DIRTY DISNEY, MORALLY BANKRUPT HOLLYWOOD, AND THE ROTTEN CORPORATE ELITE

 Walt Disney, one of the greatest Americans that ever lived, is certainly rolling over in his grave due to what is being done in the name of his once great company. I had Disney stock, not because I purchased it, but because Fox sold their movie properties to them. I thought of organizing a shareholder revolt, but have too many irons in the fire already, so I dumped it, disgusted at what the company has been doing, and figuring it would eventually come back to pummel the stock. It’s happening now, and the brand may be tarnished for years to come thanks to the Hollywood leftists, who always hated Disney for its mainline wholesomeness, until they got control of it and began to ruin it.

This is a company where some of these scoundrels have made more in a year than Walt Disney made over his entire life from something he created. Yet they have done nothing on their own creatively for years. Instead they have bought up every other provider of youthful entertainment, i.e. Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, etc. resulting in a quasi-monopoly on entertainment for the young. In addition they own ABC and other properties. 

Before the current controversy, they had already been implementing offensively anti-white policies, dismissing projects as “too white,” etc. and forcing their “wokeness” onto their employees, as well as infiltrating their content with messages. The wokeness then spilled over to fringe sexual matters, and they immediately bought into the hysterical, and warped reaction of the left to a Florida law on parental rights that said absolutely nothing about what the left claimed. It simply prevents teachers from discussing “gender issues” with kindergarten kids. Who can possibly be against that other than perverts, child molesters, deviants, and leftists? 

Fortunately Governor Ron DeSantis stood his ground, (unlike the corporate Republicans of the past, who always folded to any pressure from the left and their establishment organs like the NY Times) and told Disney where to go, and further, with the Florida legislature, began to strip away privileges Disney had obtained in the state. But that is only a first step.

Meanwhile millions have already begun to boycott the company. Parents can no longer trust anything from Disney apart from classics from the Walt era. They clearly have an agenda promoting sexual and racial propaganda aimed at children that most people will find offensive. But parents now clearly have to look at what is being inserted into “entertainment” aimed at their kids, just as they have with classroom curricula, and for now, definitely boycott Disney until Walt’s vision and company is restored.

This should be a no-brainer but some erstwhile conservatives of the establishment are objecting to what Florida has done, so that presumably we should continue to tolerate the intolerable and watch things continue to spiral downward in our culture. On the contrary, we should eventually go further and look at breaking Disney up to establish other strong sources of children’s entertainment, and force the spinoff of ABC. We must take the same approach to all of the big media companies. They, and the big social media companies are all legitimate targets for all the evil they have done, from bias, to suppressing the truth, suppressing the free exchange of ideas, silencing and even punishing dissenting voices while engaged in blatant propaganda. 

To talk about “freedom of the press” as a bulwark is ludicrous given that it is the press itself that is corrupt, suppressing freedom of expression while disseminating a false picture of reality in this country. The day they stopped being objective from favored corporate positions  and became partisan political actors they forfeited any legitimate claim to exemption from the consequences. 

All the woke corporations must similarly be held to account, and Republicans will be fools if they fail to do everything possible within the law to make their lives miserable. There is not a single institution left in this country that has not lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Now is the time to act. The rotten elite across the board that has sold out to the left must be shaken to the core, followed by a process of reconstruction and renewal if they ever again are to regain the trust of the people. 

SHORT TAKES AFTER AN ABSENCE

INFLATION: I am so sorry that I turned out to be right about inflation, (https://www.georgesarant.com/2021/12/funny-money.html) which will only get worse before it gets better, for the simple reason that it is now on everyone’s mind and incorporated into selling and purchasing decisions going forward. When I first wrote about it there was little sense of its imminent presence, and we were told that it was “transitory” by the “experts.” But now that we are all fully conscious of it, the effects are compounded, and it will build on itself the way it did in the 70s.  The damage that has been done by bad policies cannot be undone overnight, and we will likely face another recession before things level out. Mind you this is an entirely man-made phenomenon due to an incompetent administration that has been wrong about everything and is fully responsible for engendering it from a rock-solid, stable period created by the previous administration; and no, it’s not Putin’s fault.

