Scheherazade

Something smells off. Especially these sentences: “ I never ceased to be awed by the courage of ordinary citizens risking dangerous rescues that immediately followed the massacre. Press reports had claimed hundreds or thousands of people had died during the military crackdown.”

Presuming he was right at the scene of action, why does he pass the buck to the claims of ‘press reports’? And it's also suspicious the word 'massacre' is only used once before said buck passing.

The tactics of the writing style are more akin to CIA psyops.

Yes, seeing an otherwise healthy, and free-thinking human being turn through their behaviour into almost a sub-sentient machine running pre-programmed scripts, would errode a bit of the soul in almost everyone. As some of their childhood naivete is forever extinguished. At least now they’ve gained through this experience a deeper perception of the true nature of reality.

Yes, the obviousness of the limited capacity of multicultural integration should have been easily deducible to anyone in a position of real power back in the 70s and 80s when the decison was made. Yet, for several decades major countries, having decided to go down the multicultural road, also decided against a sustainable rate of integration over centuries, such as a constant 0.2% annual immigration influx until 2200 CE. The key decision makers instead favoured a destructive course of short term profits within their lifespan, and immense long term costs, that has led to the current outcomes with all the eventual consequences.

Of course, even if average productivity per capita in China is half that of America, the total output will be twice as much. No one serious in Washington (or Moscow or Brussels or Beijing, etc.) believes America could win a war on China's home turf even if nukes are untouched. Same with India to a lesser extent.

It's not even a secret at all to at least millions of folks across the world. It's only the strange American media and brainwashing system that presents the idea that China can be threatened with force.

In that sense it's highly dubious Beijing is directly involved with Myanmar's current regime change. They can achieve their objectives anyways without getting their hands dirty. Of course there may be intermediaries involved that straddle both camps so it's not clear cut either.

Although your question has merit for this case specifically as ASML is a Dutch company there is very little hand wringing about outsourcing. For the forseeable future the Dutch are going to toe Washington’s line. In fact in some ways it’s desirable to throw middle powers a bone every now and then as it gives Washington an additional geopolitical bargaining chip that can be more easily called.

You’ve hit on the unspeakable. No public figure can give a credible answer to your question while remaining logically consistent and in power.

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” - George Orwell

Which is why so many factions in Washington are putting so much effort to undermine potential challengers as the American destiny is to be number 1. The moment another group becomes more powerful, they know that what you describe will occur.

That’s what they admitted to. Harvard could have done worse and kept it under wraps, we won’t definitely know until someone does an Ito there too. In fact there are credible reasons to believe something even more dubious was going on there.

Think about the process of what giving anyone a nice office in one of the prime buildings at Harvard in that manner requires in that timeframe, what else it implies, and here’s the critical thing, without anyone else in that building or on that floor raising any concerns publicly.

It at the very least means all those concerns were intercepted privately before anyone could have aired the dirty laundry.

And do you know of anyone who could have gotten all that just by asking nicely, some smooth talking, a flight to an island, and a big cheque?

A named building maybe, nice press releases sure, an actual position complete with office, slot in the org. chart, and name plaque, in the academic bureaucracy of the most status conscious school in the world?

The one that ousted their own esteemed president, the former treasury secretary who got an AM and PhD at said school, for an off the cuff remark in a speech not long before?

Can just some millions be enough to motivate the decision makers at Harvard to do that?

Put another way, there are only a few, far more credible, folks who had setups even a fraction as cushy as Epstein had, at least on the record.

You sound like someone who understands how academia truly works. From your experience doesn’t that chain of events imply something more was involved?

Though of course the fact that BillG was acting as a secret intermediary for Epstein’s funds at MIT also really implies something more was involved there too and it implies that Ito still has some secrets and/or was used as a patsy. So in the end you may be correct.

Whatever force(s) powerful enough to motivate BillG to act like that may indeed make Harvard’s type more preferable, assuming the folks there were strong enough to resist what BillG could not.

The funky DoD accounting though... has profound implications nationwide.

It’s almost become an anti signal at this point, whenever someone says Mao was responsible for xx millions of deaths you can safely assume that they are easily fooled. There is no serious historian of Chinese history would actually claim a number like that either. Direct responsibility is probably in the thousands range, he was fighting for decades after all, indirectly through 1 degree of separation probably hundreds of thousands, through 2 degrees of separation probably in the low millions if you include the cultural revolution and the very late stages of the famine when he became fully aware of the devastation. 3+ degrees? Perhaps in the 8 digit range, though at that point attributing malice or intent becomes absurd for anyone who understands how Beijing power politics works.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”- G. Michael Hopf

Indeed, if there is not a credible explanation from first principles it should be assumed that the article was written primarily for reasons other than illuminating knowledge.

