Category Archives: Sailing

TechBro Farm Disasters: Vance, Musk and Ellison Couldn’t Grow a Pair of Nuts if They Tried

In 2011 I led a series of presentations and engagements about security as human survival infrastructure related to advanced farming concepts, based on the encryption and virtualization principles I was enmeshed in at the time (e.g. cloud).

Source: “A Cloud Odyssey”, BSidesLV 2011

To be fair, vertical farming was being heavily (deceptively) promoted as a new concept around then, so I was just pulling it into the tech industry as a natural confluence. The ideas go back, way back. Egypt’s Nile Valley was farming without soil at least 4,000 years ago. And we all know, hopefully, about Babylon’s famous hanging gardens in 600 BCE. But it was 1937 when the University of California, Berkeley proudly announced that a farm boy from Nebraska had grown up to make plants (including tobacco!) grow vertically, setting off a huge modern investment buzz not seen since 1859.

The business of growing plants in water is centuries old. Long before the Christian era it was believed that plants got all their sustenance from water. In 1699 a natural historian named John Woodward grew spearmint, potatoes and vetch in water from springs and rivers. First experiments which involved adding nutrient chemicals to the water are credited to a German named Knop (1859). Growing commercial crops in water is another matter. At Berkeley, Dr. Gericke aimed at producing tank crops which would economically compete with or surpass soil-grown crops. So successful washe that several California vegetable and flower growers have changed to water culture, more than a dozen branch experiment stations have been opened, and Dr. Gericke enjoys a “fan mail” of some 500 letters a week. […] When newshawks ask him whether he expects to make a lot of money out of hydroponics, he just smiles, shows two gold teeth.

That’s a lot of letters! If only he had invented databases instead, just imagine the plastic surgery and penis enlargements he could have achieved.

Speaking of shallow and selfish, in 2012 the Oracle founder and evil tech oligarch Larry Ellison bought Hawaii’s Lāna’i Island for $300 million to make the saddest attempt at industrial farming in history.

Eight years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering. …constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.

Ellison’s failure illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of place-based knowledge systems. How can someone who claims to understand technology fail at even the most basic farming, one of the oldest technology-rich industries? How he got started gives a HUGE hint. He didn’t give two cents about farming, he just wanted better eating. But gross unsustainable consumption is the opposite of cultivation, and appetite for destruction isn’t agriculture.

It all started right after the Oracle founder bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012. Ellison took his wife to a hotel restaurant and they found the food to be “inedible.”

“We had to drive to the grocery store in town and buy Snickers bars and Coke,” he told Departures magazine. “We decided that is ridiculous — we need to grow our food.”

Ellison floated the notion to his partner, a medical doctor and scientist with expertise in advanced cancer, David Agus.

Dumbest story ever. Billionaire doesn’t like one meal at one hotel restaurant and he decides to put a cancer doctor in charge of turning an entire island into a farming experiment? This approach exemplifies the extractive mindset that prioritizes abuse and control over ecological understanding and sustenance. Food sovereignty movements in Hawaii like Hoʻokuaʻāina were revitalizing traditional agricultural knowledge, but Ellison’s immediate reaction was to walk past coconut trees, past pineapple plants, through banana groves yelling “I’m hungry, help, get me a Snickers and Coke!”

Of course he can’t farm. Can a database peel a banana?

Hawaiian ahupuaʻa systems used traditional land management that sustainably divided resources from mountain to sea. Small groups maintaining loʻi (wetland taro patches) sustained island populations for centuries without external inputs. This isn’t hard to understand. It’s like Ellison and his army of wealthy white men landing with a colonial belief of “terra nullius“, staring at two rocks next to two others and saying “from this point forward we tell everyone 2+2 = 10, priced ten dollars each” and then they wonder why the fraud so effective on people doesn’t work for nature.

“The ahupua’a is the guide map to looking at Hawaii from a completely traditional Hawaiian point of view, taking you back thousands of years and offering you the thoughts of the people who have lived there and been stewards of the land all this time,” said Sam ‘Ohu Gon, senior scientist at the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific, a project of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s the doorway to accessing all that past knowledge that is completely applicable today.” In fact, Gon says, the ahupua’a system, also called moku, could model a way to feed and provide for the Earth’s rapidly growing population in the face of climate change. “With these intensively managed farming and fishing systems, Hawaiians were able to maintain a remarkably small ecological footprint, using less than 15% of their terrestrial ecosystem, while supporting several hundreds of thousands of people with no external inputs,” he explained.

