CyberPlayGround Blog

ECP NetHappenings The Chinese Mob

The Chinese Mob

2011 Boris Nikolic, business partner of hanging out in Capri with the wife of the leader of the Chinese Mob. “stanley ho the richest man in hong kong„ owns most of macua, and is the leader of the chinese mob”
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01858685.pdf

Credited with transforming Macau into the world’s biggest casino centre, he would only lose his monopoly when it was opened after four decades to wider competition including from the US billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Sands China.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/26/stanley-ho-the-billionaire-macao-casino-tycoon-dies-aged-98

In 2010, after a long investigation, the New Jersey gaming authorities issued a report declaring a link between Ho and the triads and requiring that MGM Mirage Macau (a joint venture with Ho) divest its interest in an Atlantic City casino. https://www.scmp.com/article/708998/triads-thrive-hos-casinos-us-report-says

Stanley Ho is great-grandson of Dutch Jewish businessman Charles Henry Maurice Bosman. Bosman supplied “cheap” Chinese labor from Hong Kong to California… We learn how dreadful that labor was, but no one really talks about how it got to the U.S.. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1089/glr2.2021.0025

About two centuries after the failure of the VOC’s embassy, and once the
Dutch had dominated maritime commerce in Asia, Comprador Bosman came to Hong Kong, at the age of 20, to work for coolie merchant Cornelius
Koopmanschap, 134 a Dutch labor broker who was in the business of importing and exporting cheap Chinese labor. In the 1860s, Koopmanschap lived between California and Hong Kong, and with his connections he was
considered the main contractor and importer of Chinese labor to San
Francisco. 135
The skills of the 24-year-old Charles Bosman, along with the fact that
Cornelius needed to focus on the thriving U.S. market-the Central Pacific
Railroad needed a lot of cheap labor-and spend more time in California, are
most likely key reasons for the transformation of the firm in Hong Kong into Bosman & Co, with the U.S. unit operating under the name Koopmanschap & Co shortly after Mr. Bosman became Dutch Consul, a tenure that allowed him to control and oversee the shipping of labor to Dutch Guiana, in South America.
On February 19, 1863, an act was passed prohibiting the “Coolie Trade” by
American Citizens in American Vessels. 136 The coolie trade was banned, as it was considered a form of slavery, which in itself may have had a significant impact on the business of Mr. Bosman, who moved from Hong Kong to London in the late 1860s or early 1870s, where he established the “Eastern Agency” in 1873.
Left behind were his Chinese mistress Sze Tai, his name-sinicized to 19 (Ho), and five children. Among them was Wai Fook Ho, born in 1863, the
grandfather of Stanley Ho and brother of Sir Robert Hotung, one of Macau’s
greatest philanthropists. Wai Fook Ho had 13 children, one of them the father of Stanley Ho, Ho Sai-kwong (19 ₩*). The Ho clan was wealthy and influential in the colonial Hong Kong period of the late nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century. Stanley’s grandfather was no different in his position as Chief Compradore at Jardine, Matheson & Co., (opium Boston Brahman ) 137 an original trading house that dates back to Imperial China and is still a Hong Kong conglomerate. He also had the crucial role of leader of the Chinese community.

“The book lays bare the moral compromises of the Kadoories and the Sassoons–and their exceptional foresight, success, and generosity”
https://forward.com/culture/442250/when-jews-were-kings-and-opium-lords-in-shanghai/

ECP NetHappenings STRC pays 11.5% annually

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BITCOIN

STRC IS THE GREATEST CAPITAL MIGRATION EVENT IN HISTORY
STRC returns 11.5% annually with dividends paid monthly.
Your HYSA pays 4%.
Your bond fund pays 5% and lost you 12% in 2022.
100% of STRC proceeds become Bitcoin.
Normies don’t need to understand Bitcoin.
They need to understand YIELD.
The world doesn’t know it yet but the ultimate end game for Strategy is to compete with nation states for yield-seeking investors who want a safe way to store their capital.
Stripping volatility out of bitcoin creates a product that retail, retired folks, companies, countries can get a rate of return in real collateral.
You are not early. You are FIRST. $STRC $MSTR

Washington-based think tank Cato Institute criticizes Bitcoin’s tax treatment in the US, arguing that the current system makes it impossible to use BTC for everyday payments, as it puts an excessive administrative burden on citizens.

Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin ETF attracts $100M in its first week.

