Category: Uncategorized

CPAC converged

CPAC underlines my point about the total worthlessness of the so-called “conservative movement”:

The Stream has been warning Christians that our religious liberty is in danger. Both Maggie Gallagher and John Zmirak pointed to the crucial upcoming race in Pennsylvania. There the GOP establishment has endorsed a candidate who sponsored a pro-trans “bathroom bill” with no protections for dissenters.

Such disasters don’t come from nowhere. They emerge because the conservative movement itself is undergoing an LGBT-inspired purge.

Consider the phone call Dan Schneider made to Brian Camenker in early February 2018. Dan Schneider is the Executive Director of the Conservative Political Action Conference. (“CPAC” wields great influence in politics. Just how great? Donald J. Trump is speaking at their yearly convention!)

Brian Camenker is the president of Mass Resistance. That’s a decades-old network of grassroots organizers. His groups fight radical left-wing movements in schools, local communities, and state policies. You may not have heard of Mass Resistance because its chapters focus on local activism, not always elections. They tend not to congregate on Twitter but encompass many people. Mass Resistance works with the folks who got Donald J. Trump elected.

Mr. Camenker had applied to run a table at CPAC’s big conference. CPAC approved his application and took his payment. Then about ten days before CPAC, Mr. Schneider told Mr. Camenker that he had changed his mind. He unilaterally rescinded the contract between Mass Resistance and CPAC.

Why? Mr. Camenker opposed transgender and homosexual curriculum for children in 2015. He used language that is less than perfectly … winsome. How does Mr. Schneider know about these comments? Because he found a video clip online. That’s thanks to gay activists who have indexed Mass Resistance as a “hate group.” So gay activists are now vetting who can speak at “conservative” events. Isn’t that special?

Mr. Schneider has barred Camenker him from exhibiting at CPAC. It seems that CPAC wants more gay lobbyists with deep pockets. So CPAC is now stiff-arming religious folks who want the public library to stop pushing sodomy on four-year-olds.

CPAC has come a long way since it worried about including gay Republican groups like the Log Cabins. Now CPAC serves as their enforcement wing. It silences conservatives for stating that homosexuality or transgenderism might be objectionable.

Which, of course, is why they should have kept the Log Cabin Republicans out in the first place. Convergence always begins with foolish inclusivity. Sacrifice one principle, and it is only a matter of time before you sacrifice the rest of them.

Alt-Right or nothing, Christians. This proves, again, that there is absolutely no point in relying upon the conservatives to accomplish anything except your surrender. Conservatives have COMPLETELY failed in literally every possible way. It was a movement that was always destined to fail, since it was never anything more than a posture and a pose. About the only progressive objective that conservatives haven’t embraced is your disarmament.

And I wouldn’t count that out in the aftermath of the next school shooting, considering the way in which their donors are threatening to stop writing checks if they don’t cave on gun control too.

I am proud to have never described myself as a conservative. People used to wonder why I didn’t, but I trust that my reasoning is more readily apparent today.

A clueless chief of staff

Reading this account of Reince Preibus’s short-lived term as White House Chief of Staff, one does not wonder why Trump brought him on – it was an olive branch to the Republican Establishment – but how the guy ended up in charge of the RNC in the first place:

Priebus was hobbled by two other factors. A former Republican National Committee chairman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, he barely knew his new boss, and he was part of the establishment that Trump had vilified. Moreover, during the campaign, the two men had been known to feud. Trump had been especially resentful of Priebus’s reaction to the campaign’s existential crisis just a month before Election Day: the release of the tawdry Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump had made graphic misogynist comments that were caught by an open microphone.

The morning after the video surfaced, Trump’s candidacy had been pronounced all but dead in the media. In response, the beleaguered nominee’s top aides—campaign C.E.O. Stephen Bannon, former New York mayor Rudy Giu­liani, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump—gathered at Trump Tower for a war council to advise the candidate on whether he should stay in the race or quit.

