican. I have my doubts about that.
Nevertheless, Petraeus would have likely run as a Republican.
Petraeus’ meteoric career rise took a boost from Bush when he was assigned to lead the Iraq debacle. Subsequently, he was re-assigned by Obama to the Afghanistan debacle.
In both cases, he was assigned (first by a Republican, and then by a “Democrat”) to a career-suicide assignment. A lesser general’s career might have been seriously damaged by situations that should have lost control further than they did.
Neither of the two “career assassination attempts” succeeded.
Finally, Obama assigned him to lead the CIA.
On a side note, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair was also in the news this week — removed from duty due to an “extramarital affair”.
Whether or not the affairs in question took place are a moot point.
My question is: Cui bono? Who benefits from the elimination of Petraeus?
I say that both Team Bush and the Pentagon and Team Obama (all the same team) have much to gain from the career assassination of Petraeus. But the question of Benghazi has nothing to do with Obama’s gain, as is being speculated by the feverish right-wing. Obama gains much more than that.
Also being missed is the significance of the date:
Benghazi happened on 9/11. Petraeus’ assassination happened on 11/9. (Dave has covered 11/9 as a significant date in Nazi mythology, and Germanic supremacist lore dating back to the 1800s; “11/9” is how 9/11 is written in Europe, where the date is signified before the month number).
Republicans were never interested in what their president knew on 9/11 or about forewarnings given to Bush. Their sudden interest in crippling Obama for the exact same reasons on the same date will fizzle out as a scandal, whether or not it deserves to.
Hence the elimination of Petraeus becomes a clean getaway. Like the JFK assassination, members of both parties had a noteworthy interest in his demise. And Petraeus: Cui bono?
And don’t forget, there is another precedent for this:
Shortly after Bush’s 2004 “re-election”, Bush got rid of CIA chief Porter Goss and Deputy Director Dusty Foggo. The scandal at that time was “Hookergate” — along the lines of the Franklin Scandal, but without any reported children involved ( ... that we know of ... ). Allegedly, at the Watergate Hotel, prominent government figures were lured into poker games which involved prostitutes & cocaine (and probably other things) which were reportedly filmed for blackmail behind a two-way mirror.
(Note that this scandal has been almost scrubbed from the Internet, with little of the more significant details still extant in any of the remaining Internet material).
Who was Porter Goss? What was his role in or knowledge of 9/11? Florida was Goss’ home state as a Congressman before he was elevated to head CIA. Venice, Florida (and other Florida locations) was where the alleged terrorists were bootlegged (and probable CIA/German BND asset Mohammed Atta) through the “flight school” that has CIA connections.
Remember where Goss was on the morning of 9/11. Why was Goss similarly eliminated, directly after Bush’s “re-election”? The parallels between the demise of Goss and of Petraeus are remarkably similar.
From memory, as I recall,the “5 B’s” whose influence should never be underestimated; bullets, beds, bribes, bombs, and blackmail.
@R. Wilson:
Here’s a good article that covers much of the weirdness that’s emerged in the Petraeus resignation story in just the last day. And here’s another summary article that comes complete with a “love pentagon” diagram. One interesting tidbit that was left out of both is the fact that Natalie Khawan, Jill Kelley’s identical twin sister that lives with her in Tampa, is also a lawyer that specializes in whistleblower cases in law school. I haven’t seen any info on what actual whistleblowing cases she’s ever worked on, but hopefully it didn’t involve whistleblowers in the military with accusations against high-ranking officers because there might be some conflict of interest. This is definitely one of the more bizarre sex-related stories we’ve seen come out of a powerful networks in a while (if you don’t count all of this. Or this.)
@Robert Wilson–
Good catch with the 9/11–11/9 link.
I’ll be posting about the Petraeus affair soon–it’s in process.
Consider what’s happening at the BBC right now and examine the passage from Sun-Tzu in FTR #366, quoted by Gehlen in his autobiography.
Consider also the long-term subversion of the Anglo-Saxon world by the Underground Reich.