UKRAINE: I still believe what I wrote regarding the ultimate demise of the Putin regime (https://www.georgesarant.com/2022/02/how-tough-guys-fall.html) which will ultimately come to pass, due to the disastrous invasion of Ukraine. That is the bright side; the dark side is the possibility that he may become totally unhinged, say the hell with everything, and take the whole world down with him in a nuclear catastrophe. We would then be reliant on the good sense and decency of Russians tasked with implementing this to disobey.  But otherwise we are witnessing the self-destruction of the geographically largest country in the world, a culmination of chronic bad government. 

Our eyes have clearly been opened by exposure to the Ukrainian reality. Beforehand I think many of us had a vague picture of some sort of drab, post Soviet region, along with Chernobyl, etc. Instead what we now see is a beautiful city, and a heroic people, many of whom speak English better than many Americans these days. Again, tragically, this too could have been avoided if we had a different administration. 

INDIVIDUALS AND HISTORY; It should be clear now that it is individuals that matter in life, from the uniqueness of each and every one of us, to those at the pinnacle of power. If someone with the humane instincts of a Gorbachev had been in charge of Russia instead of Putin, how different things would have been. Instead one malevolent actor holds the whole world hostage. Or, suppose the Ukrainian leader was someone who, in the face of danger, absconded, in a pattern going back to the Byzantine Emperor facing the Fourth Crusade up to the last President of Afghanistan, resulting in the collapse of the government? Fortunately for the Ukranians, Zalinsky was the man who instead held things together. 

There are no grand “causes,” no “laws,” no great “theories” governing history. There are only events and individuals, and how they respond to them. There are endless “if only-s” throughout history that would have resulted in completely different outcomes given different players. We need only think of the virtually miraculous accomplishments of Washington, without whom this country would not exist. Or our present sorry state under a grossly incompetent administration of old radicals going off the rails. 

THE ROTTEN LEFT: It should be crystal clear now the extent to which we have been subject to a morally bankrupt Left, that across the board destroys everything it touches. Think simply of any interest group online, and how often they ruin things by injecting politics into subjects that have no connection with it, or how our media have been corrupted, education system destroyed, biological facts rejected, endless racializing of everything, language itself purloined, etc. because they view all aspects of life as political, while the rest of us live in the real world. Look tellingly, at the reaction to Musk buying Twitter and restoring free speech, which they cannot abide, in keeping with their ongoing censorship because they cannot bear to hear anything that conflicts with their warped world view. This repressive reign must end and true freedom be restored to all our institutions or we are doomed. 

HOW TOUGH GUYS FALL

 The history of the last century reveals a pattern that goes as far back as Ancient Greece. The surest way to end a tyrannical regime is to start a war, which more often than not backfires spectacularly. In the case of Greece it wasn’t just in ancient times but in the modern world as well. When the Greek junta in conjunction with Cypriot allies overthrew the government of Archbishop Makarios in an attempt at unification, the results were disastrous. It gave the Turks a pretext to invade which in turn led to the collapse of the junta. When the Argentine military regime decided to seize the Falkland Islands it resulted in a war with Britain that also resulted in the end of that junta. Then there was the Serbian regime that met its demise in the Kosovo war. 

But those are just the smaller examples. Catastrophe resulted in World War II when Germany, Japan, and Italy invaded their neighbors ending the government of all three. Prior to that the whole world changed in World War I, when every empire on the European continent collapsed. Clearly when tough guys start a war the results are usually completely unexpected. Thus the question today is whether history might repeat itself in the case of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

First it must be noted that there is a considerable difference between an authoritarian regime like Putin’s and a totalitarian regime like the Communists. In the former you can pretty much do what you want as long as you stay out of politics. In the latter the state controls all aspects of life. In an authoritarian regime power is less systematized, and usually there is not much of a binding ideology. This makes the levers of power more tenuous.