The nominee, sleep-deprived, surly, his jaw clenched, posed the crucial question: in light of the videotape, what were his chances of winning? Priebus went first: “If you decide to stay in, you will lose in the biggest landslide in American political history.” One by one, Trump’s other advisers danced around the question—until finally it was Bannon’s turn. “One hundred percent,” he declared. “One hundred percent you’re going to win this thing. Metaphysical.” (Priebus recalled things differently, saying no one was that emphatic.)

Trump, of course, pulled off an astonishing upset. And a month later, McDonough met his successor as chief of staff in the West Wing lobby and escorted him to his office. As the former chiefs went around the table, giving Priebus advice, they were unanimous about one thing: Trump would be unable to govern unless Priebus was empowered as first among equals in the West Wing. Trump’s incoming chief dutifully took notes on a yellow pad.

Suddenly there was a commotion; Barack Obama was entering the room. Everyone stood and shook hands, then Obama motioned for them to sit. The 44th president’s own chiefs—Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, Jack Lew, McDonough, and Pete Rouse (who served unofficially)—were all pres­ent, and Obama nodded toward them. “Every one of these guys at different times told me something that pissed me off,” Obama said, flashing his familiar grin. “They weren’t always right; sometimes I was. But they were right to do that because they knew they had to tell me what I needed to hear rather than what I wanted to hear.” Obama looked at Priebus. “That’s the most important function of a chief of staff. Presidents need that. And I hope you will do that for President Trump.” With that, Obama said his good-byes and departed.

Why would you ever listen to what someone said after he had demonstrated such a complete inability to read the electorate or predict the future? I’m astonished that Trump even pretended to take the guy’s opinion seriously at all.

We have a tendency to believe that those who are around the positions of power must be smarter or more astute than the average individual in some way. We are endlessly lectured on the importance of their gravitas, their credentials, their educations, and their comportment. But the truth is more often than not that they simply happen to have had access to money, power, or influence. It’s not just the USA, almost every democracy is run by people who are no more intelligent, and have no better judgment, than those annoying kids that were on your high school student council.

Except the kids you knew on your student council were less arrogant, less sheltered, and less corrupt than the average politico.

Barnes & Noble: the beginning of the end

The end of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain has not yet arrived. But it is now in sight:

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books.

That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 632 stores. From a former employee:

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Further, the company laid off many shipping receivers around the holidays, resulting in bare shelves and a customer escape to Amazon. In December 2017, usually B&N’s key month, sales dropped 6 percent to $953 million. Online sales fell 4.5 percent.

It is important to note that when other big box retailers, namely Circuit City, went the route of firing all highly paid employees and bringing in minimum wage cashiers, stockers, and salespeople it signaled the beginning of the end.

It’s actually worse than was originally reported, because Barnes & Noble had already shut down 149 of those 781 stores.

The decline of Barnes & Noble is both sad and exciting, as far as I’m concerned. Sad, because the bookstore was an important part of my early adulthood. I used to go to the original Roseville store after work on payday to spend most of my monthly $50 book budget on what gradually became an impressive collection of SF/F paperbacks, augmented by an eclectic assortment of hardcovers picked up on remainder. That’s why I still have all the Dorset Press books, like The Kingdom of Armenia by M. Chahin and The Mabinogion, translated and introduced by Jeffrey Gantz, on the bookshelves in my office.

A few years later, Spacebunny and I used to spend almost every Friday night at the Har Mar Barnes & Noble after working out and having dinner with the guys at Khan’s Mongolian BBQ. That was also where, as a newly published SF author, I participated in the store’s biggest-ever book-signing with David Arneson, Gordon R. Dickson, Joel Rosenberg, and David Feintuch, all of whom have since left us. For more than a decade, Barnes & Noble was a touchstone for me.

But the incipient failure of the chain also means that new opportunities are in store. It means that Amazon’s influence over the book world will grow stronger and the power of the Big Five will be further weakened. It means chaos and excitement and danger, and an environment in which the most nimble and adroit can profit most.

So, it’s going to be an interesting ride ahead. I hope you will join us on it. And since I’m often asked how our readers can most effectively support us when you buy our books, the answer is buying our print edition books through the Castalia Direct Store. The interface absolutely sucks and the prices are not always as good as Amazon, but we are working with our partners are Aerio on improving both. The alternative is to be completely dependent upon Amazon, which strikes me, for one, as a risky idea.

