And… another one.
Time for another candlelight vigil!
Oh wait, no one died except the incompetent Muzzie, so maybe we can skip the vigil this time.
https://youtu.be/1r-k6yLTiAE
From a MarketWatch piece on Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, and what subsequent moves like this portend for the future:
Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It’s quite likely. Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have estimated China’s manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 2 million jobs.
If Amazon can capture 40% of the GAFO market within five years (as seems likely), about 1.5 million jobs at brick-and-mortar stores could be lost. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses and delivery services, and the total would be well over 2 million.
And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town and hamlet in America.
The always-good Joel Kotkin writes:
As one recent paper demonstrates, the “super platforms” of the so-called Big Five depress competition, squeeze suppliers, and drive down earnings, much as the monopolists of the late 19th century did.
Indeed for most Americans the once-promising new economy has meant a descent, as one MIT economist recently put it, toward a precarious position usually associated with Third World countries. Even Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the oligarch universe, has gone from one of the most egalitarian places in America to a highly unequal one where the working and middle class have, if anything, done worse, in terms of income, than before the boom.
On the related matter of ‘fake news’ as orchestrated by the Big Five:
Facebook is already the largest source of news for Americans, particularly the young. They, along with Google, seem capable of shaping information flows to suit their particular world view, one increasingly hostile to any dissenting opinions from the right. (One key to understanding post-election concerns about “fake news” is to realize that a staggering 99 percent of growth in digital advertising in 2016 went to Google and Facebook.) At the same time, those two, along with Apple and Amazon, increasingly shape the national culture, essentially turning Hollywood into glitzy contract laborers.
But no one practices the politics of oligarchy better than Bezos. Under his ownership The Washington Post has been transformed into the Pravda of the gentry left. Last year, for example, they worked overtime to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign, whose victory might have led to stronger antitrust enforcement and the confiscation of some of their unprecedented wealth. Once Sanders was dispatched, Bezos, fearing the rise of uncontrollable Trumpian populism, sank his editorial resources into supporting the big money favorite, Hillary Clinton.
The Big Five’s political endgame?
The founders of the big tech firms may embrace progressive ideas on the environment, free trade, and immigration, but have little use for unions or raising capital gains rates.
Overall, notes Ferenstein, they eschew nationalism, favoring global governance, want more immigration and embrace the notion of a government nanny state to tell the masses how to live. They also prefer highly unequal conditions of urban density over the more traditionally egalitarian suburbs. Largely childless San Francisco, impossibly expensive and deeply divided by class, is the preferred model of the future.
The primary obstacle to their vision?… People.
People, little or otherwise, now constitute the Masters’ biggest problem. Unlike the old moguls like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford, the new Masters do not promise greater prosperity, or even decent jobs for the middle or working class. Their vision, increasingly, seems to be a world where most people’s labor is largely superfluous, and will need to be satiated with regular basic income from the state, a position now widely embraced by such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, supplemented by occasional “gig” work.
They imagine a future where few will ever own homes or control any real assets. Rather than being parts of a geography or even a country, the increasingly socially isolated masses can be part of Zuckerberg’s “global community” while ordering food from Amazon, delivered by a drone from an automated warehouse, employing social media and virtual reality to fill their long periods of idleness.
Here’s a wonderful psych gem, with some wonderful playing, by a band fronted by a young Todd Rundgren. From the opening box-chords to the awesome flanging of the mix that starts at 0:57, this song rocks.
The Finsbury Park mosque attack suspect is 47-year old Darren Osborne:
The alleged attacker, who reportedly shouted “I want to kill all Muslims”, is reportedly a married father of four…
There is this choice quote:
The anti-fascist campaign group Hope not Hate has said it fears the UK is entering a cycle of “tit-for-tat violence… where the extremes feed off one another, and terror attack propels terror attack.”
The organisation, which campaigns against the far right, said the sheer number of events meant “there can feel a dangerous sense of inevitability to all this”.
Yes, we appear to be entering the next inevitable phase.
As a response, do you think they’ll have their own candlelight vigil, praying for ‘peace and unity’ (as white victims of Islamic terror immediately do as a ‘reaction’) or will they react in a different way?
Vincent Law nails it in “The Latest London Terror Attack On Finsbury Park Mosque Is Just Part And Parcel Of Living In A Big City”:
My advice for the Muslim community is to carry on exactly as before. Get used to it guys. It’s part and parcel of life in London. Learn to live with it.
Beautiful.
Perhaps the Anglo-Saxon will learn to hate again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U3PLxUvhIc
Macca turned 75 yesterday.
Vincent Law reports on the MSM-hyped “10,000 Strong Muslim Rally” to condemn radical Islam, a rally that received, well, significantly less than 10,000 Muslims in attendance.
