Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts

Monday, August 9, 2021

Skynet: Terminator Wasn't Fiction, It Was History - And We're Living It

Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art.  Today we are living the latter… and it’s called The Terminator.  Little did we know when we first watched Arnold utter “I’ll be back” in 1984 that we were actually watching our real future. 

For those who don’t remember, Terminator was set in 1984 Los Angeles when a cyborg is sent back from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor. The premise is that at some point Skynet, an artificial intelligence defense system, had gained self awareness and launched a nuclear war in its effort to destroy civilization and the humans who built it.  A resistance had formed and John Connor was leading it to victory over Skynet.  In a last ditch attempt for victory Skynet sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor before her son, John, could be born. 

While the names may have been changed to protect the not so innocent and while we may not be in 1984, make no mistake, we are very much in the throes of the apocalypse that Linda Hamilton was driving off into the sunset to face.

Our Skynet is called Silicon Valley and its comrades of the American left.  Unlike Skynet, which gained self awareness, Silicon Valley, is full of people who seem to have no self awareness at all.  They proffer ideas that normal people recognize as ludicrous such as men can give birth, America is systemically racist and defunding police leads to safer streets, yet they think they are correct about everything.  Just look at the world they exist in. The Bay Area is overrun with homelessness, drug addicts literally sprawled out on the sidewalks, the streets are covered with human feces and hypodermic needles, violence is raging out of control and so many criminals shoplift with impunity in full view of employees and cameras that national chains and mom & pop shops alike are having to close their doors because they’re losing so much money. What’s more, their calls for defunding police persist, despite extraordinary spikes of violence. 

The left is anything but self aware.  They push insane policies that lead to the literal destruction of society and somehow believe they are standing up for the oppressed.  They claim that America is racist while in fact the United States may be the least racist nation on the planet.

Of course none of this would matter if Silicon Valley were today just the sleepy erstwhile farmland it was when Hewlett & Packard launched their company in 1939, or even as late as 1976 when Apple was launched.  But Silicon Valley is no longer that tranquil, serene suburb, but rather it has become the hub of our Skynet.  Silicon Valley, between social media, information hosting and communications, has gained a stranglehold on virtually every American citizen.  Privacy no longer exists.  Free exchange of ideas no longer exists.  Opinions that differ from the approved script are no longer allowed and are banned from the public square. 

Silicon Valley in general and social media in particular have set Americans against one another every bit as much as Skynet set humans against one another via nuclear war.  The truth is, social media is even more insidious than Skynet.  At least with nuclear war you understand the enemy is indeed an enemy and you recognize that mortal danger that lies ahead. Social media creates enemies where there used to be friendship, it creates victim oppressor relationships where none exist, it provides tools for groups to attack individuals with unapproved ideas and do so both online and off, usually with impunity. 

Like Skynet, which started out as a useful tool to game out various scenarios and ended up bastardizing itself into a tool to conduct actual war, social media started out as a useful tool to connect with friends and ended up as a tool allowed citizens to go to war against one another.

In addition to turning people against one another, the other aspect of The Terminator that rings far too true in 2021 America is the erasure of history. Schwarzenegger went back in history to try and eliminate Sarah Connor in order to stop John Connor from ever existing.  In a similar way, social media, BLM, Antifa and Democrats writ large are actively erasing American history.  First it was statues of Confederate generals, then it was the Founding Fathers followed in short order by Aunt Jemima and Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss.  Half of history is erased and the other half is rewritten.  No longer was America born in 1776, but rather 1619.  No longer was America founded on freedom, but instead on slavery.  America was never a land of opportunity but a land of oppression. 

The last, and perhaps most disturbing element of The Terminator documentary is the fact that Skynet never gave up.  Although the movie ended with the cyborg crushed to death in a press, we all know that that was not the real end of the story.  Not only did the cyborg survive, but Skynet kept sending newer and better assassins to kill Sarah or John or somehow destroy the past to prevent the future.  Donald Trump is our John Connor and his tenure in the White House was the perfect demonstration of this unbridled attack machine:  Four years of the Russia hoax, even after it was proven demonstrably false… Kids in Cages… “Suckers and losers”… “Good people on both sides”…  Trump’s a racist… Trump’s a sexist… Trump hates immigrants… Trump’s a fascist… Obstruction of justice… Not to mention the impeachment.  And when all of that fails, they blatantly steal an election under the cover of night and then attack the people who point out the theft as racists. And then another impeachment!