Wakanda is Israel

It’s rather bizarre to see all the “hurrah for African nationalism” hooplah about Black Panther when it is clearly just more globalist propaganda dressed in a dashiki. WATYF went to see the movie so you don’t have to; he responded to the following exchange between MOTW and me in which we theorized precisely how it would be converged. And, as it turns out, it is a severely converged movie that subverts, rather than celebrates, the very nationalism it so ostentatiously displays.

MOTW: I even predict that the second Black Panther movie will have a villain who wants to bring the traditional nationalist values back to Wakanda, but the Black Panther–who will by then be SJW enlightened and will thus have accepted the glories of progressive globalism–will fight to stop Wakanda’s return to its past “dark ages” of nativism and “regressivism”. Thus, in this movie, they show a nationalistic Wakanda so that they can then use that premise in movie two to show how much better Wakanda becomes once it turns globalist and progressive. That is my prediction.

VOX: I was actually expecting them to pull that in this movie.

WATYF: They did.

How many people here actually saw this movie? I thought I saw some comments about how this movie was pro-nationalist and so would undercut the SJWs and what not. Was this something they concluded from second-hand info? Because that’s the opposite message that this movie conveys.

I’ll leave aside the non-political things I didn’t like about this movie (the CGI, the incoherent motives of the Big Bad, the lousy fight choreography, the hammy accents/acting) and focus on the political message.

The Big Bad is angry at the history of black oppression (and maybe even oppression in general, but mostly black oppression) and he’s also pissed that Black Panther’s dad killed his dad. He tricks some white dude into helping him steal back an artifact that was stolen from Wakandans by evil Whitey a long time ago. Afterwards, he double-crosses the white dude because it ends up he only wanted to kill him so he could deliver him (a wanted Wakandan criminal) to the Wakandans as a way to leverage his way in the door and gain some clout.

Once there, he points out how Wakandans shouldn’t be in hiding, letting oppression of their people (I guess all black people are their people or something) go on around the world. They should be helping. Not just helping, but ruling. Black Panther talks about how important it is that they protect Wakanda and its secrets and how it has always been this way. Big Bad challenges Black Panther for the crown and wins, then sets in motion a plan to send advanced weapons to all of the “oppressed people” around the world so they can rise up against their oppressors.

Yes, some of the social justicey things are put in the mouth of the Big Bad, but they are done so in a sympathetic manner, not in a way that makes him sound crazy or even wrong. This is demonstrated by the fact that by the end of the movie, after defeating the Big Bad and giving him a chance to see one last Wakandan sunset and say a few words about the evils of slavery before finally dying, Black Panther decides that the Big Bad was right all along (at least in part).

First, he goes to America and buys up a bunch of buildings in the projects so he can “make a difference”. Then, in a post-credit scene that made me groan audibly, he goes to the UN, announces their intention to start aiding the world and taking a more active role in it, reveals their secret advanced status (since up to that point everyone assumed they were just a poor nation of farmers) and gives a “Can’t we all just get along” speech that rivals anything ever said by any milquetoast, white-guilt-addled liberal. Something about “there’s much more that unites us than divides us” and all that hippy-dippy garbage.

There is nothing “nationalist” about this movie. If anything, it’s about how a nationalist learned that his nationalism was wrong.

I will say that the preachy context in the main part of the film was more subtle and that if you didn’t hang around for the post-credit scene then you may have missed exactly what they were trying to say, but after the speech he gives at the UN, the message couldn’t have been clearer.

Metaphorical translation: Wakanda is Israel. The primary theme is the selfish evil of nationalism versus the imperialist imperative of tikkun olam and blessing the world through magnanimous superiority. The memes are wrong. This movie is not even remotely Alt-Right. It is as every bit as cancerous and converged as we expected.

And why on Earth would you ever have expected anything else from Disney? SJWs ALWAYS double down.

Then go join the Democrats

Along with all the other Fake Americans:

A prominent Republican political donor demanded on Saturday that the party pass legislation to restrict access to guns, and vowed not to contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”

Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.

