10 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Real Writing Updates
I just submitted this week’s TPC column, which addresses a growing legal problem and which was coupled (by me) with some neglected history. Will be good stuff and linked here when published.
And, I’m wrapping up a new fiction short – a supernatural thriller teaser! That, I think, will be excellent. Look for it at TPC and, most definitely, here.
10 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in News and Notes
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The end can’t be too far away for the world’s largest coffee, toy, and women’s magazine shop. Vox Day is right, as usual, about what this means to big publishers, book lovers, and B&N.
It’s just about all over for the major publishers now that Barnes & Noble has been acquired by a hedge fund:
Barnes & Noble Inc said on Friday it would be bought by hedge fund Elliott Management Corp for $475.8 million, marking the end of the once-dominant U.S. book retailer as a public company after years of falling sales.
Shares in the largest U.S. bookstore chain rose 11%, after ending up 30% on Thursday when reports of a potential deal surfaced.
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 1993, Barnes & Noble has struggled to grow its business since the arrival of Amazon.com Inc turned the book sales market on its head. Even the company’s recent efforts to pull in a more tech-savvy audience with its Nook e-book reader failed to compete with Amazon’s Kindle and other tablets.
Elliot’s offer of $6.50 per share, represented a premium of about 42% to Wednesday’s close, the day before media reports of a potential transaction first surfaced. Barnes & Noble has been exploring options for a buyout since at least last October, with multiple parties showing interest including founder-chairman Leonard Riggio. Riggio acquired the flagship Barnes & Noble trade name in 1970s, nearly a century after Charles Barnes started the business in his Illinois home. Riggio grew the business, adding several retail stores across the country, but could not sustain the growth in a retail landscape dominated by Amazon.
In 2014, Barnes & Noble closed its New York Fifth Avenue store – once the world’s largest bookstore – and has faced declining sales for at least the last three years. As of this January, it ran 627 retail stores.
I very much doubt that Elliott Management has any interest whatsoever in building up a bookselling business. Instead, it’s going to methodically extract the most valuable pieces of the business, sell them off, and profit from the dismantling of the business. This means that the Big Five publishers will probably merge and reduce themselves to a Big Three, with at least two attempts to set up their own competitor to Amazon, both of which will fail, like Macmillan’s attempt to establish Pronoun, due to their structural inability to ignore the legacy requirements that inhibit their decision-making.
And, the book market is going to shrink further anyway. We’re now working on the second generation of complete illiterates, soon to move from “don’t read” to “can’t read.” Dark Ages 2.0.
09 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Hellywood Offers Georgia Strange New Gods
Bow before them and sacrifice the children, or suffer the economic consequences. Bloomberg’s choice of “biggest victim” is a little interesting.
Biggest Victim
The threats have created a large cast of odd bedfellows.
The biggest potential victim of a Hollywood boycott, for instance, is Pinewood Studios Atlanta, with its 18 sound stages and 400-acre backlot south of the city, where a number of Disney’s Marvel blockbusters, including the recent “Avengers: Endgame” were produced.
Pinewood’s lead owner is Dan Cathy, the chief executive of Chick-fil-A and outspoken social conservative whose Southern Baptist church opposes all abortions. Cathy is also developing a mini-city across the street, with pricey rowhouse-style homes, boutiques, restaurants and a spa clubhouse. Neither Cathy nor anyone from Pinewood would comment on the potential impact from Hollywood’s threats.
Kemp has also gone silent, after canceling a trip to an annual Georgia Film Day in Los Angeles and touring Pinewood to reassure the industry last month. The tour did not enter the soundstages where people work. “We’re not commenting,” said governor spokesman Cody Hall, in response to a question about the boycott threats.
Meanwhile, the Democrat whom Kemp narrowly trumped in last year’s gubernatorial race, Stacey Abrams, is all over the place. She popped up in April at an “Avengers: Endgame” screening for film workers and their families, where Kemp — who had yet to sign the abortion bill — was the main speaker. She has now cast herself as the Georgia film industry’s savior and is urging filmmakers to help fight the law in court instead of pulling out. She flies to Hollywood to make her case next week.
Others close to the industry — particularly the black entertainment industry — say Atlanta should declare its independence from Georgia, at least for marketing purposes. “Georgia doesn’t deserve Atlanta,” said Erik Gordon, a marketing consultant who works with African-American entertainers.
I’d say the biggest victims are also the smallest, those murdered children. Next, would be the rest of the population being zombified by the filth and idiocy produced at places like Pinewood.
Choose carefully, Georgia. If you bow to Moloch, then expect to reap his rewards. You will deserve what you get either way.
*As important as this issue is, I tire of writing basically the same thing time after time. And, based on the little feedback I get from the Georgians themselves, it may be a non-starter. Darkness does not go away just because one ignores it.
09 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on NPS Credibility Gone by 2019
So much for another climate change hoax:
Glacier National Park quietly removed a visitor center sign saying its iconic glaciers will disappear by 2020 due to climate change.
Several winters of heavy snowfall threw off climate model projections the glaciers would all disappear by 2020, according to federal officials.
A blogger first noticed the signage change and noted other signs warning of “impending glacier disappearance have been replaced.”
The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change.
As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.
Now, it’s 2030, or 2080, or 8020, or never.