Henry Paulson: US DEBT CRISIS BOND CRASH

The man who helped the US economy recover from the 2008 financial crisis is now warning of something far worse. Bloomberg
Henry Paulson Says US Should Prepare for a ‘Vicious’ Bond Crash
Same guy who said that if we didn’t give the banks $700 billion in 2008 it would lead to a financial collapse and martial law.

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says a US debt crisis is coming. He says when the Fed becomes the only buyer of Treasuries and yields keep rising, the system breaks.
Unlike 2008, the government won’t have the fiscal resources to bail itself out this time. $39 trillion in US government debt, Rising yields making it more expensive to service. The only option left is printing more money to pay off old debt with new debt. Every dollar printed devalues the ones already in your pocket. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million. No one can print more, No central bank can debase it, No government can inflate it away to cover its own spending. When the people who managed the last crisis are warning about the next one, one should pay attention to what sits outside the system entirely: BITCOIN.

Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas gave Trump immunity for attempting a coup that Ginni Thomas helped plan. Sascha Riley accuses Trump of abusing him when he was a child. Riley says Clarence Thomas and other politicians attended these trafficking parties. Riley has publicly accused them for years, never been sued.

The original sin was failing to send Donald Trump to prison for the rest of his life for mounting a violent coup to overthrow the election of 2020.
-David Frum

NPR

Connie Ballmer, a one-time NPR foundation trustee and the wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, is donating $80 million in a record gift from a living donor.

INTERNET

As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.
As a society, we will greatly regret not having made multiple, independent copies of Internet Archive, letting it all rest in the hands of one organization.

SOFTWARE

The key insight most people miss: for every $1 spent on software, ~$6 is spent on services.
The entire SaaS playbook was about capturing the software dollar. The AI playbook is about capturing the services dollar — at software margins.

Not “AI for accountants.” The AI accounting firm.
Not “AI for lawyers.” The AI law firm.

The companies that figure this out won’t look like SaaS companies. They’ll look like services firms rebuilt on software infrastructure.

That’s a fundamentally different company to build, fund, and scale. And most founders are still building copilots.

DEMOCRATS FAIL AGAIN

The senior old out of touch conservatives folks who rule over the Democrat machinery and take our votes for granted do not understand how the world operates today. It isn’t million dollar ads on TV just before elections that will win this fight. They are so out of touch. Democrat voters are sick of them and their power and bad decisions. They have to get out of the way. Progressives will get the vote, that’s who the democrat voters want. They always wanted Bernie and AOC.

The US is quietly on a wartime footing for a much bigger conflict.
Auto-enrolling Gen Z in the draft. Asking Ford to build bombs. Renaming the Pentagon the Department of War.

BREAKING: The House just failed to end Trump’s Iran war by ONE vote.
213-214.
One fucking Democrat.
Jared Golden of Maine.
That’s it. That’s the margin.
One Democrat crossed the aisle and gave Trump the war.

New Jersey: Democrat Analilia Mejía has won the special election to replace Gov. Mikie Sherrill.

Trump’s Budget Director Russ Vought just REFUSED to tell me
( Senator Ms. Murray ) how much of YOUR taxpayer dollars Trump has already spent on his war of choice with Iran. That’s outrageous. It’s literally his job to know, and the American people deserve answers!

Primary the AIPAC whores out of office.
36 Senators vote to block $150M of 1000-lb bombs to Israel.
Another record high, after 40 voted to block bulldozers.

Blumenthal, Coons, Cortez Masto, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Peters, Reed, Rosen, Schumer, Warner, and Whitehouse voted with Republicans.

These are the Democrats who just voted to keep sending weapons to Israel:
Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Maria Cantwell, Chris Coons, Catherine Cortez Masto, John Fetterman, Kirsten Gillibrand, Maggie Hassan, John Hickenlooper, Alex Padilla, Gary Peters, Jacky Rosen, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, Ron Wyden.

40 of them signed a letter this week expressing alarm over children starving in Gaza.
Only 27 voted to actually stop the weapons.
They’ll sign the letter.
They won’t cast the vote.
Screenshot this. Remember their names.

This is about the illegal & immoral actions of Netanyahu’s government, which are indefensible.

ESSAY

Sama Hoole
@SamaHoole

The Flexner Report

In 1900, John D. Rockefeller controlled approximately 90 percent of all petroleum refining in the United States. He was, by some calculations, the richest private individual who had ever lived.