“I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons,” he wrote. “Enough is enough!”

Hmmm, Florida-based. Checks Infogalactic. Confirmed. Fake American.

Hoffman was raised on the south side of Chicago, the youngest of seven children. His father, a Jewish Austrian, emigrated to the United States in 1906 and opened a poultry store, while his mother was a Scottish-American immigrant who grew up in Kentucky.

Fake Americans neither understand nor respect fundamental American rights. They may be paper citizens, but they are not Posterity and they are not Americans.

If I were the Chairman of the RNC, I would very publicly expel Mr. Hoffman Jr. from the Republican Party. The man is attempting to use his money and influence to disarm Americans and deny them their unalienable rights. I’d call him a traitor, except, of course, he is not an American at all. Even the civic nationalists with their “creedal nation” nonsense can’t deny that, as Mr. Hoffman Jr. does not accept the creed or the Constitution.

Italia in revolt

Regime change is coming soon to Italy.

A fortnight tomorrow, Italians will go to the polls in an election that was ill-tempered enough before the horror show in Macerata.

The EU’s failed migration policies and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of African migrants on the Italian coast had already made immigration one of the two big issues in the election on March 4. The other is Italy’s dismal economy, currently buried under £2 trillion of national debt. Macerata has raised the stakes even higher.

Most Italians I meet blame their politicians for ineptitude and the EU for abandoning them. They are in a vengeful mood…. Berlusconi’s coalition partners are the hard-Right League or ‘Lega’ (previously the breakaway Northern League) and the even-more-Right-wing neo-fascist Brothers of Italy. Despite the name, they are led by a woman and their candidates include Rachele Mussolini, granddaughter of the wartime dictator.

As for the Left, things are looking bleak. Italy’s centre-Left Democratic Party (PD) is the only one sharing the vision of ever-closer European union peddled by France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel. But Italians want less Europe, not more.

Even diehard supporters of the PD admit this is not their year. Their great hope, the shiny Macron-style Matteo Renzi, was prime minister for five minutes, but destroyed his career with a botched referendum on the constitution in 2016 and had to be replaced by a caretaker PM.

Once the country has voted a fortnight hence, Italy seems likely to join the EU’s anti-Brussels nationalist awkward squad of Poland, Austria, Hungary and others.

There is, though, little appetite for a Brexit-style break with Europe — there will be no ‘Quitaly’ just yet — largely because the country could not stand the economic shock.

But Brussels is viewed with utter contempt. And politicians across the board are now capitalising on the Macerata situation. Berlusconi himself has warned of a ‘social bomb’ as a result and says that just 5 per cent of Italy’s 600,000 migrants are legitimate refugees who should be allowed to stay.

The newspaper La Repubblica has carried a pre-Macerata opinion poll showing that 40 per cent of Italians ‘strongly or very strongly’ agree that migrants represent ‘a danger to public order and personal safety’.

Here in Macerata, 150 miles north of Rome, I find zero appetite for greater European integration — and this is a Left-wing university town.

Historically, it would have been firmly behind the liberal consensus.

Not any more. Even the liberals talk like Ukip, while those on the Right talk of mass deportations.

I’m definitely pro-Lega and pro-Salvini. Berlusconi is getting all the attention, of course, but Salvini is the much more serious player and he’s going to be around a lot longer than Silvio. I don’t think Italy is psychologically ready to shed the burden of the EU yet, but people dislike it a LOT more than they did back when it was Euros flooding into Italy instead of Africans.

But again, notice the difference between the strength of the reaction and the numbers involved. The European nations will defend themselves before it is too late and they will survive.

Black is the new black

Black Panther is not only the best superhero movie ever made, it is also the most successful. More or less. This just goes to show that Obama really did heal the racial divide in the United States and end global racism.

By the time the four-day President’s Day holiday stretch ends, Black Panther will have surpassed many of Marvel’s mightiest on the all-time domestic B.O. openers chart. Black Panther is now looking at the 6th best opening of all-time on a 3-day-basis with an estimated $187.6M per industry projections and a mind-blowing $216M over four days.