Second, on the surface Putin’s goals may not seem completely unreasonable given that Russia itself essentially began in Kiev until you realize just how strongly the Ukrainians actually feel. They have inspired leadership and a far more cohesive sense of national identity than we have been led to believe and they clearly intend to resist heroically to the last man.  The problem for Putin is that contemporary Ukrainians clearly want to be free of Russia, which in turn may result in a prolonged occupation, which, given historical precedent, potentially could lead to the collapse of his government. The historical odds are not in his favor  unless he cuts his losses and leaves quickly. There is virtually universal condemnation of the invasion and it appears that Putin has seriously miscalculated the consequences. 

His cronies will be far less reliable once they start losing money, the public, because they do have access to information outside of state propaganda are not supportive, and the cooperation of an increasingly demoralized military cannot be guaranteed. The danger is that a man who seems to be increasingly unhinged and out of touch with reality has his finger on a nuclear button and we can only pray that in a worst case scenario cooler head prevail in the Kremlin. 

It is heartbreaking to see the disruption of life for ordinary Ukrainians but at the same time inspiring to see the heroic resolve of these people in the face of such a daunting challenge. Against long odds my sense is that they will eventually triumph and that the fall of the Putin regime has begun. It will not be immediate but when it does happen it clearly will be traceable back to this ill-conceived invasion and the historical pattern will again be repeated. 

RUSSIA, UKRAINE AND THE WEST

It is beyond the realm of possibilities that a senile Joe Biden could have outfoxed Vladimir Putin. But the results appear as though he has. Putin initially engaged in saber-rattling with Ukraine in the hopes of exacting some concessions from the West. One concern in particular was not unreasonable, namely a guarantee that Ukraine would not be brought into NATO, given the idea of a perceived national threat directly on their border. The appropriate thing would be to allay this concern over time. 

However when Biden didn't bite and essentially said go ahead and invade (on a limited scale), it pulled the rug out from under Putin. Any invasion, even if ultimately successful, would clearly be costly for the Russians. Putin had probably hoped that he would gain some concessions, and then back down without losing face. Now he is stuck in a situation where he has little choice but to make good on his  threats. 

But if he goes forward it will be costly for the Russians, in terms of lives lost, as well as resulting further sanctions from the West. This will not sit well domestically with the Russian people which may in turn further undermine the popularity of his government. As a result Putin has gone from a relatively low-cost winning proposition to a no-win situation, perhaps leaving little choice but to go ahead with a limited invasion, as helpfully suggested by Biden, who, given pronouncements regarding Americans leaving Ukraine, may in fact have a heads up. This makes the whole situation comical, were it not for the tragedy, even a “limited” tragedy that is likely to occur for the hapless troops on the ground. 

Our whole approach towards Russia since the fall of communism has been short-sighted and insensitive. Putin has some legitimate concerns regarding the Russians “stranded” in bordering countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the shaky geographical result in some regions. We should have been making some attempt to assuage such concerns, as well as ameliorating the overall situation by bringing Russia back into the West, instead of pushing them into the arms of China, which is the greatest external threat we face today. If we do not change course on this we will indeed be facing a perilous situation going forward. 

 

HOW THE INTERNET CAUGHT COVID!

Everything went down at our city house for five days: no Internet, no phone, no TV, no anything, due to a broken FIOS box at our house. Our home network was still operational, but not much useful could be done with it. Alexa didn’t work, Ring doorbells were out, thermostats weren’t transmitting, etc. etc. Then it really hit me. Why the hell are we so dependent on the Internet for all this stuff? Why can’t it work locally and give us  control over what is functional in our own homes?

