The REAL Reason Bill Gates Supports Israel - And Why You Should Be Afraid Bill Gates, whose full name is William Henry Gates III, is definitely not Jewish. Nor is Israel by any stretch of the imagination a sympathetic character so far as Gates noted humanitarianism goes. Despite being one of the wealthiest men in the world, Gates has consistently been known as a man more interested in expanding Microsofts hegemony than sheer personal enrichment. The man did not outgrow his wardrobe of V-neck sweaters until the late nineties and still prefers a Big Mac and online bridge games to fancy foods and social occasions. When asked what the best thing about being the wealthiest man in the world was, he famously deadpanned, I wish I wasnt. Nothing good comes of it. Since then, he has parted with billions of his own money, helping various third-worlders out. So I dont believe hes in it for the money, either. Actually, Gates true motive is much more ominous. Lets get one thing straight here. Israel is NOT a good business environment. Land, energy and water are costly. The entire country is a de facto contested territory. Because Israel is a military state, all workers have to give 2-3 years in their early twenties and a few months each year thereafter to the Israeli Defense Force - returns on workforce investment their civilian employer isnt getting. Supporting Israels massive military machine, deserts-to-cities infrastructure and European-style socialist welfare state means crushing taxes that are even now running the economy into the ground. Finally, as in China, all Israeli software has to have backdoors for the Mossad. And heaven knows they have informants everywhere. The fact Israel is the most advanced country in the Middle East matters little when one considers how many Bangalore infoworkers produce services for Americans. That Israel happens to be closer to Egypt and Jordan matters no more than how far the US is from India. So the question remains: what does Israel have to offer Bill Gates? Israel and Iran have a few surprising qualities in common, amongst them that constant military pressure and distrust of other nations have resulted in establishment of homegrown high-tech sectors. Israel made its own unmanned drone, the Eitan, before the US did (and just as Iran is now doing on its own in turn). Israels homegrown tank, the Merkava, shares parts with the British Centurion, yet is arguably more than a match for the American M1 Abrams and, unlike either, doubles as an APC. In Saddams Bombmaker, one of Saddams nuclear scientists described an incident where a nuclear-powered Israeli satellite uplink was discovered by a nomadic herder when he noticed a hilltop was steaming from its subterranean thermal exhaust. Urgent military expediency colludes with the traditional Jewish pursuit of education less for the money and more out of a sense of honor to drive Israels tech culture. But the net result is, while countries like India or China can produce millions of competent engineers and technicians, Israel has a commanding lead in systems design. The remarkable degree of user-friendliness of modern technology belies the unfathomable complexity of the underlying components. Microchips, hardware interfaces and machine code are so incredibly complex, only a very, very few people, subject to tremendous training and discipline upon extraordinary preternatural talent are capable of developing the technology that we all use every day without a second thought. Indeed, contemporary Westerners take pride in our high-tech society as if any fool with an iPhone knows how it works. I remember fondly childhood visits to the Miwok museum in downtown Sacramento. When one considers that, by contrast, every Miwok knew how to weave beautifully patterned baskets so tight they could hold water, make rapid-worthy canoes without iron tools, and kill two-ton buffalo with bows and spears made of wood and bone, one knows better than to chauvinistically label those people as backward. Technology takes many forms, but what technology is, is applied knowledge. Refinement, not sophistication, validates technology. The bottom line is - and this is where we should be worried - the American educational system completely and utterly fails at producing those kinds of super-experts. Like the hunting of the dodo or passenger pigeon to extinction, the precipitous decline goes all but unnoticed amongst the moral squalor of our civilization, for the very reason Americans cannot fathom causality beyond the market. Actually the market is, in fact, to blame, and the reason why it is to blame is, again, worrisome. The bloat of the financial sector belies a fundamental truth about the US, which is that its only claim to relevance is the overpowered dollar and how it enables the US to import everything it needs. If the USs currency traded at a rate commensurate with the real productivity of the US economy, the US would be a third world country. So the US labor economy has come to reflect this, with degrees in finance and marketing being inordinately lucrative as they tap right into this nations sole lifeblood. Ars gratia artis, as it were. Microsoft, like every other supertechnology firm, must recruit legions of these very rare super-experts to keep its operations going. There are simply not enough brains to go around. Israel, like Iraq, is turning into a battleground over a vanishing resource. That this resource is in such dire shortage due to the profound failure of American institutions and values that Gates feels compelled to make paeans to Israel should give us real cause for worry. The real worry may be that the supply Israel and a few other countries like India and Japan provide may prove insufficient - or even go into decline themselves - and with it our entire tech civilization as it is known. STEM education must be more than just a subsidized cause - the perpetuation of advanced STEM knowledge must be a drive woven into the very fabric of our culture.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 09:44:35 +0000
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