He had a problem. Scientists were discovering that compounds derived from coal tar, a petroleum byproduct, could be used as synthetic medicines. Aspirin, derived from coal tar, had been launched by Bayer in 1899. The petroleum waste stream Rockefeller had previously had to dispose of could now be sold back to the public as medicine at a markup of roughly 10,000 percent.

He had another problem. American medicine in 1900 was a competitive ecosystem of homeopaths, herbalists, naturopaths, osteopaths, midwives, and traditional doctors who used food, plants, water, and lifestyle as the primary tools of healing. Approximately half of all American medical schools taught some form of natural or alternative medicine.

Rockefeller bought into the German pharmaceutical industry, eventually taking a substantial stake in IG Farben, the conglomerate that included Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. He then commissioned a report.

The report was written by Abraham Flexner, an educator with no medical training, funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, and published in 1910. It declared that natural and alternative medical schools were unscientific quackery. It recommended the closure of more than half of all American medical schools and the standardisation of the rest around medicine based on synthetic patented drugs.

Congress acted. Half of American medical schools closed within a decade. The remainder accepted Rockefeller and Carnegie funding on the condition that their curricula be reorganised around pharmaceutical treatment. Nutrition was removed. Herbal medicine was removed. Lifestyle intervention was removed. The doctor’s job was redefined: diagnose the symptom, prescribe the drug.

The drugs were petroleum-derived. The petroleum was supplied by Rockefeller-controlled refineries. The medical schools were funded by Rockefeller. The journals were funded by Rockefeller. The AMA was supported by Rockefeller. The hospitals were funded by Rockefeller.

By 1925, the American medical system was a vertically integrated extension of the petroleum industry, operating under the marketing slogan that it was scientific.

This is the system that exists today.

The pharmaceutical industry generates approximately $1.5 trillion in annual revenue. The American population, 4 percent of the global total, consumes approximately 50 percent of all pharmaceuticals manufactured.

The system was not designed to make people healthy. The system was designed to manage symptoms in a way that produces lifetime customers. A healthy patient is a former customer. A managed patient, who takes the pill every day for the rest of their life, is an annuity.

The objective has always been to keep you in that profitable corridor between healthy and dead.

Long enough to keep buying. Not so well that you stop.

The doctor who advises you to fix your metabolism by changing your diet is, from the point of view of the system that trained him, a defective product. The doctor who prescribes you a statin, a metformin, an antidepressant, and a blood pressure medication for life is performing exactly as designed.

The system was designed by an oil baron who needed to sell the waste products of his refineries.

It still functions, 116 years after the Flexner Report, exactly the way he designed it.

You are the customer.

The corridor is where you live.

▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓

ECP NetHappenings Melania’s Husband Rapes Children

The Senate is about to vote on handing a national forest over to a foreign corporation. A Chilean mining company wants to develop a copper mine upstream from the Boundary Waters, a pristine wilderness. The GOP has to choose between a foreign corporation and their constituents.

BREAKING: The Senate just passed the legislation allowing the devastation of the Boundary Waters. The motion passed 50-49, and now goes to Donald Trump’s desk. The way Republicans passed this bill that prevents future administrations from issuing protections for Superior National Forest, so this pristine land will be exploited in perpetuity unless Congress intervenes to reverse this decision. The state of Minnesota can still block the Chilean mining corporation from operating in Superior National Forest and protect the Boundary Waters from pollution.

In March 2026, the USA became the only country to vote against a United Nations document affirming global women’s rights.
Fuck that noise!

Mackenzie Scott has donated about $19B or more to charity vs
Lauren Sanchez has donated about $19B or more to her plastic surgeon
All wives are not the same.

John Eastman, the conservative attorney who helped devise President Trump’s last ditch strategy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has officially been disbarred, per the California Supreme Court.

Trump has pardoned “more healthcare fraudsters [the ones who take advantage of dying people] than any Administration in American history.”
This is a major scandal.

Melania’s Husband Rapes Children
Trump: “I don’t think the pope should be getting into politics.”
Also Trump: “Meet my personal spiritual advisor, Paula White.”
Peak hypocrisy: telling the pope to butt out of politics while your own pastor’s on the fucking payroll.

MONEY

$158 billion of illicit activity was conducted via crypto last year 2025.
Meanwhile, the traditional financial system facilitated $3.1 trillion of illicit activity in 2025.