The lame excuse is that using the web enables you to control things outside of the home, but which would you rather have- personal local control or the convenience of turning up your thermostat remotely from your car? I’m not going to speculate about motives as to why things are the way they are, but right now it clearly gives large companies a huge amount of access to your information, how you live, what you do, etc.  and, more disturbingly, they can control things the same way you do. There is no reason why things should be this way. 

Before all these protocols became established I thought of rigging my house up with a character named Max, who spoke like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would have resided in the home and would have taken care of things locally like a sort of virtual valet. Then Alexa came along and I became an early user. But at this pont  I would rather have my Max processing my information than Amazon.  It should be possible for all of these devices to work locally, independent of the Internet. There is absolutely no reason why you at least can’t have both options.

More ominously, suppose that the big boys started sharing the information in concert, or even worse, with the government. As things stand all of them are currently on the same page in sweet harmony (with the potential exception of Apple) and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the possibilities without getting paranoid. Whatever the case this kind of power concentration ought to be unacceptable, and the time has come to liberate Americans from this electronic yoke. 

*   *   *

Anyway we were still able to do some things via our cell phones by establishing a Hotspot, so we could, to some extent, access the Internet, but none of the other stuff since it is on a different network. Now the fun part arose when we contacted Verizon for service. They responded right away and scheduled a repairman within a reasonable length of time. But at the appointed hour no one showed up, so I called to find out why. The response was that we hadn’t answered a Covid question properly and they wouldn’t send a repairman unless we answered a couple of questions confirming that we weren’t Covid positive and agreed to wear a mask in our own home! 

Now unbeknownst to me my wife had actually spoken to someone at tech support and had answered all the questions appropriately, so that should have sufficed. But somehow they decided to cancel because someone supposedly responded “Yes” instead of “No” to a text message with the same stupid questions. Neither of us ever got it, and although I don’t pay much attention to text since my phone is constantly flooded with Trump messages ever since the NRCC gave it out to everyone. I certainly never answered “Yes” to anything, so it is possible the boys just wanted to goof off. In any case they came two days later after we carefully answered the questions; twice, and yet again just before they would enter the house. So we compliantly masked up when they finally came and quickly replaced some sort of broken doodad. 

Things have really gone completely jabberwocky over Covid. It is the height of absurdity to make an urgent repair dependent on answering a couple of text messages, (and text messages only) confirming that no one in the house has a disease and that everyone is masked. This is just the pinnacle of paranoia in a city where you have to carry a card confirming you’ve been vaccinated just to eat in a restaurant, which is yet another burden on an industry that already has been decimated by government regulations. If all of this isn’t overkill I don’t know what is. Our lives are being run by screwballs and if we don’t revolt soon we are going to be transformed into corporate state run automatons.

THE ENDLESS COVID CRISIS

 No wonder people in Covidland  are confused by ever shifting pronouncements on the pandemic. A few weeks ago when I went to a supermarket on Long Island virtually no one was wearing a mask. Today everyone was sporting one, so I had to go back to the car to search for a mask. There is no point in rocking the boat about this sort of thing. 

A few weeks ago I also had Covid despite having been vaccinated three times. I was sick for a few days and then it went away, but to be on the safe side I quarantined at my country house in order to avoid infecting anyone else. My latest bloodwork now shows I have the antibody. It is quite possible that had I not been so vaccinated it could have been far worse, and I might have wound up in the hospital, or on my way to the Covid underworld.

The Omicron variant is apparently quite contagious, and some sort of response is required. The question is whether extreme regulations are necessary, while also upending various rights. There is no easy answer to this, but clearly this administration is clueless and its vacillation and shifting positions have both confused and alienated the public. If this continues, if you know the Greek alphabet we will soon be nearing Ωmega, or the end, period. 

They came into office blaming the previous administration for the number of apparent Covid deaths, notwithstanding the fact that vaccines were developed in record time and travel restrictions put in place. Yet at the same time they were imposing heavy controls on Americans, in terms of testing, vaccines, and protections, they have allowed a continuing flow of illegal immigrants to enter the country without testing any of them. This is insanity. They claimed they would get control of the epidemic and mitigate its impact, yet last year under their watch the number of deaths exceeded the previous year. 

