CEOs and companies are never on the side of the people
For anyone seeking direct proof that woke capitalism is nothing but a scam, look no further than Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, who says as much in a direct message exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper. He calls “ethics” a “dumb game we woke Westerners play” — presumably to avoid any scrutiny from journalists, employees, investors and consumers.
For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.
“I read through Wikipedia a lot when I’m bored in class,” says Adam, aged 15, who studies photography and ICT at a school in Kent.
One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopaedia’s entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented “the first electric bread toaster”.
The smiles at the G20 cannot mask the deep tensions between East and West.
The G20 heads of state met in Bali this week, with geopolitical instability swirling around them and tensions raised between West and East. The missile that landed on Polish soil on Tuesday almost derailed proceedings. For one thing, it led Chinese president Xi Jinping to stand up Rishi Sunak, supposedly because of last-minute ‘movements to schedules’. But at least Joe Biden’s three-hour meeting with Xi passed without incident. And the relief of the delegates and the media was palpable.
Today’s Poland defies several leftist narratives.
As I settled into my LOT airlines seat, waiting for the plane to take off to Warsaw, I realized that I was feeling cozy. All my life I’ve been really self-conscious about how pale I am. Pale skin is thin skin and thin skin provides no camouflage. Every scar and eye bag, every wrinkle and knotted vein, is neon. “Black don’t crack,” black women boast. The darker the skin, the thicker. Thick skin wrinkles less and hides imperfections. Pale people like me look older than a comparable darker skinned person.
Why American films ignore life under Communism.
Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie colony’s rules. Consider this year’s “Total Eclipse.” Odd as it may seem, this is the first serious American film set against the background of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe’s two totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into war. With an ally on the Eastern Front, Hitler sent his Panzers west while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A film like this could have been as big a didactic dud as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s 1982 bomb, “Inchon,” with Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script, carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film’s dramatic power.
Musk posted a 24-hour Twitter poll asking users to decide if the controversial Trump, who recently announced a new run for the White House, should be reinstated on the embattled platform.
In the end, more than 15 million people voted, with those choosing to reinstate Trump taking 51.8% of the vote to 48.2% who said no.
Don’t worry, if a particular law, let’s say, the Emergencies Act, doesn’t say or do what a government wants it to say or do, in Justin Trudeau’s Canada you can just pretend it does. The rule of law? Constitutional norms? Parliamentary supremacy? Pfft, those are for dorks.
Almost no one — not CSIS, not the Ontario police, not even the prime minister himself up until the last minute — really believes the Freedom Convoy protests counted as a threat to the “security of Canada” as defined in legislation, or otherwise met the standard for declaring a national emergency.
Neil Young: ‘I sound like an old hippy, right? Well, that’s who I am!’
Neil Young’s new album, World Record, begins with a gentle lullaby of a song called Love Earth. “We can bring the seasons back,” sings Young in a reedy tenor as his on-off backing band Crazy Horse do their loose, shuffling thing. “Can you imagine that?” It is a vision of a return to an ecological Eden, and like the rest of World Record it addresses the two big concerns Young has been singing about his entire career: the environment and war. It is, I say to the singer, activist and self-described rich hippy, a rare glimpse of positivity when generally conversations on the environment are overwhelmingly negative.
Trans activist claims transgender people can change their biological sex pic.twitter.com/MLsipmIR89
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 19, 2022
After the crypto firm collapsed, the executive who handled the Enron debacle was brought in – and said he’d never seen anything like it
Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is another typical tale of financial mismanagement. That’s how its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, terms it: a liquidity crisis that tipped over into a solvency one.
FTX had deposits and loans and when depositors tried to get their money back, FTX didn’t have it to hand. Sure, the loans were in fancy digital money, rather than stale dollars, but at first glance, it appears like just another big company failure.
Then you look closer, and it becomes clear that the whole edifice is in fact the corporate equivalent of three children in a trenchcoat pretending to be a fully grown man.
Elon Musk inspires more meltdowns amid a sense that anything can and will happen
In the film Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard comes upon a remote outpost defending a bridge. Hoping to confer with the commander, he instead finds a delirious state of chaos. A machine gunner fires heavy caliber rounds into the night while trading taunts with an unseen member of the Viet Cong.
There is a war going on — against the diesel engine. It is being waged not because the diesel engine is a “threat” to the “climate.” It is being waged because the diesel engine is a threat — to the electric car. The forces pushing the latter use the manufactured “threat” of a “climate crisis” to attack the diesel engine (and also diesel fuel) precisely because it is a threat … to them and their agenda.
A special counsel with a background in war crimes has been appointed to carry out criminal investigations into Donald Trump over his role in the January 6 riot and his retention of government documents.
Jack Smith, specialist prosecutor for Kosovo war crimes who has served at the International Criminal Court investigating crimes against humanity, was named special counsel by Merrick Garland, the US attorney-general.
As Winston Churchill pointed out, “I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction”.
The Biden administration’s inaction has only been legitimizing the Iranian regime’s savage crackdown on its population, and sending a message to the Iranian people that Washington does not stand with them or with their aspirations for establishing a democratic system of governance; rule of law and justice; freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly; and human rights for all.
November 19 – Paveh, western #Iran
More footage of regime security forces fleeing from protesting locals who are continuing the nationwide protests against the mullahs on the 65th day of the uprising.#IranRevolution2022#مرگ_بر_ستمگر_چه_شاه_باشه_چه_رهبر pic.twitter.com/ALm6hn8iFc— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) November 19, 2022
Singapore achieves housing affordability through differentiated citizenship rights and restricted foreign ownership.
If you’re Canadian, you might feel envious learning the quest for affordable housing is basically a success for many of the 5.7 million people of Singapore.
That is not a story you hear often, or at all, in Canada, especially not in Greater Toronto, Metro Vancouver or Victoria, three of the world’s more unaffordable cities.