Did you know the NSA published a Cryptocurrency Paper 12 Years Before Bitcoin?
HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm

ESSAYS

When Jews were kings (and opium lords) in Shanghai

Captain Prescott and the American House of Russell and Co.

THE LEFT HEMISPHERE
IS NOT AS INTELLIGENT AS THE RIGHT

Why is the brain split in two?
Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s 30-year answer is eye-opening.
We need two opposite kinds of attention at once. Left hemisphere: narrow, laser-focused on grabbing what it wants. Right hemisphere: broad, open, vigilant — watching the entire living world so you don’t become lunch while chasing yours. When the left dominates, life feels fragmented, mechanical, and empty. When the right leads, everything feels connected, alive, and meaningful. McGilchrist warns we’ve let the left hemisphere take over — and beauty, wonder, and purpose are quietly disappearing. Have you felt the world shift between feeling flat and mechanical… versus vividly alive and connected? What changed your attention?
VIDEO https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/2044773855659688096

The world’s most respected political scientist just admitted that governments no longer run the world.

Ricardo @Ric_RTP
https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2044795916624806275 +VIDEO

https://x.com/ianbremmer Ian Bremmer’s firm writes the risk report every major hedge fund, bank, and government reads before making decisions.

He doesn’t do hot takes. He does FORECASTS.
And buried under a 90-minute discussion with Steven Bartlett, he dropped this bombshell:

Anthropic built a model so powerful it could hack every bank, power grid, and water system on Earth.

They didn’t call Congress.

They called Jerome Powell and Scott Bessent directly.

Within hours, every major bank CEO was in an emergency meeting.

Jamie Dimon called it a “five alarm fire.”

No hearings. No votes. No public debate.

A private company detected a threat, called two people, and the US financial system reorganized around it overnight.

That’s not a “government.”

And this is the pattern nobody’s connecting:

Michael Dell just moved $6.25 BILLION to 25 million American kids using federal infrastructure Trump’s team built for him. Government does the accounting. Dell gets the PR.

Jeff Bezos just came out of retirement with $6.2 billion to build “AI for the physical economy.” 100 researchers. Day one. No board. No IPO. Just: go.

Jensen Huang told Joe Rogan that CUDA, the single technology that made AI possible, was built because ONE guy at Nvidia believed in it when the stock crashed 83%. Nobody voted on it. Nobody approved it. He just did it.

Elon has Starlink turning wars on and off in Ukraine.

None of these decisions went through a legislature.

None of them were debated on CNN.

None of them were on any ballot.

In Bremmer’s own words:

“The most important new global leaders aren’t countries. They’re technology companies writing their own rules.”

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

There are two economies running in parallel right now:

Economy A is the one you see. Elections. Tariffs. Tweets. Midterms. Iran. Congressional hearings where senators ask Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes money.

Economy B is the one that actually decides things. 5 CEOs, 3 central bankers, and a handful of billionaires in group chats and private dinners, rerouting trillions and deploying technology that rewrites physics, biology, and labor.

Economy A is theater for the 99%.

Economy B is where the 1% already live.

And the gap isn’t closing.

Bremmer’s real warning wasn’t about China or Trump…

It was this:

We’re heading toward a split between “empowered hybrid individuals” with AI as a core relationship, and people we “won’t even treat as human beings anymore.”

Not different classes.

A different SPECIES.

This is a forecaster who advises Goldman, BlackRock, and the White House telling you the taxonomy of humanity itself is about to fork.

Meanwhile the public is fighting about who’s going to win the midterms.

Trump is a symptom. Mdani is a symptom. Farage is a symptom.

They’re all reactions to a system average people can feel has already left them behind, but can’t articulate why.

But the why is simple:

The people making the decisions that will define the next 50 years of your life stopped asking for permission.

They stopped running for office.

They stopped filing quarterly reports on what matters.

They just build, deploy, and inform the government after.

ECP NetHappenings Mark Cuban will run for President

Mark Cuban will run for President

Mark Cuban @mcuban costplusdrugs
https://costplusdrugs.com

Mark Cuban on AI:
“The two types of approaches to AI, some people who use it so they don’t have to learn anything, and some people who use it so they have the opportunity to learn everything.”