But the numbers may be exaggerated by other conditions at the time of death, and its attribution to Covid may have something to do with reporting incentives. No one really knows. What the people do know at this point is that very few “leaders” and “experts” really  know what they are talking about, and no one trusts the government any more. 

The severe disruption of many lives due to government policies is incalculable. But few of the people making and supporting these decisions are affected by them.  Those who work for the government, in academia, the media, big corporations, finance, etc. haven’t paid any price. The burden has been born by the working people and industries they are employed in, which have born the brunt of all the attempts to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. These are mostly small businesses such as restaurants, as well as the hospitality and travel industries. Meanwhile some big businesses have actually benefited. Clearly the effects have been uneven.

In a rational world the government would have targeted expenditures to those actually hurt by the pandemic, like the ones mentioned above. They had real costs and losses due to government policies that were designed to stem the spread of the disease. Instead the government passed out money to everyone, over and over, at far, far greater cost than an intelligent approach would have required. The consequences of this mindless beneficence will be heavy going forward. 

Yet simultaneously this same regime went out of its way to punish people who refuse to comply with its mandates. Not only have a vast number of people lost their jobs as a result, they have even been denied unemployment insurance! Meanwhile the regime’s client teachers union member have continued to be paid in many areas without doing any work.  Different standards for different people; and don’t forget our pampered illegal aliens. This is obscene and is indicative of an administrative state out of control. 

There are some states that have managed to maintain the constitutional freedoms we have inherited, but the federal government is hopelessly incompetent, arbitrary, inconsistent, wasteful, and destructive. 

There is much to be undone here and entire agencies that must be upended and reconstructed, and people needlessly punished must be compensated. That is certainly just and only the beginning steps necessary to restore legitimacy and confidence in this government. Too many of the ruling circles are clueless as to the revolutionary situation they are fomenting on the ground, while at the same time sending out an army of agents to monitor and harass “domestic terrorists” like parents and veterans. 

The people have lost confidence in all our institutions across the board, so what is left? The upcoming election tsunami will be the last chance to address these conditions and urgently implement reforms, for if they fail again this time, life as we have known it in this great republic will be over. 

WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT JANUARY 6, 2021

When Biden and Harris spoke this morning my jaw dropped in disbelief. It is apparent that the Democrats are going to use the riot of last Jan.6 as a new holiday of sorts to obscure their utter and complete failure on every single problem this country faces. No doubt it stirred emotion among Democratic partisans and the gullible, and anger among Republicans, but it all seems blind to the most significant to occurrence that day, which to me seemed obvious at the time, and still resonates, which was the failure to maintain security at the Capitol. So we need to look at the facts and get past the emotion.

Joe Biden gave a terrible divisive speech devoted largely to attacking Donald Trump, who, it must be said, provides a target-rich environment, mostly consisting of remarks he should have addressed a year ago. Apparently someone woke him up, wound him up, and sent him out to the podium to deliver a bitterly partisan speech, largely beating a dead horse in attacking Donald Trump, instead of uttering a single unifying word. That is why it was completely disingenuous, at best designed to motivate Democrats, and at worst to confirm him as absolutely the worst president in the history of the USA.

To be clear, I do not for a minute believe the overall presidential election last year was stolen. I find that suggestion to be untenable, and Donald Trump’s behavior since the election bizarre and sadly self-destructive, following a highly successful term of accomplishment against daunting odds. But any honest assessment of the past few years will find the most  egregious “threat to democracy” to have occurred during and after the Obama administration when the security services of the county were compromised and debased into partisan weapons against the incoming administration; (never mind the endless and worse “big lie” that the Russians were really in control, ultimately found to have emanated from the Hillary Clinton campaign and buried by the dishonest media). This was substantively far worse than a disorganized mob milling around the Capitol that was shockingly and poorly secured. It was a passing event, as opposed to deep and lasting damage to the state that has not only compromised  its legitimacy but only gotten worse, as we see these now comical security services unleashed against parents concerned about the poisonous ideology being imposed upon school children, or chasing phantom white racists while adversaries around the world are laughingly eating our lunch. 