You can bet that the BBC scandals aren’t reinforcing Britons’ sense of civic pride and patriotism.
Best,
Dave Emory
Oooo....the National Intelligence Council just published its “Global Trends 2030” report on what the world will likely look like in a couple of decades. Big shocker, it’ll be like today but with more thirst, hunger, and poverty:
OK, so let’s see...according to the report, the big looming threat facing the developing world is that there won’t be enough kids to keep our “growth forever!” economic system chugging while nearly half the global population is expected to face severe food and water shortages. Also, the “Black Swan” event that could really mess things up is faster than expected climate change, but at least the US should be able to frack its way to energy independence. As they say, you can’t fix stupid, so hopefully the neuro-enhancements also predicted in the report might help. We’re going to need ALL the help we can possibly get.
Glenn’s Gulch is on the drawing board:
Ooooo...David Barton is going to help with the “deprogramming” center. That should be, um, “educational”.
You have to wonder if Glenn’s Gulch will get an embassy here:
And the privatization of global security continues, this time with privateers:
One can see why Peter Thiel & Friends are so keen on creating their own island nations...what, with abuses like this routinely taking place year after year who wouldn’t want to leave?
The CIA’s venture capital firm just bought a company that develops software capable of interpreting data and writing text summaries well enough that it’s already by some newspapers. It sounds like it’s going to be useful in analyzing and summarizing the vast volumes of data the intelligence community deals with. So, just FYI, Skynet is learning how to read and write:
While it sounds like “Quill” will have a lot of immediately useful applications in dealing with “big data” needs described above, there are quite a few other intelligence-related areas where having software with the ability to analyze data and write text might come in handy.
[...] our last post, we noted that, in addition to Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir (Thiel associate Alex Karp) had German roots. The available evidence suggests that they [...]
In case anyone was curious about whether Seasteader-in-chief Patri Friedman publicly endorses the neoreactionary/Dark Enlightenment movement here’s a recent Facebook post by Friedman on just this topic
Great, so Friedman is going to develop the kinder, gentler version of a philosophy that’s tailored for the rich and powerful and deeply anti-democratic at its core? Well, good luck with that Patri. These kinds of things are easier said than done.
Oh look, a transhumanist Libertarian wrote a children’s book. What wisdoms might be passed along to the next generation?
Listen to your wise Libertarian elders, kids. They really really care about life. Well, specifically, their own lives. And if you follow their lead you might be able to enjoy the future hellscape the Libertarian philosophy is creating for a long long time. You probably won’t be getting many lessons about sharing the limited resources on the planet with other living things but that may not really be an issue. Your elders are trying to stop themselves from dying from of old age. They aren’t ending death.
Here’s a reminder that every time an expensive, cutting edge transhumanist technology gets rolled out, the world’s yawning wealth gap includes a new biology gap too:
“It will be used like caffeine and amphetamines to increase production—mother’s little helper...In the future, the number of jobs will decline due to robots and those who don’t have to sleep as much will have a huge advantage.”
Well, workaholics should at least have something to look forward to: First, the anti-sleep technology is so advanced that only the wealthy will be able to afford it. But as the cost of the technology declines and its availability becomes more widespread, the anti-sleep technology is just going to be one of those things the rest of us simply need to use in order to compete with the everyone for the shrinking number of non-robot-dominated jobs. That’s right, in the future, you’re either going to be one of the poor sleeping masses or a non-sleeping non-robot.
So it’s looking like the global elite on track to become one giant unregulated experiment on what happens with the most powerful people on the planet systematically sleep deprive themselves with an array of technologies. And that’s just one of the potential transhumanist technologies we could see over the next 50 years. There are plenty of other technologies, each with their own potential impacts on the wealth/biology gap, coming through the pipeline.
From the moment the news of the unexpected passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia become public, the fight over who should replace him on the court suddenly became the biggest question in American politics, as happens when a Supreme Court justice dies. And, of course, the conspiracy theories that Scalia was bumped off by Obama were started a moment later. That was pretty much guaranteed.