09 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Curse of Credentialization
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DC, education, private school, schools, Sidwell Friends, trash
I rail and rant against the “public” schools and with good reason. However, fair is fair, and sometimes things go awry at nonpareil private schools. Drama a Sidwell:
School officials have repeatedly warned parents, who represent the pinnacle of elite Washington, about their offensive conduct. In January, the head of the school, Bryan Garman, sent a remarkable letter to parents of seniors in which he demanded that they stop “the verbal assault of employees.” He also reiterated a policy banning them from recording conversations with counselors and making calls to counselors from blocked phone numbers. Garman also suggested that some parents were responsible for the “circulation of rumors about students.”
Anger, vitriol, and deceptiveness have come to define highly selective college admissions. In the now notorious Varsity Blues scandal, the desire from wealthy parents to get their children into such elite institutions as Yale and the University of Southern California led them to lie on applications and obtain fake SAT scores. At Sidwell Friends, one of America’s most famous Quaker schools, the desire manifested itself in bad behaviors—including parents spreading rumors about other students, ostensibly so that their children could get a leg up, the letter said.
Why the desperation?
08 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on The War on Books
VP offers some shocking (if predictable) insight into the removal of books from institutions of higher “learning.”
The Great Enstupidation of the United States proceeds apace:
When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.
Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.
Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.
One can make a very good case for outlawing so-called “higher education” now, as the Christian university created to educate young men has now devolved into a worse-than-useless factory for transforming young women into barren SJW debt-slaves.
This is a continuation of the trend from middle and high schools, in keeping with the general dumbing down. In some of those schools, what books are left are being caution-taped off to protect students from any random ideas.
Picture by me. I was not kidding, sadly.
08 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Indelible Evidence
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As the IQs fall and other dsygenic markers manifest, we see signs. Some are literally tattooed on people. I marked this story but forgot about it: U. Miami study links tattoos to mental issues.
People with tattoo are more likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues and suffer from sleep problems, findings of new research have revealed.
In a survey-based study published in International Journal of Dermatology on Jan. 24, Karoline Mortensen, from the University of Miami, and colleagues investigated a potential association between tattoo and negative health-related outcomes and risky behaviors.
They found that having tattoos was not significantly related to overall health status. Nonetheless, their survey, which involved more than 2,000 adults in the United States, found that people who have inked skin were more likely to suffer from mental health issues and sleep problems.
Compared with their non-tattooed counterparts, people with tattoos were also more likely to have a higher number of sex partners in the past year. They also tend to be smokers, and likely to have spent time in jail.
Brain scanning might help explain the correlation. Then again, was a study really needed to reach this conclusion?
Yes, yes, pedants, I’m sure yours is special…
08 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Spike Lee Says, “Do the Wrong Thing”
The great director urges his fellow mentally-ill carpetbaggers to abandon the Peach State:
Director Spike Lee is calling for Hollywood production companies to leave Georgia over a law that would ban abortions as early as six weeks, upon detection of a fetal heartbeat.
Most studios that have commented have said they’re waiting to see if the so-called “heartbeat” law actually takes effect next year, or if the courts will block it. But at the arrivals line for Denzel Washington’s AFI Lifetime Achievement tribute Thursday, Lee said now is the time for Georgia-based productions to “shut it down” and boycott the state’s booming film industry to drive change.
In stating, “shut it down,” he forgot to add “they know!”
07 Friday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Enemy Within
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Mexico has identified possible American and British funding for some of the “refugee” invasion columns which steadily march across the open Southern border.
Mexican tax officials froze the assets of 26 individuals and entities they allege are tied to human smuggling organizations or to promoting Central American migrant caravans. The caravans moved thousands of individuals from the “northern triangle” through Mexico to the U.S. border. The funding for the migrant caravans allegedly came from the U.S., England, Africa, and Central America.
Through a prepared statement, Mexico’s Finance and Tax Secretariat (SHCP) announced the freezing of the accounts claiming the move resulted from an investigation by their Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF).
One wonders if the President can bother to put down the Twitterphone and hold off on banning firearms and maybe have these fifth column criminals hunted down and destroyed prosecuted. I realize that is a lot to wonder.
07 Friday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on A Comparison of Depressions
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Doug Casey examines the 1930s alongside the modern age.
THE SOCIETY
1930s
The world was largely rural or small-town. Communications were slow, but people tended to trust the media. The government exercised considerable moral suasion, and people tended to support it. The business of the country was business, as Calvin Coolidge said, and men who created wealth were esteemed. All told, if you were going to have a depression, it was a rather stable environment for it; despite that, however, there were still plenty of riots, marches, and general disorder.
Today
The country is now urban and suburban, and although communications are rapid, there’s little interpersonal contact. The media are suspect. The government is seen more as an adversary or an imperial ruler than an arbitrator accepted by a consensus of concerned citizens. Businessmen are viewed as unscrupulous predators who take advantage of anyone weak enough to be exploited.
A major financial smashup in today’s atmosphere could do a lot more than wipe out a few naives in the stock market and unemploy some workers, as occurred in the ’30s; some sectors of society are now time bombs. It’s hard to say, for instance, what third- and fourth-generation welfare recipients are going to do when the going gets really tough.
At least we’ve got TeeVee, smartphones, and social media today.
PERRIN LOVETT 
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