There have been other instances in the past where “sacred” government facilities have be debased. When Andrew Jackson was elected president a mob was invited into the White House that became unruly and caused a great deal of damage. As far as January 6th goes, if there in fact had been any controlling conspiracy (yet to be found) to seize the Capitol it would have succeeded given how abysmally poor the security was. Now who actually had controlling responsibility over the Capitol police? None other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself. Yes, what became a mob was fed a lot of misinformation, and a handful actually destructively breached the facility (which allowed most to just wander around aimlessly taking selfies) but the lesson to take away from this is not the grave “threat to democracy” that occurred but the astonishingly unprepared, clueless security that day, which was just  inexcusable. It could easily have been a more organized attack by foreign enemies of the country, domestic radicals, or any bad player you can think of. 

Thus, it is false and misleading nonsense to suggest that foreign adversaries saw democracy as unworkable and under siege, when what actually registered with them was how bad the security was and how easy it was to breach. What they are still seeing is a bumbling, disorganized, dysfunctional security apparatus that can be penetrated compromised in a myriad of ways, thanks to the idiots in charge. They just don’t take this government seriously any more with its penchant for “stern warnings,” and “serious consequences” that never materialize. 

For Joe Biden to stand there and obfuscate the situation with canned rhetoric and dark fantasies about the terrible and apparently ongoing threat to democracy is preposterous, and worse a lame and devious attempt cover over the disastrous incompetence and failure of his administration across the board. It will no doubt stir the blood of partisans and pompous, gullible, and just plain stupid media mavens, who solemnly will continue the performance, and dutifully carry water for the Big Fool, but the real truth is that this country is in deep trouble, and hopefully enough people will be smart enough to see through the ruse, and respond accordingly at the ballot box. 

THE ENDLESS COVID PANDEMIC

 I've been pretty sick since a little before the end of last year. Once I stopped throwing up and got my temperature down I was able to function, though very lethargically. I am better now but I've been isolating myself at my summer house because it is almost certainly COVID,  and one of my doctors is ordering the antibody test to confirm. 

I was vaccinated three times, and it is possible it was either not so effective or it prevented me from coming down with something far worse. I don't know, and I think nobody really knows. That is a big problem. This whole thing has degenerated into a disastrous situation where trust has been further lost and clumsy attempts to stop the free flow of information have only made it worse. We need to see things in the light of day with verifiable facts in order to make an informed judgement. But that judgement is, and should be our own and not dictated by some higher authority, especially when it is one we do not have full confidence is. Everyone is an individual with different physiologies and accordingly must be addressed as a unique individual human, not via a heavy handed, dictatorial directive putting everyone in the same box, and worse sanctioning them if they do not comply with the order. There is no possible justification for throwing healthy people out of work, and worse denying them unemployment. 

It is going to be years before anyone can sort out the truth on this due to all of the obfuscation. Are hospital death counts accurate, or is more being attributed to COVID than is warranted? What is the definitive utility of masks? Of vaccinations? Of treatments? The administration has botched the distribution of tests so that demand now exceeds supply, and has done very little on what is probably the more important element here, namely cures for people that have come down with it instead of just ordering vaccinations. This is just incomprehensible. The application of cures has been largely left to individuals, doctors, hospitals and states, and has resulted in an unnecessary ball of confusion rolling through social media. Furthermore, it is now increasingly obvious that the vaccine is not enough, nor totally effective so the present crisis is the people who re currently suffering, which mean prioritizing cures.

I still think it is prudent for older folks to be vaccinated, given the inevitability of declining health, but there is no reason whatsoever to force it on small children and others, where there is no evidence that requires, perhaps outside of nonscientific demands from the Teachers Unions. 