So it’s worth noting that one area of emerging technologies could make future Supreme Court nomination fights like this a lot less frequent, although it might make the conspiracy theories surrounding any Supreme Court justice deaths, or any deaths for that matter, somewhat more frequent:
“But forget immortality. Living beyond 100 years old will be routine in the near future; the new generation of supercentenarians is likely alive today, and will still be around in 2100.”
Just imagine, if Calico pulls some sort of longevity breakthrough in the near future, you’ll never retire and John Roberts will be the Supreme Court Chief Justice forever. And if he does shed his mortal coil, it must have been some sort of foul play! Vampires don’t just spontaneously keel over. It’s not like they’re 79 year olds with chronic heart conditions.
If an immortal John Roberts sounds like some sort of judicial hell on Earth future scenario, keep in mind that some immortality technologies could indeed make hell on Earth scenarios sort of a reality. At least if it involves uploading your brain into a computer or something. And should that ever happen, the Supreme Court is probably going to get a lot of cases involving judicial hells on earth:
“Nuclear war could come tomorrow. Those of us who survive it might spend the rest of our days in misery. But that misery would be relatively short. Radical life extension via mind uploads would seem to risk inconceivably long, possibly endless misery. And this holds even if no future generation deliberately inflicts that misery.”
Yep, while fears of hell typically involve dying first, who knows, maybe transhumanist immortality technology without a suicide switch could one day make hell a reality. It’s the kind of thought that should give us pause as we “summon the Demon” of artificial intelligence. If we don’t want to suffer indefinitely as a digital consciousness, our future A.I. critters probably won’t appreciate it either. Hopefully the Supreme Court will have something to say about that at some point.
But in the mean time, while you should be breathing a sigh of relief that Antonin Scalia’s mind hasn’t been immortalized so it can rule from the bench for centuries to come, you should probably also be breathing a sigh of relief that you aren’t a disembodied consciousness trapped in a machine either. Sure, you might not be able to see all the fascinating Supreme Court precedents that will be in an age of immortal man-machines if you don’t upload your mind, but at least you won’t get tormented indefinitely by the Sys Admins of the future.
Yes, this wasn’t a very cheery thought experiment, but it could have been worse!
The arrest of Steve Bannon over fraud charges issued by federal prosecutors in the South District of New York (SDNY) involving fundraising for a group that was ostensibly going to be building a wall on the US-Mexico border is understandably dominating US political headlines today. The fact that Bannon was arrested while he was on a yacht owned by Guo Wengui, the Chinese billionaire who is Bannon’s key partner in generating anti-China propaganda, off the cost of Connecticut only adds to the intrigue given that SDNY investigators are still looking into Bannon’s relationship with Guo.
In one sense, getting charged with fraudulently raising funds to privately build a border wall is quite a turn of events for someone like Bannon who entered into the Trump White House pledging to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’. The privatization and eventual fraudulent rigging of government services has long been a Republican Party project, after all, so directly raising funds for a private initiative that would carry out Trump’s policies is kind of the next logical awful step in that agenda. But getting arrested for fraud was obviously never part the plan and that’s part of what makes this the kind of story that probably has President Trump even more on edge about the perils of losing the White House because it’s a big reminder that even someone like Bannon, who was Trump’s national security advisor not too long ago, might end up getting charged with federal crimes for their gross malfeasance. And gross malfeasance is basically the Trump administration’s unifying theme. Plus a number of Trump’s inner circle, including Don Jr., have been open supporters of the “We Build the Wall” scam project. Given the growing alarm over Trump’s preemptive moves to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election it’s going to be interesting to see if the Trump administration’s sabotage of the election ramps up even more in response to these charges.
