You And What Army?

So you want to be a billionaire publisher...

Doc sent me news about Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram who is worth nearly 15 billion and now sits in detention somewhere in France. The situation reminds me of several things.

The first comes from a book review I published over a decade ago. It was written by an ex-CIA agent who taught me a number of important lessons that I retain to this day. One of those lessons has to do with the nature of wealth- so let me get into them.

The first has to do with cash. Every peasant in every country on the planet knows what to do with $50,000. That is why there is a great deal of security at retail banks. Physical security, guards with guns, locks on safes, mantrap doors. It should be obvious that every young Snoop Dogg worth his gang colors would do a drive-by for 10% of that cash. There are billions of such beleagured humans worldwide. $5,000,000? I’d think most of us upper middle class peasants could figure out what to do with a good half of that without too much trouble. What do you do with $100million? Well that’s quite a difficult question. You see, just moving that kind of money makes one conspicuous in ways the overwhelming majority of us don’t even understand. Unless you are a trader on Wall Street or the majordomo of some major entity, you don’t have a clue about treasury operations of a global corporation and how easy or difficult it would be.

But even more obscure is understanding what happens to somebody who makes a million dollar mistake. If my bad behavior (which fits into a fairly predictable square of professional ethics) cost my company a one million dollar customer, I’d probably be summarily fired. If there is anything to being the member of the Ivy Cabal or some Bullingdon Club, it is that you would know how to survive a 5 million dollar mistake. Nevertheless, unless you are, ooh I don’t know, Franklin Raines or Barney Frank, you don’t get to make a billion dollar mistake, and live. That is, unless you have the goods one sombody four pay grades above you.

What I believe to be true about the Rulers, is that there is a circle-jerk of mutual blackmail that is keeping the lid on an awful lot of failed sausage making in the US and all over the world. After all, California has not fallen off into the Pacific, literally or figuratively. You and I have no idea.

There are all kinds of mistakes that will get you murdered, and there are all kinds of murders that cannot be and will not ever be solved, by definition. In other words there is all kinds of human destruction out there of the sort that that is slow, arcane and predictably unpredictable. In that way, ethically speaking, there is no such thing as hypocrisy. There is ‘justice’ of a sort we never get to know.

So the most important lesson that I got from this ex-CIA is how to remain living in the overworld, as opposed to getting dragged down into the underworld. The Dark Web. How to be a Grey Man in the broad American middle class. How to be a Dad Bod nobody. People used to tell me that Candace Owens had it all figured out. Before that they told me it was Lashawn Barber. How’s that working out? One of the stories that never quite makes it into American popular culture is the story of Aaron the Moor. If you think you’re going to pull one over on royalty without being royalty yourself, you’re in for a very rude awakening, and shortly thereafter you will be dead.

This is the lesson of Aaron, and it is the lesson of Edward Snowden. It is the lesson of infants playing with firearms. It is the lesson of traitors and spies, of police informants and of disgruntled whistleblowers. It is inevitably the lesson of Michael Moore, of Tucker Carlson, of John McAfee, and of various people who piss in the wind and step on Superman’s cape. If you know who Mark Felt was, then you should remember that he was anonymous for 30 years. Above a certain level, a very long game is being played. I suspect that Pavel Durov, at the tender age of 39, has no idea of the 7 dimensional chess game he has engaged.

---

The business is called intelligence. Intelligence, that is to say, geopolitical intelligence is an operation played at the trillion dollar multi-generational level. Billionaires, sheiks, princes and generals are mere pawns in this game. One can pretend that multi-billion dollar global corporations with tens of thousands of employees are too powerful to be swayed, but really. Do you honestly believe that Mark Zuckerberg is craftier than Gina Haspel? Where did Zuck learn to be a leader? Where did Haspel?

I just finished reading my seventh book by Ben Macintyre. Prisoners of the Castle is an excellent history of the Nazi prizon at Colditz Castle in WW2. By the time you get to the end, you will come to understand what gentleman expected of each other in those olden days and what the consequences of murder are among gentlemen. But we don’t live in an age of the rule of gentlemen patriots. Nobility, while it still exists in our hearts, does so on the fringes of our nationalism, not squarely in the middle. Who is to say this will remain the case? Take a look at the various ages of British royalty, it’s actually very interesting. What’s an Edwardian age as compared to a Victorian age? Maybe nobody in the house of Windsor knows. Maybe no Republicans or Democrats understand the patriotism of the Founders. Maybe no Millennial knows what river and what sea they are chanting about. Maybe Pavel Durov doesn’t know who he’s fucking with.

I realize this is a harsh and bitter pill to swallow, but exactly how do we expect somebody who is providing a service for one billion people, with a staff of 30, to actually win against a nation-state? How do we expect him to not be responsible for what happens on his platform? Is the Bank of England so sovereign? Is Morgan Stanley so unregulated? Have you put money into the Bank of China recently?

So Durov has run afoul of some crafty attorneys representing the nation of France where he holds citizenship of some sort. You can invest all the Hopium you like, my money is on France. I think he made a billion dollar mistake.

---

The conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott reminds us that there is no such thing as ‘human rights’ available to any and all. There are only civil rights, as these are a contract between the state and the citizen. The citizen must obey the laws of the state and as a consequence is granted a defense of their rights & property by that state. Once you sail your yacht out into international waters, you cannot be so easily defended. Out there, it’s just a gentleman’s agreement. Let’s see if this Russian born dude is ready to stop posing and take on a national obligation. Yachts are not battleships.