Ellison ignored ALL of that.

Instead he pranced around with an open checkbook, built on decades of horrible cheats, to mint a completely dumb 900-pound hammer that only works with expensive rusty nails his buddy makes using federal grants. The Silicon Valley bro culture of government funded vicious attacks and hyper-aggression may work against other humans like in a war, but it doesn’t wash at all with nature. The earth doesn’t play that. Patrick Wolfe famously wrote “invasion is a structure not an event“, which frames perfectly why and how Ellison’s project is a pathetic rehash of failed colonial patterns in land misuse.

In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism… strives for the dissolution of native societies. …it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event…

Gisèle Yasmeen’s “foodscapes” theory also easily predicts the failures from the start, given a total disconnection of food production from cultural and ecological relationships.

But wait, it gets worse. Ellison supplied his colonial aspirations using fraudulent products of a Nazi-loving apartheid guy!

Six hyper-technological and Tesla solar-powered greenhouses sit on a sliver of what was once the U.S.’s largest pineapple plantation, owned by Dole. After pineapple production ended in 1992, decades of soil neglect followed, leaving the red earth dry, nutrient-deficient, eroded and peppered with black plastic…

Sad history fact: Dole cynically convinced the U.S. government to invade Hawaii and seize it in a staged-coup, destroying a sovereign country and their land, just so he could maximize profits. Ellison sounds just like the same kind of American idiot.

Ellison said the greenhouses, totaling 120,000 square feet, would be off the grid, powered by solar panels thanks to its partnership with Tesla. But the panels often didn’t work. The high winds showered them with dirt and debris, and there were questions on whether they were installed properly, according to one of the people. Instead, the greenhouses’ fans, water pumps and other needs were often powered by diesel generators.

Tesla didn’t work? Talk about a redundant phrase. Their top engineers flown from around the world to a tropical paradise didn’t even design for wind, on a very windy island. Why am I not surprised? Elon Musk snake oil is the stuff of true fraud, a failure at every level. Next you’ll be telling me his promise to land regularly on Mars by 2018 and colonize it by 2022 didn’t happen, yet he kept all the billions?

Way to go Elon. SpaceX/Tesla couldn’t design for or around obvious island weather patterns, let alone the centuries-old knowledge about sustainable production of native plants, despite detailed instructions being published since at least the 1990s.

RTFM guys!

Anyone with half a brain could have planned a beautiful Polynesian cuisine farm of pineapples, bananas, sugarcane sweet potatoes, mangoes, taro, yams, breadfruit, coconuts, arrowroot… not to mention William Herbert Purvis’ macadamia nuts!

Try to grow a pair, Ellison.

The island has to import food because it has lost its roots, literally. Extraction and exploitation by unsustainable self-serving fools is proving to be an undoing of the racist white men who tried to pour their ill-gotten wealth into agriculture in an attempt to hedge food (corner the market) and profit on artificial scarcity.

Both Vance and Musk’s startups have largely failed to achieve their aims—AppHarvest, the farming startup that Vance was a major investor in, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Musk’s Square Roots laid off most of its staff the same year. […] Things may ultimately work out for Sensei if Ellison’s friend President Trump manages to wipe out all the migrant farm labor across the country, as he seems hoped to do…

True security, especially food security, comes from relationship with and understanding of land rather than forced technological control over it by men blind to concepts of compassion and care. My 2011 presentations were all about today’s failed tech-farming ventures, which certainly feels weird to reflect upon. They should and could have done much better. Billions wasted on egos and excesses, as millions of people starved, and nobody is better off. Like Dr. Gericke, today’s tech billionaires are fundamentally motivated by profit rather than sustainability or genuine security. Shall we look at those two gold teeth again?

The Skids Are Not All Right: DOGE-like Killers on the Loose in America

A fatal confrontation on the Vermont border has exposed how Silicon Valley’s elitist tech immorality can spiral rapidly into real-world harms to society. This isn’t about innovation – national security experts must acknowledge groups exploiting technological complexity mask straightforward domestic terrorism. The same people who brought you FTX and Musk’s teenage “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) – which purged federal experts while breaching and leaking government systems in a Khmer Rouge-style destruction of expertise are spawning predictable outcomes: from massive financial fraud and incompetent breaches of federal systems to gun-toting assassins, all are powered by the same bogus magical technology thinking.