So with Bannon’s yacht arrest taking place in the midst of a growing Trumpian election sabotage agenda, perhaps now is a good time to get an update on the status of the Seasteading movement. After all, if you’re a world leader in fear of arrest after you leave office imagine how convenient it would be if there were all sorts of floating mini ‘sovereign states’ owned by fascists like Peter Thiel where you could flee to after leaving office. And back in June we got such an update: The Seasteading movement continue, although it doesn’t appear that its initial backers like Peter Thiel are still openly financing it (continuing secret funding is another question). Author and self-appointed “seavangelist”, Joe Quirk, now runs the Seasteading Institute. As we might expect, the movement is using the coronavirus pandemic as a new justification for Seastead: If you’re scared of the coronavirus flee to a Seastead!
They’re also pitching the Seasteads as a means for small island nations to deal with rising oceans and climate change as well as a means of restoring coastal environments by acting as artificial reefs. Interest in using Seasteads to deal with climate change even got one group close to getting permission from the government of French Polynesia to agree to the creation of a Seastead off the coast of the country. The deal fell through, however, once the French Polynesian government realized that the Seasteaders were far more interested in creating a libertarian sovereign state right off the coast as opposed to actually helping the country prepare for climate change. That rejection by French Polynesia, in turn, led one of the figures involved with the project, Collins Chen, to shift his entire Seasteading vision away from creating Libertarian sovereign float city-states and instead turned it into basically an engineer project where existing cities would use Seastead technology to expand their footprint into coastal areas at the same time the coastal environment is renewed. Even the UN has expressed interest in the Seasteads-as-artificial-reefs model for dealing with rising oceans, with the United Nations’ sustainable development arm, UN-Habitat, hosting a round table discussion for Chen’s project in April 2019.
Still, there appears to be plenty of remaining Seasteaders who are intent on creating their Libertarian sovereign mini-states including a project in Panama that centers around building a giant 3D printer to print new Seastead units. The plan is to have each unit registered as a boat and flying the Panamanian flag and rented on a time-share basis. The idea is that if it proves to be an economic success the offshore community will grow large and powerful enough to eventually strike out on its own. So there just might be a few sovereign mini-states for Trump administration figures to flee to in the future, but probably not soon. Might the Trump administration suddenly take an interest in allowing sovereign Seasteads (specifically ones without an extradition treat with the US) off the US coast in coming months? We’ll see, but as the following stories of Seasteading make clear, it doesn’t actually take long to set up a mini-Seastead. Physically getting the infrastructure in place isn’t the hard part. It’s getting a government to agree to allow something like that off their coasts that’s the hard part:
““Coronavirus is an opportunity to show the world that what we’re building is actually going to be very useful in the future,” says Chad Elwartowski, in a recent video post from his beachside base in Panama. The Michigan-born software engineer turned bitcoin trader is a leading figure in the seasteading movement, a libertarian group dedicated to building independent floating cities on the high seas. Along with the bunker builders and survivalist preppers, their long-held ambitions have been bolstered by the current global pandemic. “No matter if you’re scared of the virus or the reaction to the virus,” he adds, “living out on the ocean will be helpful for these situations.””
No matter what the problem — whether or be a pandemic of a government response to a pandemic — living on the ocean is the solution. That’s the Seasteader pitch. A pitch from someone who was chased off the coast of Thailand last year after he set up a six metre-wide fiberglass cabin on a floating pole 12 nautical miles from Phuket. It’s an example of one of paradoxes of Seasteading: in order to set up a sovereign mini-state you need the approval of an actual sovereign state first:
And it’s that paradox that appears to have ultimate sunk the 2017 agreement between the Seasteading Institute and French Polynesia. The government wanted a solution to climate change and rising sea levels but the Seasteaders just wanted a spot to set up their eventually-sovereign floating experiment:
Will the Seasteaders eventually find a government that’s willing to sponsor an aspiring sovereign state off their coasts? We can’t rule it out. Let’s not forget that the Charter City concept sounds awfully similar to state-sponsored quasi-autonomous Seasteads, at least in terms of creating a kind of special economic-zones. So we probably shouldn’t be surprised if a government somewhere decides to indulge in this kind project. If the Seasteaders weren’t so consistently hyper-greedy they probably could have bribed the required government officials somewhere by now to make it happen. Plus, while having a Seastead off the coast of your own country is probably just asking for trouble, if claiming “unclaimed waters” is part of the plan it’s conceivable that sponsored Seastead communities could be seen by some nations as a means of colonization and indirect force projection over the planet’s oceans. It’s one of the grand ironies of the movement that its likeliest path to success probably comes by finding a way to make themselves very useful to existing governments. And for the next few months the idea of independent new offshore micro-nations (without extradition treaties with the US) is an idea that could be very tempting to the Trump administration. Will Peter Thiel finally get his Seastead, perhaps with US government support, in coming months? We’ll see, but if it happens thanks to Trump it will probably come with the very high price of having to put up with some very annoying permanent houseguests.