How much do moviegoers love Black Panther? The Ryan Coogler-directed movie earned an A+ CinemaScore tonight, Marvel’s second after 2012’s The Avengers.

On the 3-day all-time chart, Black Panther is just above Captain America: Civil War ($179.1M). Back in January Fandango reported that out of the gate in its first 24 hours, Black Panther outstripped the advance tickets sales of Civil War, however, analysts didn’t rush to comp the Wakanda superhero to Marvel’s other titles. They just couldn’t believe at the time how massive this was going to be. While Black Panther is under Avengers: Age of Ultron on the 3-day all-time openers list  ($191.2M), the pic is beating the sequel’s four-day run ($204.4M). Black Panther has already left Disney’s Beauty and the Beast ($174.7M) and WB/DC’s Batman v. Superman ($166M) in the dust to become the biggest pre-summer opener of all-time.

This is excellent news. Given the similarly unprecedented success of Wonder Woman, Marvel is clearly going to be doubling down, and doubling down again, on even more diversity.

The door to the disruption of the comics industry just opened that much wider.

It’s going to be amusing to read the revisionist reviews when all the critics finally sober up. I expect we will see an arc similar to the one we see after every Star Wars movie.

  1. OMG! It’s the BEST since EMPIRE!
  2. Okay, maybe we got a little carried away. But it’s still really good!
  3. Well, I mean, it’s all right.
  4. Actually, there are a lot of things that don’t make any sense.
  5. And are pretty lame, come to think of it.
  6. This movie sucks.
  7. Now, what was the second one called? No, the second of the new ones, not the prequels.

You know it’s going to happen. The whispers about the first major plot holes have already begun. And speaking of Star Wars movies, as of Day 62, The Last Jedi had officially fallen $300 million behind its predecessor in domestic box office.

TFA: Day 63 $917.8
TLJ: Day 63 $617.4

Both my December 19th prediction and my January 12th projection of $624 million domestic are looking pretty good. Including the foreign box office, TLJ is currently $745.8 million short. Convergence is expensive.

USMC lowers officer standards

Because gender equality is more important than winning wars. And why not? Seriously. It’s not as if the US Armed Forces have been defending the nation or its borders for the last 60 years anyhow.

The Marine Corps has made a major change to its Infantry Officer Course. The first big challenge for many was a test of physical fitness. If you passed, you moved on. If you didn’t, you washed out. The test was especially difficult for women who had to meet the same standard as the men. Not anymore.

The Infantry Officer Course now uses the physical fitness test as an exercise, and not a pass/fail requirement.

Officials with Marine Corps Training and Education Command told Military.com “that Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller had made a decision in November to transform the test from a high-stakes hurdle to an assessment from which students can drop without risking their place in the course.”

“[Neller] approved modifications to the IOC [program of instruction] to better tie student evaluation and graduation requirements to published infantry training and readiness manual, military occupational specialty specific performance standards, and operating force requirements,” TECOM officials said in a statement.

As the student evaluation and graduation requirements gravitate towards female-friendly subjective homework and classroom attendance standards rather than objective physical standards, we can expect women to increasingly not only complete the Infantry Officer Course, but excel in it. Which, over time, will lead to the consequences explained by Martin Van Creveld and quoted in SJWs Always Double Down:

As Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian has noted, the more women enter any professional field, the more men leave it. And as the men depart, so to do the prestige and the economic rewards provided by the field. This creates a vicious cycle that both expels existing men from the field while repelling new men from entering it.

If the universities can be considered a reliable model, we’re about three decades away from a majority female Marine Corps. No wonder China is content to patiently wait for its opportunity. This marks the second step in the end of the USMC’s historical prestige. Even current female Marine officers understand this.

“Changing this rite of passage will be doing female Marines no favors in trying to be infantry officers,” Marine 2nd Lt. Emma Stokien, a Marine Corps intelligence officer, wrote. “Female Marines often have to work much harder than their peers to earn the same respect, and entering the infantry under the dark cloud of even perceived lowered standards will make this a practically impossible challenge and potentially cause real harm to unit cohesion and the faith between leader and led.”