What began in high wealth individual rationalist circles – where tech elites debated ethics, consciousness, and societal redesign between Burning Man trips – allegedly has led to at least seven dead across three states at the hands of radicalized militant technologists. This follows a pattern in history where domain shifts in technology repeatedly bring with them the threat of trojan horses with destructive aims masquerading as a gift of progress.

2019 Sonoma County Sheriff’s office booking mug shots of (from top left) Jack LaSota, Alexander Leatham, Emma Borhanian and (bottom left) Gwen Danielson, court appearance of Maximilian Snyder and a Newport City Inn surveillance video image of Teresa Youngblut. LaSota is a technologist known as “Ziz”, and they’re his “Zizians” (AP Photo)

Maximilian. Who names their child Maximilian? Elites of the elites.

Snyder and Youngblut both attended Lakeside School, a private high school in Seattle. Snyder studied computer science at the University of Oxford, according to his LinkedIn profile, and in 2023 won $11,000 in an artificial intelligence research competition. Youngblut described herself on social media as a computer science student at the University of Washington.

They formed a group called the Zizians out of the same extremist anti-government soup that produced today’s techno-utopian billionaires. Like Elon Musk’s “DOGEan” teenagers destroying federal expertise in the false name of “efficiency” while breaching secure systems, or his dire warnings about “woke” while he soaks up government handouts, or Peter Thiel’s quest for a sprawling intelligence empire to become a secretive techno-king, they questioned society’s basic moral frameworks and why they should abide by any laws. But where the cunning dishonestly that laundered apartheid wealth enabled South African-born tech leaders to pivot such thoughts into destabilizing and capturing the entire American state, these Zizians chose instead a far more obvious and localized violent path.

[Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community] said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like, thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.

Their leader, Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, openly explored what would happen if society were stripped of conventional morality. The group attracted high performing accomplished members – Big Tech engineers, Oxford-educated data scientists, competition-winning mathematicians. They first attempted to escape society via a “Rationalist Fleet”, an ill-fated tugboat scheme reminiscent of many earlier Silicon Valley attempts at autonomous zones.

Elon Musk called his fantasy world “Mars Technocracy” (to invalidate laws).

Peter Thiel called his fantasy world seasteading (to invalidate laws).

The Zizian inexperience and incompetence combined with an ill-conceived autonomous society-on-a-boat plan sank the whole thing, literally. Unlike Musk and Thiel however, they lacked an “invisible” empire that shared a particular vision of “investment” curated through growing up in apartheid South Africa. In other words, the Zizian’s have been disadvantaged in their domestic terrorism approach to unraveling the American state, as minor operators lacking Musk and Thiel’s heavy use of back-room deals for a technology-driven race war.

When the laws of physics forced a Zizian setback it only accelerated the group’s descent into more anti-law madness (e.g. how Elon Musk reframes his increasingly obvious failures at Tesla and SpaceX into investment “opportunities” for even more and larger “rapid disassembly” leading to death). Their protests against rationalist communities turned into extremist angry outbursts and confrontations (e.g. how Elon Musk throws angry Nazi salutes and angrily campaigns for AfD – Nazi party – to take control over Germany). Zizian confrontations led to individual acts of sloppy self-incriminating violence. A landlord serving an eviction for unpaid rent ended in a sword fight, a gun fight and then assassination. An elderly Pennsylvania couple was assassinated. A military veteran serving as a Border Patrol agent doing routine paperwork died in an abrupt fire-fight.

During a records check, the unidentified female passenger was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows. After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.

This Vermont tragedy at the border has been generating the most news of all because the German “wiz” mathematician Ophelia Bauckholt and Teresa Youngblut had wrapped cellphones in foil while wearing tactical gear garnished by open carry guns. It exemplifies how child-like fascination with technical sophistication as a form of privileged power feeds into anti-government technologist madness.

Authorities who searched the car found a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, respirators and ammunition, the FBI said. They also found two-way radios and used shooting range targets.

Allegedly Elon Musk had in mind a famous 1994 fire-fight with police, which led to sudden death of South African domestic terrorists (AWB), when he fraudulently marketed his latest Swasticar as magically bullet-proof.

The fetish of fast in guns, encryption protocols and cryptocurrency operations reflected the mindset as DOGEans who breached federal systems, and the billion-dollar crypto frauds, as the same pseudo-super-society-hacker fantasy expressed through different tools. Their sloppy tradecraft and tactical mistakes repeatedly reveal what happens when technological magical thinking meets physical reality.