The left was and is simply relentless.  Like Skynet, they literally never, ever give up. Even when you think they are defeated, when you win the highest office in the land, they find novel ways to thwart your victory. Get elected on the platform of building a wall they engage a dozen different ways to thwart it.  When one element of the Skynet swamp is eliminated three more simply arrive to take its place.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley, the Media and the Democrat party are what Skynet was: an existential threat to civilization and everything we hold dear.  A threat to common sense, rational thought, individual freedom, the Constitution, and most of all, the Republic.  America has been the bulwark against tyranny in the world for almost a century.  When our Skynet succeeds in eliminating the United States, the entire world will be less safe and eventually civilization will collapse just as it did when 2029’s Skynet launched its war. 

Reece’s characterization of Skynet couldn’t be more accurate today:  Listen and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.  That is the future we are facing.  Unless Americans can figure out how to stop it. 

Monday, May 10, 2021

Never Tell A Leftist They Hate America...

Never tell a leftist they hate America.  They will correct you every time.  They don’t hate America they’ll tell you, they just want to improve it.  They just want to help make it better.  They just want America to live up to her ideals.

No, it’s not America per se that they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in the first place.  Free enterprise.  Limited government. Federalism. Separation of Powers.   Individual freedom.

But, while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant and more. In addition, the Constitution is an outdated document written by old racist white guys and needs to be reimagined.

So, OK, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America. And apparently they don’t, because even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world… big surprise, they never actually leave!

When I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever existed it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get angry and look at me as if I just told them I the earth is flat.  But the funny thing is, when I ask what nation is better or empire was better… crickets.  They immediately launch into a polemic about how America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric etc. It’s ripe with inequality, inequity and is run by rich white men.  And not to be forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document written by old white racist guys and as such, shouldn’t control our lives today. 

Then I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape they suggest, where should we go to escape it?  Again, crickets. 

Despite the fact that the leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in history that is or was superior to the United States, that had a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US, they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:

  • Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
  • Defund the police.
  • Pack the Supreme Court.
  • Disband the INS.
  • $15 minimum wage.
  • Demonize the Founding Fathers.
  • Eliminate the Electoral College.
  • Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
  • Eliminate bail requirements & sentencing minimums.
  • Participation trophies.
  • Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
  • Universal healthcare
  • Free college tuition
  • Green energy mandates and subsidies
  • Eliminate fossil fuels
  • Repeal the Second Amendment
  • Eliminate capitalism.
  • Eliminate the binary gender construct
  • Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
  • Tax the rich
  • Forgive student debt
  • Mandate vaccinations

And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops.  Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which begat partial birth abortion.  Gay rights turned into civil unions turned into gay marriage.  Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing crash.  And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to cancelling Dr. Seuss & Aunt Jemima. 

At exactly what point will America cease to be the racist sexist hellhole that the left tells us it is?   Must the military perfectly reflect the hue and sex of America itself?  Must corporate executives be promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?  What else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American populace?  How about the NBA & the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the NBA and 70% of the NFL.  Do we fire 90% of them to hire more white men and women of every race?  Would that make the games more competitive, more exciting?  Probably not.  Or how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women.  Should 40% of them be fired in order to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country? Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer? Unlikely.  And this could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers.  Sanitation workers.  Teachers.  Barbers.  Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.   

The bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is destroy what someone else built.  We’ve seen that play out across America time and again.  From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960’s to turning once great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle from a year of “mostly peaceful protests”.  When the left comes to power in successful cities the march to a real hellscape begins.  And it’s not just cities.  The left broke the Boy Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel and they are in the process of destroying women’s sports. Dennis Prager often says “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s right.  The left has never built a nation millions of people risk their lives to enter.  The left has never built a society where freedom of thought, speech and the press have thrived.  The left has never built an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else. 

The left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its imperfections.  Voltaire was prescient when he observed “Perfect is the enemy of the good”.  America is no doubt imperfect.  It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often inequitable… but mankind is all of his creations are.  The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has seen fit to grace man with and while it will continue to be imperfect until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape the left makes it out to be.  But of course none of that matters because for the left, building something great is never a necessity, in fact, it’s never even a consideration.  Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those who don’t have the courage to try.  

I’m not sure what the textbook definition of hate of county might be, but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it.  There’s an old saying: “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” Replace duck with hate and you have America’s left:  too cowardly risk doing anything but more than willing to demonize those who aren’t.     