As if to rub the Right’s noses in some Central Park dogsh*t, the NYT has a piece titled “Protesters Outside ‘Julius Caesar’ in Central Park, and Laughs Inside”.
That very juxtaposition in the title, given a play about the brutal assassination of Julius Caesar Donald Trump, is itself quite telling. After mentioning the handful of protestors who showed up, the ‘reporters’ (Emily Palmer and Maya Salam, peace be upon him) describe just how the in-joke sophisticates watching the play reacted to some of the most unsubtle, agitprop crap you can imagine:
Inside the theater, the production began shortly before 8:15. Just minutes later, three theater staff members rushed toward the stage to inspect an audience member, then left.
Otherwise, the show took a self-aware bent and was filled with often-lighthearted political jokes. “Who is it in the press that calls on me?” Julius Caesar cried out to great laughs. And the audience booed when a character who represented an adviser was introduced. At one point, actors came out with protest signs and exclaimed, “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”
More laughter swelled when Caesar appeared sitting in a footed tub, smoking a cigar and typing on his phone, and again when the character playing his wife stepped into the tub, seducing him with a Russian accent.
The piece, like the liberal mantra elsewhere on this subject, is to point out that a 2012 version of the play (not in NYC, mind you, but in that great theater hub of Minneapolis) featured an Obama-looking POTUS and, so, why weren’t conservatives outraged about this?
Mary Andrews, 59, of Manhattan, who was hoping for a standby ticket — standby lines were closed because of high demand — was wondering where the backlash had been when another American production of “Julius Caesar,” in 2012 in Minneapolis, depicted Caesar as President Barack Obama.
The answer, of course, is that in that Obama-reign version of Julius Caesar, the ‘bad guys’ were depicted as the assassins, and the POTUS as the ‘good guy’ wronged (a separate recent NYT article notes of the Minneapolis version: “Five years ago, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis staged a production featuring the assassination of an Obama-esque Caesar by a group of right-wing conspirators.”)… whereas in this Trump-era version the assassins are quite clearly the ‘good guys’ and the POTUS most assuredly ‘bad’.
In a perfect embodiment of the NYT as purveyor of snark and fake news, there is this passage, accompanied by the photo below:
Before the production, a more reflective tone had been sought. Audience members were invited onto the stage to add a message to a poster reading “I mourn for” and “I hope for.”
People added words like, I mourn for: “innocents lost,” “Manchester,” “Brett” and “Apathy, Enemy of Democracy”; and I hope for: “Paris accord,” “a better life for my sister” and “unconditional love, including self-love.”
Above is all that is written about the poster, but take a close look at the poster itself (at least the biggest words you can even see), in letters so big the NYT editors must have missed them.
In the NYT (where else) is a piece on Congo titled “In Goma, Lights May Flicker but Looks Stay Sharp”:
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the birthplace of SAPE, a loosely organized cult of dandies known as “les sapeurs.” SAPE is an abbreviation of the group’s name, which in English translates as the Society of Ambience and Elegant People. The contrast between the extravagance of their attire and the hardships of their lives has the effect of highlighting the dignity of their code. Indeed, dressing well is part of the culture there.
“Everybody wears these amazing colorful clothes and are so eager to show who they are,” Ms. Harris said of the people in Goma.
Ms. Harris was in Congo on a fellowship documenting energy poverty. She wanted to capture how people, many of whom don’t have reliable electricity or access to water, maintain pride in their appearance. In Goma, 14 of 18 neighborhoods in the city experience rolling blackouts on a daily basis.
Their society is in complete disarray, but hey, at least they look good! This reminded me of the wonderful passage from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, where during a sojourn to Washington D.C., wrote:
“I took great interest in studying the life of our people there closely at that time. I found that while among them there was a large element of substantial, worthy citizens, there was also a superficiality about the life of a large class that greatly alarmed me. I saw young coloured men who were not earning more than four dollars a week spend two dollars or more for a buggy on Sunday to ride up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in, in order that they might try to convince the world that they were worth thousands. I saw other young men who received seventy–five or one hundred dollars per month from the Government, who were in debt at the end of every month.”
In the NYT piece, we also learn that the Kult of Kim Kardashian has quite the influence in Congo:
Nadia Wete Mwami is a model. “This is not an African style,” Ms. Mwami said of her look. “To me, this is like an American style. I get my inspiration from Kim Kardashian.” Ms. Harris wanted to show what it means to be a young person in Congo who is borrowing ideas from other parts of the world. “She said again as a point of pride, ‘I copy from Kim Kardashian, but the Congolese people copy from me.’”
So, let’s see…. Young women of the Congo are getting their fashion cues by culturally appropriating the look of ‘white’ Kim Kardashian, while Kim Karshashian herself is being accused of culturally appropriating American black fashion trends.
This ‘cultural appropriation’ stuff gets so confusing.
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.