The pattern is an inevitable outcome of Silicon Valley’s tendency to view society as a system to be hacked and disabled – from DOGEans purging government expertise like digital Khmer Rouge to Zizians taking up arms – whether through market manipulation or direct violence. When young privilege-driven technical minds untether from conventional morality, the results can be deadly. The same drive to disrupt and rebuild, which creates billion-dollar frauds who capture federal politicians to destroy federal aid, also can turn into targeted murder and stoke local chaos.

Remember the Rajneeshees? They at least needed a physical compound. These new tech cult killers are more dangerous – they’re nomadic, using technology as their virtual compound, armed with both Python and pistols, treating America like their personal hackathon project gone catastrophically wrong. The same mindset that leads some to build racist digital empires to destroy lives at the national-level leads others to pull physical triggers in a pointless assassination.

Zizian investigations at the local level continue across jurisdictions, while DOGE’s teenage destructive force gets away with systematically dismantling federal expertise. Four Zizian group members sit in custody on murder charges. Three remain at large, including LaSota. The broader question remains: how many other groups are following similar philosophical paths toward anti-government violence?

The real horror isn’t just the body count – it’s how this fits a pattern. From DOGE’s teenage purge of government expertise to cryptocurrency schemes that vaporize retirement savings, Silicon Valley’s rationalist communities keep “exploring how to rebuild society’s ethical frameworks.” Most channel these ideas into lossy startups and wacky manifestos that drain investors. But as the Zizian bloodshed shows, some experiments in moral philosophy end not just in huge stock fraud but in body counts.

Next time your local teenage tech billionaire talks about redesigning society’s moral framework, remember: whether through market manipulation or direct violence, it’s really about insecure kids of privilege using technology as their magical shield against accountability, leading inevitably to violence against society – sometimes financial, sometimes physical, always destructive terrorism.

Technological innovations can easily mask dual purposes: the printing press enabled both enlightenment and racist propaganda, gunpowder birthed both festive fireworks and modern warfare, and machine guns sold as tools of colonial control using automation became instruments of mass trench death in WWI and a genocidal Holocaust. What’s marketed as progress often conceals potential for accelerated destruction where left unchecked.

Related: OpenAI CEO Altman Announces End of Civil Society in Stargate AI Plan

USS Harry Truman Crashes With Cargo Ship Near Egypt

The Navy is reporting a 190ft bulk carrier ship built in 2003, the BESIKTAS-M operating under a Panamanian flag, has collided with the American flagship aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at approximately 11:46 p.m. local time, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Currently the report reads that the Truman’s nuclear power plants were unaffected, with no injuries or flooding. Questions surround how and why the BESIKTAS-M failed its navigational requirements.

GM Cites Quality Control in Huge Jump of 2024 EV Sales

Best EV value of 2024? Many people seem to believe so. The Chevy Equinox is poised to give EV market leaders Hyundai and Kia a run for their money.

I see a nugget of security analysis as a buried lede in the news of GM crushing 2024 EV sales goals.

In 2024, GM’s EV sales surged 50% to 114,432, its highest ever aided by the new Equinox EV…. That made it one of the fastest-growing players in the electric space.

…investing more than $1 billion in companies making graphite and lithium, as well as deals with South Korea’s LG Chem to produce cathodes for it in Tennessee. That results in big savings related to shipping battery components from China, a multiweek process, as well as fewer quality control headaches.

Like “having product on the water for five weeks that you’re financing, only to find out there’s a reject in that part,” [Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery operations] said. “There’s a lot of costs that are not included upfront.”

Moves to set up a lower-cost battery supply base were cited among reasons Deutsche Bank equity analyst Edison Yu raised GM’s shares to a Buy this month, noting that its EV strategy wasn’t “entirely dependent on volume but also on battery and materials cost savings.”

What an important supply-chain integrity point in an otherwise great report about GM’s already fruitful plans for EV growth. It reminds me of this 2024 chart, showing just how hot the California EV market was last year and where top talent has been going (Hint: reverse correlate with recalls).

Chart: Michael Thomas. Source: CA New Dealers Association

Update: 2024 EV registrations in CA versus 2023. GM is up over 1000% while Tesla is failing so hard their negative bar literally is falling off the charts.