With all of the alarm in DC over the revelations about General Mark Milley’s phone calls to China over concerns about then-President Trump’s mental stability and alarm in China over the prospect of Trump launching a nuclear first-strike on China, it’s worth noting the dangerous, potentially world-ending, psychology described in another recently published book about one of the most powerful people in the United States: Peter Thiel.
At least that’s the general picture of Thiel’s psychology described in the following except of the new book The Contrarian, a biography of Thiel by Max Chafkin. It’s not really a new picture of Thiel. Just a little clearer than what we’ve received so far. A well known picture of someone who cares about absolutely nothing other than self-enrichment and self-empowerment, staying true to the philosophy of his idol Ayn Rand. But what’s new is the apparent paranoia held by Thiel. Paranoia that he appears to deal with by accruing more and more political power.
And that’s why the questions currently being asked about just what was Donald Trump ready to do to keep his grip on power shouldn’t be limited to questions about Donald Trump. Thiel is a kind of one-man ‘Deep State’ of his own at this point, after all,. His relationship with the US government only appears to be deepening as time goes by. So if insane gambits that risk the well-being of everyone is something we’re now suddenly worried, we should probably start asking whether or not there are any psychological limits to what Peter Thiel is willing to do to achieve his goals. Long-term goals of acquiring as much wealth and power as possible while living forever paired with the more immediate goals of not being punished for the crimes he’s committed on the way:
“But Trump’s presidency would not end badly for Thiel, who didn’t comment for this article, adapted from my forthcoming book, The Contrarian. Thiel’s companies would win government contracts, and his net worth would soar—and it would, crucially, remain in the legal tax shelter that he’s spent half his career trying to protect. As a venture capitalist, Thiel had made it his business to find up-and-comers, invest in their success, and then sell his stock when it was financially advantageous to do so. Now he was doing the same with a U.S. president.”
One of America’s top fascist oligarchs got A LOT wealthier during the Trump presidency. That’s one of the key takeaways from this new biography on Thiel. And in our pseudo-democratic oligarchic version of contemporary America wealth = power. Wealth and political connections. And Thiel had both in spades for the past four years.
It’s also notable that it was Steve Bannnon who was apparently Thiel’s closest ally in the Trump administration, and yet Bannon comes off as a kind of moderating force in the early months of the Trump transition and administration, reigning in Thiel’s “out there’ ideas on ‘disrupting government’:
Now, regarding Palantir’s involvement in the creation of the Cambridge Analytica mass-data harvesting scheme and the claims by Alfredas Chmieliauskas — the Palantir employee credited with floating the idea — that his bosses were fully on board with the idea, in’s important to recall the reports describing a situation at Palantir where there employees realized the Cambridge Analytica scheme might create a legal loophole that would allow them to pass along all that Facebook user data to the NSA, getting around legal barriers to such data collection. Palantir apparently had big plans for Cambridge Analytica. Very big plans that involved acting as a proxy for the US national security state. It raises the disturbing question of whether or not this kind of ‘creative’ interpretation of the law is part of Palantir’s appeal to government clients:
Then there’s Thiel’s keen interest in effectively getting Palantir access to the volumes of NIH data. While Thiel didn’t succeed in getting NIH chief Francis Collins replaced, he’s still managed to get Palantir’s foot in the door. It’s just a matter of time before the US government decides to give Palantir access to that treasure trove of data:
Interestingly, it also sounds like Palantir may have played a previously unknown role in promoting the ‘stolen election’ narrative following the 2020 election. It raises the significant questions about just what Thiel’s role has been with respect to the to Trump’s insurrection/coup schemes. Has Thiel been whispering in Trump’s ear about stolen elections? The guy obviously has a massive investment in keep Trump in office:
It’s also just kind of notable that this man who has accrued an ever-growing fortune based on technology investments doesn’t actually seem to have a strong technical background. Don’t forget his background is in philosophy and law. So Thiel’s big innovations were apparently in the successful implementation of modern-day monopolies:
But it’s when we get to the story of Thiel’s ‘legal’ illegal tax sheltered retirement account where we get to the part of this Thiel biography that points towards some potentially very scary future scenarios: Thiel’s wealth might actually be far more than the current $5 billion estimations. But much of that wealth is tied up in a tax-shelter scheme that, on the one hand, appears to be entirely illegal. But on the other hand, no one has actually charged Thiel for engaging in it. Hidden wealth that includes Thiel’s millions of shares in Palantir. Thiel has possibly tens of billions of dollars socked away in retirement account account that arguably shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Starting in 1999, Thiel because using his Roth IRA to purchase shares in companies he was directly involved with for as little as a thousandth of a penny per share. Al of those shares can eventually be sold, tax free. The only legal justification for the tactic was to rely on the fact that Thiel didn’t technically own more than 50% of the shares of these companies. He effectively ran the companies, and in fact forced Palantir to loan him the money to buy these artificially cheap shares, but relied on that legal loophole to argue that he didn’t own the companies. So Thiel has tens of billions of dollars in shares he illegally acquired, but since the law doesn’t actually apply to super-wealthy individuals like Thiel he’s been able to get by with these scheme for over two decades:
But at some point he’s going to have to cash out of that IRA. What’s going to happen then? It’s the kind of question that reportedly has Thiel feeling very paranoid. All the more paranoid after a 2014 GAO announcement that it was looking into 314 taxpayers who had done exactly what Thiel had done and recommended that Congress crack down on the practice. And while Thiel was never formally sanctioned for this practice, the reality is that his IRA fortune remains on such questionable legal footing that a range of scenarios could put that fortune in peril. The IRS could reinterpret the rules and force him to pay taxes on the entire account. Or disgruntled former employees could reveal the lie that Thiel didn’t control these companies. And having this legal Sword of Damocles hanging over his head appears to have made Thiel even more paranoid than he already was. This was in 2014, and it’s hard to ignore the reality that Thiel’s big plunge into Republican politics didn’t really start until after 2014. At least not in a big way:
Yes, the man running the privatized NSA and who cares about nothing more than wealth and power has been feeling threatened by the government — due to the legal peril he created for himself years earlier — and responded by diving into US politics and embedding himself in the White House. A modern day privatized J. Edgard Hoover. What could possibly go wrong?
And keep in mind that this is Peter Thiel we’re talking about here. A guy with the goal of living forever, damn the consequences to anyone or anything else, who set out to create independent city-states to government oversight and become a kind of neo-monarch. The guy has been openly living like a super-villain for years. It’s hard to think of someone more likely to be working on some sort of doomsday weapon that he can use to blackmail the world. In other words, odds are his sleazy IRA tax shelter scheme isn’t the only project he’s worried about the government sticking its nose into. We’ll see. Or at least Palantir will see. The rest of us probably won’t see, at least not until it’s too late.
It’s back. Not that it ever really left. But it has a new champion, albeit with the same old backers. Yes, Seasteading is back. Not necessarily on the sea this time. The plan is more for an autonomous sovereign charter city. Probably somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. Maybe Italy. Maybe Morocco. Those are all the kinds of details that have yet to be decided by The Praxis Society, founded in 2019 by Californian Dryden Brown and former Boston College wide receiver Charlie Callinan with a goal of creating an autonomous libertarian enclave. As we’re going to see, Brown is basically a proud fascist. The kind of ‘libertarian’ who views monarchy as the best option for maintaining ‘liberty’.