Meanwhile China has paid no price for infecting the whole world unnecessarily, and I mean a substantive price, not lame gestures like boycotting the Olympics, which should never be done under any circumstances. It is unfair to the athletes, and contrary to the Olympic spirit, which involves bringing everyone, especially enemies together. No there must be a stiffer price, and we should begin to act in concert with our allies to develop one. I tend to suspect that this was in fact created and leaked from a lab. It has spread and mutated like nothing we have ever seen before. 

The real question is intent. Was it some sort of accident or did the Communists deliberately spread it. On the one hand it is highly unlikely that they would first inflict this on their own people. But we are talking about hard-line communists in power now, who see everything in collective terms and care nothing about individual lives. Any sacrifice is fine in order to build communism, which is why over 100 million people were killed in the last century. For that matter, given their indifference to human life it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they would, by the same lights, launch a nuclear war or greater plague on the assumption that given their huge population enough will survive to build the golden era of communism while eliminating all their enemies. After all, on a lighter note Reagan once asked for people to be free to leave China and come to America if they wished. So Chou En-Lai replied, how many Chinese do you want? 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, or something to that effect. 

We must get to the bottom of this one way or another. The West now faces a ruthless adversary intent on pushing us all aside any way they can. They steal our secrets, compromise our sports, Hollywood, and corporations that no longer have any loyalty to the USA, and for this there must be, there will be a reckoning. 

MORE FUNNY MONEY

The government is going to be sending out another round of "stimulus" checks to some, but no all people that will be exceedingly generous. I'm not miffed because I'm not eligible to get anything, but because there is no rational basis whatsoever for this action at this time. This money, or should I say "funny money" is either created out of thin air by printing it, which means that the money you have is worth less (i.e. inflation), or it will be based on yet more debt that coming generations will have to pay, or out of higher taxes for those that can still pay. This Covid bonus is illegitimate and ill conceived. It should have been targeted only to those who have actually been hurt by government policies, i.e. the restaurant industry, at a far lower cost. The future of this country is being squandered by an incredibly wasteful array of ill-conceived spending, and this really tops it off. The spoils may be shared broadly but the cost will be born narrowly.

Furthermore this is a terrible precedent we are now, apparently getting used to. It does nothing but encourage dependency with a nod from your friendly Democratic Party representative. More and more the message from the Biden administration is clear: do what we tell you to do and we will take care of you. It is clearly a case of trying to entrap more people into dependency, and therefore into Democrat voters. It is a brilliantly insidious maneuver. Who is going to say no to free money?

The problem is that free money becomes funny money and the inflation we are seeing now will only get worse until the whole system collapses, unless we reverse course, which is going to be harder and harder to do. This kind of spending will only usher in 1970s level inflation, and nobody wants that.  

THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

Facebook, excuse me, "Meta" is the worst company in the world. I was putting this together when I found that I was hardly alone in this opinion as Facebook came out on top as the worst entity in a Yahoo Finance survey as well, so this judgement is widespread. How then has it managed to so dominate social media?

 A lot was simply luck, but even more, the missteps of potential competitors. Let’s start with MySpace, which should have been in this position, given its early start, and the fact that it had far more customers initially than Facebook. It had the field to itself initially but blew it by having slow loading pages, blasting music on each one, along with much too heavy individual graphics and multimedia. Still people might have stuck with it except for the painfully slow loading. Fox blew $250 million purchasing  it without realizing what the problem was, so there was plenty of room for Facebook to grow, given its very plain, simple, and consistent interface that loaded right away and focused more on personal connection. But that was really all. 

The real, puzzling might-have-been is AOL, which had a better setup over twenty years ago than Facebook does today. They could and should have dominated this field but failed to adjust. Emerging from the earliest days of the Internet most users went by handles, rather than their real names, and their personal information remained as private as they wanted it to, which in retrospect may have been a plus given the state of privacy these days. But their search mechanism was far better in terms of finding people, they didn’t control who and what you could see, and they didn’t bombard you with ads, but also failed to monetize the service properly. Others, notably Google and Yahoo also tried, but it was too late and they simply abandoned their half-hearted efforts.

