The Pentagon Is Running An Investment Bank
What could go wrong?
Links are at the end, in the Cone of Silence.
I don’t know why but I’m feeling like Wile E. Coyote at the end of a vignette, so things could be a little sparse around here.
“In recent months, the Pentagon has moved to provide loans, guarantees, and other financial instruments to technology companies it considers crucial to national security — a step beyond the grants and contracts it normally employs.”
The Office of Strategic Capital doesn’t functionally exist yet, and the Intercept says the full scope of its powers is yet to be determined, but it’s meant to provide the war department with investment banking-like opportunities to help out the venture capital world. The Bidennaires have requested $115 million for the definitely-not-a-bailout-fund.1
One of the organization’s champions is hundred-millionaire Mark Warner, who prior to his gubernatorial and Senate gigs founded and ran a large investment company with money he made by acquiring cellular frequency licenses from the federal government and selling them on, and who was a leader in undermining the Dodd-Frank post-2008 bank regulations, which may or may not have accelerated the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
Anyway. The Pentagon is gonna be an investment bank, purely for national security purposes. Hayek would be appalled.
“We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.”
I mean sure, we can, but what would they care. The writer, Joe Fassler, thinks shaming billionaires into using their superyachts and private jets more responsibly would serve as an incentive for the rest of us to be more conscious of our own carbon footprints.2
Fassler mentions Jeff Bezos’s superyacht, the three-master Koru, as an example of what’s possible in the realm of reducing carbon emissions among the grotesquely rich.
Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new [clean-ish] technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.
There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’ newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.
We talked a bit about the Koru yesterday, and the superyacht’s superyacht, the 240-foot motor yacht Abeona, which will be out there spewing carbon with the best of them as it tends to the Koru’s needs. Fassler was evidently unaware of the support ship.3
Bezos, it should be noted, wanted to dismantle a historic Rotterdam bridge in the process of getting his toy from the shipyard to somewhere close to the sea, because the bridge couldn’t accommodate the schooner’s masts. The ship would have fit under the bridge without the masts, and ultimately made its way without the masts by another route, but Bezos, it seems, was looking for a transgressive frisson.4
Local citizens promised a mass egging in response to his original plan, which probably helps explain why the shipyard avoided the bridge in question altogether.
Anyway, a guy with a private rocket company probably wouldn’t be the best example of a low-carbon billionaire even without the dual superyachts.
“Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting.”
I have negative interest in Britain’s royal family, but this London Review of Books take on the red-headed prince’s autobiography is damned entertaining, as you might expect from an essay titled "Off His Royal Tits."5
Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.
The LRB permits a limited number of free reads, so if you’re not a habitual user Andrew O’Hagan’s piece may be (will be, if you’re a subscriber) accessible.
“Yevgeny Prigozhin, boss of the Russian government’s semi-private, arm’s-length alternative army, Wagner, likes to make videos.”
That’s James Meek, writing, also in the London Review of Books, about Prigozhin’s TikTok-like war videos.6
Prigozhin’s face glows like a Christmas ham. ‘If before we were fighting the professional Ukrainian army,’ he says, ‘today we see ever more old men and children.’ The camera pans left. Alongside Prigozhin and his bodyguard stand three men identified as Ukrainian prisoners, arrayed from shortest to tallest, shivering with cold or terror or both. One is old, with a bare head and a full white beard, looking in this light like a peasant from an Ilya Repin painting. The others are barely out of their teens, with pinched faces and hunched shoulders, their thin green beanies pulled down over their ears.
The Wagner head seems to be frank about the casualties his soldiers have suffered, and often blames them, says Meek, on the Russian war department’s failure to maintain munition supply lines and other support for the private army. Meek also says that while some among Prigozhin’s audience think the criticism is evidence of his good standing with Putin, others think it represents the opposite.
‘If he had a direct line to Putin ... he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on Fox News, for example, or other places trying to talk to Trump.’
I don’t imagine Trump would have started an overseas adventure like Putin’s in Ukraine, but can you imagine the media frenzy, around him and around others outside a Trump administration, if he did? I wonder if he’d get the usual war bump from the press. Respect due the Commander in Chief kind of thing; the office, not the man.
Probably, right?
“[A] president can't pardon someone for a state crime, only for federal offenses. But Biden can eliminate federal complaints. He can set a tone. He can be, in a way Trump never was, presidential.”
Oh, come the fuck on.7
People like this helped inspire my proposed constitutional amendment requiring an automatic five years in prison for presidents immediately following their tenure.
Music
Fever Ray is Karin Dreijer, who was also a co-founder of performance group The Knife, which we featured here not too long ago. She’s also a record producer, and her own stuff is thoroughly produced. The linked video is not a modest one.
Fever Ray, “Radical Romantics;”8 Sevdaliza, “Shabrang.”9
That, Comrades, is all there is
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