Democrats Believe Kamala Harris Is Less ‘Electable’ Than Mark Cuban

ESSAY Armaan Sidhu @realarmaansidhu
https://x.com/realarmaansidhu/status/2044669506216194440

Mark Cuban just proposed replacing health insurance with a bank account.
$2,100/month deposit.
$300 for catastrophic stop-loss insurance.
$200 for direct primary care.
The remaining $1,600 stays in YOUR account.

If you never use it, you keep it at 65. If you have a big expense, the bank loans you up to $30k to cover it, and you repay from the monthly deposits.

The simplest part of the proposal is the most radical: insurance premiums are the only debt Americans pay for life. You will pay health insurance premiums every month until you die, and you will never own anything at the end of it. Every other debt has a payoff date. Health insurance has an expiration date only when you do.

Let’s run the math on Cuban’s proposal for a family of 5.

Current reality:
$2,100/month in ACA Silver premiums = $25,200/year.
Over 40 years of working adulthood (25-65): $1,008,000.
Plus copays, deductibles, out-of-network charges, surprise bills.
Estimated lifetime healthcare spending for a typical American family: $1.5-2 million.
Most of that going to insurance companies who take a cut at every step.

Cuban’s proposal:
$300/month for stop-loss insurance (catastrophic only).
$200/month for direct primary care (a doctor who sees you for a flat fee, no insurance billing).
$1,600/month into your own HSA-style account.
Over 40 years at even modest interest, that $1,600/month compounds to approximately $1.5-2 million — roughly the same amount families currently spend on insurance, but sitting in the family’s bank account instead of an insurance company’s reserve.

The structural shift: instead of pooling risk with strangers through an insurance company’s underwriting, you pool risk with your own future self. Every dollar you don’t spend on medical care today is a dollar you have for medical care later, or for retirement, or for your kids’ inheritance.

The insurance industry’s entire business model depends on the gap between premiums collected and claims paid.
That gap funded $550+ billion in combined market cap across UnitedHealth, Anthem, Cigna, Humana, and CVS/Aetna. The money is real. It’s just not flowing to healthcare.
It’s flowing to shareholders.

Cuban’s proposal doesn’t eliminate healthcare costs.
Medical care still costs whatever it costs. What it eliminates is the insurance middleman extracting value at every transaction. Direct primary care doctors already operate on this model and charge $50-150/month for unlimited primary care visits. Stop-loss insurance already exists for catastrophic expenses. Both are currently available. What Cuban proposed is combining them into a structure most Americans can access.

The objections are predictable and real:

Objection 1: What about chronic conditions requiring ongoing expensive treatment?
Answer: stop-loss insurance covers anything above $30k. If a chronic condition triggers the stop-loss repeatedly, the system handles it the same way insurance does — catastrophic coverage kicks in.

Objection 2: What about people who can’t afford $2,100/month?
Answer: they can’t afford ACA Silver premiums either. The proposal doesn’t solve affordability for the uninsured. It restructures the system for the 160M+ Americans currently paying for employer or ACA insurance who would be financially better off under this model.

Objection 3: What prevents people from skimping on preventive care to save money?
Answer: direct primary care is included. Unlimited primary visits at a flat fee. The structure incentivizes using primary care — it’s already paid for.

Objection 4: Regulatory barriers. ERISA, ACA employer mandates, state insurance commissioners, HSA rules.
All real. All why this is a “lots of work and issues to be addressed” proposal rather than a turnkey solution.

But strip away the implementation challenges and look at the core insight:
Americans are paying lifetime insurance premiums on the assumption that they need insurance companies to manage healthcare risk. They don’t. They need catastrophic coverage for the worst-case scenarios and direct access to doctors for everything else. Everything between those two is insurance industry rent extraction.

Cuban is a billionaire who started a low-cost pharmacy because he noticed that drug pricing was broken. Now he’s noticing that insurance pricing is broken the same way. The man doesn’t need this to work for him — he’s wealthy enough to pay cash for any medical expense. He’s proposing it because the current system extracts $550 billion in market cap from sick Americans and their employers while producing worse health outcomes than every peer country.

657,000 views on an X post from a billionaire proposing to eliminate the need for private health insurance. That’s the engagement of an idea whose time might be arriving. Not because Cuban is a policy expert. Because the math is so obvious that even people who don’t follow healthcare policy can see it.

The one debt Americans can never pay off is the one they’ve never been invited to think of as a debt. Cuban just invited them. 657,000 Americans are starting to do the math.

The insurance industry’s business model depends on them never finishing.