So that left Facebook by default, which now owns the field simply because it has the critical mass, which is to say you can assume everyone is here so you basically have to be here to reach them, notwithstanding the fact that you have very little control of who you can actually reach. You can have thousands of friends but only few of them see your posts and vice versa, and you don’t even have any control over what you do see; instead they do based on what their algorithms tell them you want to see. Still the result has been that people have drifted away from sites like Classmates to their equivalent on Facebook because everything now winds up here.

But these algorithms are inexact to say the least. They basically have virtually had a license to print money to the extent that they can micro-target ads to you by tracking your web surfing. But again it is far from perfect and sometimes laughable insofar as you often see ads for something you already just purchased which makes them obviously useless and a complete waste for the advertisers. Only recently have people begun to resist being tracked, and at least one major company, Apple, now makes privacy a priority, making it more difficult for Facebook to follow you without your permission. 

Worse they don’t even screen their advertisers so that people are getting burned by bogus vendors, with, i.e. storage devices with impossibly large memory that simply don’t work. So greedy and warped are they that they ignore crooked vendors but regulate users with a heavy hand. But they have also failed even functionally and aesthetically. Given all that power and control they could have done so much better than they have, but somehow it still feels like black and white in a world of color, there being remarkably few features available. 

But worst of all is the arrogant, almost complete indifference to users. It is just outrageous that a company of this size has no real customer support. If you need help with something you are out of luck. There is simply no one there. There is no number you can call nor even an email address you can write to. You are left with very limited and often useless help pages, or forums of other Users that costs them nothing. I, personally have been struggling for months to fix the link to my personal Home page that neither I, nor anyone else can now see or get to since they zapped the link to it when I set up a public page to post some writings, and switched it to the new page. So far my efforts have been in vain. 

So there’s no staff available to do anything useful so you have to wonder just what all the people working there do. Basically a lot of them just monitor and spy on you, and will interfere with your communications if they don’t like what you’re saying. So we have a situation where some kid is sitting there deciding what you can and cannot say. As if that weren’t bad enough, they are doubling down on it by adding yet more staff to do this sort of thing while still neglecting the basics of customer service that every other company provides. As a result you see more and more “corrections,” advisories, and labels covering your posts that you, of course have no ability to rebut. 

The icing on the cake is the blatant political bias and the concerted attempt to suppress not kooks, but ordinary conservatives from expressing themselves freely. They have censored people, they have blocked people, or arbitrarily completely shut down people, most notably a President of the United States in a breathtaking abuse of power. Even if you loathe the man, the very fact that they have the power to censor even a sitting President ought to be troubling to everyone. The end result is that in this private, not-so-little world, there is effectively no free speech and an inordinate amount of control over what you can do. 

As a private company they have the right to do so, but the result is that people are increasingly chafing under their yoke, and vast numbers of people have become disenchanted, to say the least, with their skulduggery. So although now nobody likes them, users are basically trapped to the extent that if they leave the service they are cut off from all the connections they have accrued and interacted with. No surprise then that they have turned themselves into the most hated company in the world, and I mean that literally because they have also alienated countries everywhere.

But worse for them, soon there are going to be consequences. You don’t screw around with people like this and get away without paying a price. I predict that price will be heavy as sentiment and power increasingly shift in this country. As that power begins to manifest itself they may pay dearly for their transgressions, and it is quite possible that the company will collapse over the next few years. As much as he may try, this time Zuckerberg is not going to be able to buy his way out of the situation he has created. Not only is the public disenchanted, for those likely to assume power are genuinely infuriated with these shenanigans. But if they fail to do anything in spite of all of this abuse, they too will be culpable and the time for revolution then may really have arrived.