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JD Vance’s journey through Silicon Valley led to him becoming Trump’s vice presidential running mate

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circleJD Vance was a student at Yale Law School in 2011 when he attended a talk by conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance didn’t know Thiel at the time, but over the next decade he became Thiel’s employee, friend, and recipient of his generosity. Thiel’s millions of dollars paved the way for Vance to become a senator.

Vance wrote that Thiel’s speech “was the defining moment of my time at Yale Law School.” Essays for 2020 Vance said Thiel’s talk about the failure of elite institutions and his Christian faith made him rethink his own faith and quickly planned a career outside of law, perhaps tinkering with technology and venture capital before entering politics.

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Vance is best known for the hardscrabble upbringing he described in his autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy,” but in the years after graduating from Yale he developed extensive ties to Silicon Valley investors and elites. His experience as a venture capitalist combined with his status as a rags-to-riches media fixture forged the core connections that powered his political climb and helped him assemble an influential following that pushed him to become Trump’s running mate.

After graduating from Yale and briefly working in corporate law, Vance moved to San Francisco and joined Thiel’s venture firm, Mithril Capital, in 2015. After his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” gained him national fame in 2016, he joined Revolution, a venture capital firm founded by former AOL CEO Steve Case.

Vance returned to Ohio and stayed in the tech venture capital world. Leaving the Revolution Vance received funding from Thiel in early 2020 to co-found a venture firm, Naria Capital, which, like Thiel’s, was named after the elven ring of power in “The Lord of the Rings.” Naria’s other notable investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who endorsed Trump last week. The avowed goal of Vance’s firm was to invest in early-stage startups in cities that Silicon Valley often overlooks.


In 2021, Naria Capital led a group of conservative investors, including Thiel, to invest in Rumble, a video streaming platform positioning itself as a less moderated, right-leaning version of YouTube. Naria co-founder Colin Greenspon touted the investment as a challenge to Big Tech companies’ control over online services, a topic conservatives have frequently discussed amid the backlash against content moderation surrounding the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. It was also around this time that Thiel, a major financial backer of Trump during the 2016 campaign, invited Vance to meet with Trump for the first time, in a secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021. According to the New York Times:.

Vance and Thiel’s longtime relationship also paid dividends in the 2022 Senate race, with Thiel pouring a massive $15 million into Vance’s campaign. According to the Washington Posthelped garner support for President Trump and led Vance to win the fiercely contested Republican primary and Senate elections.

While Thiel has vowed in recent years to stay away from donating to the 2024 election, Vance has since tried to ingratiate himself with Trump through other Silicon Valley connections. The Ohio senator introduced prominent venture capitalist David Sachs to Donald Trump Jr. in March. The New York Times reported.Vance attended a pro-Trump fundraiser for Sachs in June, which he co-hosted with Chamath Palihapitiya, Sachs’ co-host on the popular podcast “All In.” The event, which cost $300,000 to attend, was held at Sachs’ San Francisco mansion, where investors thanked Vance for helping make the fundraiser happen. During an informal conversation at the dinner, Sachs and Palihapitiya said Trump said: Vance as his running mate.

Sachs spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday, days after calling Trump to endorse Vance as his running mate, along with Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. According to AxiosThiel also voiced his support for Vance during a private phone call with Trump, according to The New York Times. After Trump confirmed Vance would be his running mate, Sachs and Musk tweeted their congratulations, with Musk saying the victory was “ringing off.”

Many of Vance’s wealthy tech elite and venture capitalist backers now appear ready to offer even more concrete support. Investors including Musk, Andreessen, and Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale have Reportedly Planning a donation Huge sums of money supporting the Trump and Vance campaigns.

Source: www.theguardian.com

More viruses are transmitted from humans to animals than vice versa

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Some zoo animals contracted SARS-CoV-2 from humans

Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty

Animals such as rats are often considered carriers of the disease. But when it comes to the spread of disease, it turns out that other animals have more reason to fear us than we do.

Analysis of the viral genome found that when viruses move between humans and other animals, in 64% of cases they are transmitted from humans to other animals, rather than vice versa.

“We give more viruses to animals than they give us,” he says. Cedric Tan At University College London. For example, after the SARS-CoV-2 virus passed from bats to humans, likely through another species, humans passed the virus on to many other species.

Tan and his colleagues have been using a global database of sequenced viruses to study how viruses move between species. There are nearly 12 million sequences in the database, but many are incomplete or lack data on when and from which host species they were collected.

So the researchers narrowed down the 12 million to about 60,000 high-quality sequences with complete accompanying data. They then created a “family tree” of related viruses.

In total, approximately 13,000 virus lineages and 3,000 jumps between species were identified. Of the 599 jumps involving humans, most were from humans to other animals, not the other way around.

Tan says the team didn't expect this, but in retrospect it makes sense. “Our population size is huge. And our global footprint is basically everywhere.”

In other words, a virus that circulates among humans has many opportunities to spread to many other species around the world, whereas a virus that circulates among non-human species confined to a single region does not. That's far less.

Studies have found that SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, and influenza viruses are the viruses most commonly transmitted by humans to other animals. This is consistent with other studies showing, for example, that SARS-CoV-2 spread from humans to pets, zoo animals, domestic animals such as mink, and wild animals such as white-tailed deer.

However, even when SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, and influenza viruses were excluded from the analysis, the researchers found that 54 percent of infections were from humans to other animals.

The spread of viruses from humans to other species is a threat to many endangered animal species, Tan said. For example, outbreaks of human metapneumovirus and human respirovirus have killed several wild chimpanzees in Uganda.

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Source: www.newscientist.com