Saturday, February 7, 2015

From Silicon Valley with Love... and Hope for Free Markets

I’ve just returned home to Atlanta from spending a week in Silicon Valley at a program called Founder Institute. Basically FI is a bootcamp for founders of mostly tech startups. We were a pretty diverse group of companies. One wants to put servers in space, one wants to help golfers establish handicaps and another seeks to help equipment rental companies join the mobile revolution. Some had raised $3 million in funding, others were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue while the majority were like me and running on past savings or paychecks. We were also a pretty diverse group of people with participants coming from around the world. In addition from the US, attendees came from Croatia, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Columbia, Vietnam and Puerto Rico. Finally, we were of a variety of ages as well, ranging from early 20’s to mid 50’s... weighing more heavily to the latter.

My goal in going out was to get a better insight into what makes for a successful startup. I’ve been working on one startup or another for 15 years, but I’ve yet to achieve what I consider a really successful exit. In addition, I was looking for angel investors to fund my latest startup, BrandScanned, a mobile rewards app for consumers, based on brands. (Think about how much of a pain in the butt it is to collect soup labels or boxtops for the various programs that provide resources to schools. Wouldn’t it be easier if they just put a unique code on the inside of each package that you could scan with your phone and the school automatically gets the points? Or how about those contests Kelloggs runs for movie tickets or Frito Lay runs for an Xbox where you have to register on their websites and type in some ungodly long number that’s hidden inside the package. Same deal… wouldn’t it be easier to just scan the codes with your phone? I think so, which is why I founded BrandScanned.)
While I didn’t come away with an investment, I came away with some great insights. The first is something I’d been told before but never really got. Success in Silicon Valley – at least as it relates to raising angel and venture capital – is very much driven by relationships. It’s your network… investors want to get to know you… want to trust you… know that you’re resilient, creative and of course, smart. And it’s more than just a cup of coffee… although that’s where it often starts. Investors usually want to know that they are not alone and that you’ve got other investors in your network. And the key to your network is, unsurprisingly… you! As such, investors are often open to making introductions, but you’ve got to sell yourself because if you’re going to create a spectacular startup, if you’re going to make them lots of money, you’re likely going to need a lot of help in the form of employees, partners and other investors… and it’s up to you to engage and inspire them.

Another of the insights I came away with was that if you fail in Silicon Valley, that doesn’t mean you’re sunk. On the contrary. It appears to be the case that if you’ve failed, that’s almost a badge to be worn as you storm into your next endeavor having learned some lessons from your previous bruising. For every Facebook that pretty much gets it right from the beginning are dozens more like Twitter that took a circuitous route to success through failure. Failure is the fertilizer that nourishes and spurs creativity, which in can and often does blossom into success.

Finally, in Silicon Valley they love to think big. Big success followed by big exits are what investors live for. If you’re interested in starting a restaurant or building a business that will do a couple million dollars a year in revenue, good luck, but Silicon Valley investors are not likely going to help you do so… although they might become customers. They want businesses that have the potential to do $50 or $500 million a year in revenue so they can have exits that number in the eight or nine or ten figures. Since investors lose money on 9 out of 10 investments they make, they need to be able to earn enough back from one big exit to cover the cost of investing in the other nine and still make a profit. So don’t expect venture capitalists to give you the money to open pool installation business…

At the end of the day, my trip to Silicon Valley and participation in the Founder Institute program made for a great experience. But this wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t tie that experience into the larger picture.

At a time when the government seems to be doing everything it can to undermine free markets, private property and capitalism in general, it’s good to know that the spark of enterprise still exists. That people feel like they can build something. That investors and entrepreneurs are foolhardy enough to think they can change the world. And willing to take a leap of faith to do so. And not only in the United States, which used to be a bastion of freedom, but in places where you might not expect it, like Vietnam, Croatia and Columbia. The question is however, once the long national nightmare of Barack Obama and his Democrat cleptocracy are finally on the ash-bin of history, can the spark of possibilities that still exists in Silicon Valley find its way back to places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and the rest of California, where much of the spirit of opportunity and the American Dream seem to have been replaced by a populist economic fascism seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States”? Sadly, that the cancer of progressivism seems to have infected much of the country despite the fact that the American convergence of free markets and limited government have driven a greater advance in prosperity around the world any system in history. Nonetheless, perhaps the Silicon Valley mindset of unabashed opportunity is the canary in the coal mine that suggests the American Dream may still be alive, despite even the tech crowd’s distinctly liberal, big government leanings. Only time will tell.