The key difference is that MIT had someone with decision making authority admit it to it on the record, i.e. Joi Ito, whereas Harvard did not. This is precisely what gave the whole Epstein debacle some fresh oxygen. In fact it may have been what tipped mostly vague conspiracy theories into a critical mass of undeniable reality.

Although there definitely were numerous folks at Harvard also doing dubious things they simply closed ranks and didn’t say anything substantial. They almost certainly are less straightforward than the MediaLab crowd, after all they have far more to lose since it was done directly under the school administration and not a semi-autonomous entity.

Doesn’t that seem like a very strong incentive for certain folks to do something to MIT? At the very least to discourage anyone at Harvard from getting funny ideas in their old age, and to encourage in the future immediate responses like Harvard and discourage another Ito when something like this happens again.

Because there probably are even more damaging things under wraps than the worst fantasies Epstein had, as another commenter alluded to with strange accounting anomalies of Defense research money in the several hundred million range, i.e that a significant percentage of the money going to MIT from the DoD was shady. If you extrapolate that to a nationwide scale, that’s a lot of billions going who knows where.

Depending on how far up the ladder the people behind Epstein are, all education institutions in the US maybe are vulnerable as long as Washington has any control over them. Which would really mean every current and potential institution in the US would be at risk from asymmetrical shadowy maneuvering.

i.e. if there truly were folks pulling Epstein’s strings through the CIA/Mossad/etc., then they will do anything to preserve and expand their capabilities including tolerating a boundless amount of corruption within academia. Since it’s very likely they’ve already been intimidating federal judges, offing journalists, undermining NIST, undermining the NSF, etc., disrupting newMIT would be peanuts compared to that.

If all that turns out to be the case, the US won’t be able to support such a genuine organization without very powerful backers to shield it behind-the-scenes. Maybe if all the influential tech folks combined and really were motivated to resist those sorts of influences.

For complete protection from a motivated Epstein+ level of intrigue from Washington, I can only think of Russia and China, which aren’t very promising either. They can hardly be expected to be more open to intellectual freedom this century, in practice, unless there were some geopolitical goals they could achieve through it.

That leaves only a decentralized and anonymous option if you want to be able to completely ignore political maneuvering. Perhaps some sort of blockchain+ combined with some sort of trust network scoring to make anonymity workable.

A neutral middle power option with a minimal amount of careful maneuvering is also possible. Though of course Canada/Australia/Japan/Norway/Switzerland/etc. are not immune to these things, they certainly increase the bar, at least from forces outside their borders, such that with only a bit of precaution and vigilance situations like this can be avoided without calling in favors from power brokers. As middle sized countries they don’t have nearly as motivation to play these shadow games themselves.

In all likelihood a newMIT based in the US would need some seriously powerful backers to run proactive interference if the wrong crowd really wants to undermine it. Which suggests why current MIT may have fallen into the quagmire they’re in. In this light the decision makers at MIT, of those at any of the big research schools, are tragic actors; they have no hope without playing the same game, or reforming the whole of society.

There are credible reports of ‘serious high up Chinese elites’ families seeking advice at the Swiss embassy in Beijing during the 1989 upheaval. If that dynamic still exists, they don’t necessarily need to be compromised by insiders to have information leak to American intelligence.

So the upper echelons of MIT are all-in on playing the shadowy political game.

Is there any hope for alumni + some combination of other interests to alter the dim future of a once proud organization?

It’s quite frightening that you’ve never heard of sourdough bread given your baking experience. And as the other replies allude to, it’s quite common historically and in other places. Are baking books edited to exclude that knowledge in America? It really brings to mind the possibility.

Fume events are the dark belly of the aviation industry. The stuff used to lubricate turbofan engines is incredibly toxic when breathed in, literally orders of magnitude more potent than simple kerosene fumes.

“for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.” - Niccolò Machiavelli

Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles certainly didn't play nice. The list of things that they messed up, and too big to hide from being on the record, is quite illuminating (Vietname, Cuba, China/Taiwan/Tibet, Korea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, most of south america really, and so on) which suggests far more things occurred in the shadows too. A couple of Italians is small peanuts in comparison, especially since by 1960 the possibility of Italy flipping to the Soviets was gone. The secret agreement to base nukes on Italian airbases would have been signed around this timeframe, so Rome wouldn't have protested, really quite clever.

Also the organizational and logistical possibility was very real too considering that enormous sums of money were diverted off the books for funding secret projects in that period. In fact, even up to early 1945 nobody in Congress knew about the real purpose of the manhattan project (which was consuming a sizeable chunk of the national budget!). Not even Harry Truman, who was Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization at the time (who was given the run around by Stimson).

Though to be fair it was not just Washington, all the powers invested in covert, off-the-record, stuff to some degree. French/Israeli/Indian/Pakistani/South African/etc. nuclear bomb development being the most well known examples as again they are too big to fully cover up.