Interestingly, 2019 was also the year Pronomos Capital was founded with the goal of building libertarian cities. Pronomos’s backers included Peter Thiel and has none other than Patri Friedman as its founding director. Other Praxis backers include Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Silicon Valley investor Balaji Srinivasan, and Bedrock Capital, a fund launched by a former partner in Thiel’s Founders Fund (Geoff Lewis), and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research are also involved. This is a good time to recall Lonsdale’s involvement with OpenGov, a company offering government management software designed to help local governments manage data. Will these autonomous cities be run on OpenGove software? Also recall how we’ve now learned that the ‘Effective Altruism’ movement was planning on buying a small island nation and building a bunker for its members to survive and expected global apocalypse. So it appears Seasteading is back, and with a more realistic vision this time. No more floating cities. The game now is finding a country willing to hand these wealthy investors the land to build their neo-feudal libertarian paradise.
But it’s also important to recognize the new political context for this project: this is happening at the same time the Republican Party is increasingly embracing the politics of post-democracy and insurrection, with former President Trump currently on track to turning his 2024 race into an existential crisis of democracy. It’s the kind of context that should be kept in mind when we read the following quote from Bedrock’s Geoff Lewis explaining his investment: “Hopefully we can fix these wonderful, extraordinary Western societies that are quite broken right now. If we can’t, some folks would like some options to go exit to.”:
“Praxis, a for-profit corporation, was founded as Bluebook Cities in 2019 by Californian Dryden Brown and former Boston College wide receiver Charlie Callinan. They envisioned an autonomous enclave where the free-market dreams of Chicago and Austrian school economists would become reality, a place libertarians could settle without the tyranny of regulation. While the project draws inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome, Brown, the company’s CEO, said in a 2021 interview that its style would be “hero futurism” with a “neo-Gilded Age kind of aesthetic.””
It’s like Seasteading, but with a “hero futurism” style and a “neo-Gilded Age kind of aesthetic”. An autonomous enclave where libertarians could settle without the ‘tyranny of regulation’. That appears to be the grand vision behind Praxis, the company founded as Bluebook Cities in 2019 by Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan. But as we can see, while Brown is serving as the animating force behind this project, it has backing from the ‘usual suspects’, with roughly $4 million raised from Pronomos Capital alone. Pronomos, also started in 2019, has the backing of not just Peter Thiel but Patri Friedman is its founding director. Palantir co-found Joe Lonsdale is also backing Praxis. Recall Lonsdale’s involvement with OpenGov, a company offering government management software designed to help local governments manage data. And then there’s investments from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. Recall how we’ve now learned that the ‘Effective Altruism’ movement was planning on buying a small island nation and building a bunker for its members to survive and expected global apocalypse. As we can see, this is far from just Brown’s and Callinan’s Seasteading-like fantasy. It’s the next generation of Seasteading. Seemingly without a floating city this time. So it’s basically plans for a charter city, but fully autonomous and sovereign somehow:
And as we should expect, Dryden Brown is a total fascist, albeit a shy fascist. He’s clearly not comfortable fully embracing it to the public. But he’s also clearly a fascist. Because of course he is. It would be bizarre if he wasn’t, all things considered:
So where is this autonomous city state going to be set up? Well, it appears they’ve settle on Morocco or Italy. And maybe Montenegro. It would be interesting to now how Italy’s proto-fascist prime minister Georgia Meloni feels about these plans:
This is also a good time to recall that recent story about Charles Haywood, the wannabe-Caesar who was involved with Claremont Institute’s simulations that weirdly predicted Jan 6 and mass political violence around the 2020 election and who is now preparing to become a kind of warlord with a private military force to be used after law and order breaks down. You have to wonder if Haywood is involved with Praxis yet. If not, it seems like just a matter of time. Because there’s clearly a powerful wannabe-warlord impulse at work here. With some of the most powerful wannabe-warlords in the world looking to scratch that itch.