Permitting women to join the Marine Corps was the first mistake. Unqualified female officers are the second one. But the empire is in decline, and so these events are not even remotely surprising. There will be more unnecessary mistakes in the future and they will be more and more disastrous, until the empire “unexpectedly” crumbles for “no reason at all.”

Netflix and the credit bubble

Netflix has always been a shady operation, in my opinion. Their streaming business depended entirely upon someone else being forced to pay for most of the enormous bandwidth costs that their delivery system required. They got away with that one somehow, but I think it is unlikely that they’ll be able to get away with alleged accounting practices that sound creative even by Hollywood’s infamous standards.

This almost-TV network will pay at least twice what anyone else will for original content, whether you are selling a TV series, film – or even a stand-up comedy special.

The modern version of this scheme is enabled by a very unique form of accounting hocus-pocus, used by the almost-TV network.  This accounting magic allows the company to claim that it is generating a “profit”.  The reality is that this company burned through about $2 billion of cash last year, and will burn through another $3-4 billion in 2018.

This almost-TV network simply depreciates the value of all these films and shows over a far longer period of time than everyone else ever has.  The company claims that their definition is legit, because the content is in their own “library”.

This almost-TV network is the 1st to deliver its content in a unique way, using relatively new technology – they were the first company to do it this way on a large scale.  This means the Feds presently have no basis to challenge the almost TV-network on its suspect accounting, because the new “definition” has not been proven wrong.  Only the ultimate financial collapse of the company will do that.  In the meantime, the accountants and auditors go along for the ride and happily collect their fees, as they always do.

The almost-TV network tells its stockholders that it can taper down this spending spigot in the future, to generate actual cash.  This is an obvious lie, in 2 ways.

If the almost-TV network ever cut spending and new content, many subscribers would drop them like a hot potato.  Second, the company is making many big public commitments to spend money like drunken sailors, for several years into the future.  The huge deal they made this week – that is just to the head guy alone.  It doesn’t count a penny towards what it will cost to make his shows.

This sort of corporate shadiness is yet another sign that the end of the most recent credit bubble is in sight. A commenter on the site had some interesting insights on the Netflix situation by making two historical comparisons.

The AOL fraud was based on an accounting scam where they capitalized all marketing expenses. All those CD-ROMs that you got through the mail and in magazines was claimed by AOL as a “research and development” cost. So could be amortized over seven years instead of charging them against that years accounts. So AOL not only never made any profit but had actually lost huge amounts of money. Which Time Warner discovered the hard way after the merger. Many billions of losses. Its not like everyone in the business at the time did not know that AOL was based on fraud.

The Softkey/Learning Company fraud was based on acquiring larger and larger software companies and greatly inflating the “goodwill” of the acquired companies. So their balance sheet looked great and the companies they acquired were cash rich and had great cash flows. But the scam needed bigger and bigger companies to acquire, like all Ponzi schemes, and when they ran out of companies to gobble up they sold the whole festering sack of shit to the nearest clueless idiot with money. In this case Mattel. Who a few years later had to write off $3 billion in losses and almost went bankrupt.

A friend of mine was involved with a very large corporation that grew through credit-funded mergers; his company was acquired several steps before the final end game. The company had billions in revenue and was worth many multiples more when it finally imploded. It was an extremely educational experience to be able to witness the whole thing gradually play out from the outside.

The FBI is the problem

What good would more gun control laws do when the FBI would ignore every reported violation of them anyhow?

FBI director must resign: Florida governor demands Fed head step down after Bureau reveals it did not investigate Nikolas Cruz despite being warned of stockpiled guns and desire to kill SIX Weeks before massacre.

The FBI released a statement on Friday revealing that a call came in alerting the agency about Nikolas Cruz being a possible threat in early January. ‘The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts,’ said Cruz. That same caller, who contacted the FBI on January 5 via their Public Access Line, also shared their belief that Cruz might conduct a school shooting  The FBI did not investigate despite the ‘potential threat to life,’ and failed to even alert the Miami field office about the call.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida is now calling on Christopher Wrey to resign as director of the FBI and parents of victims voiced their anger at funerals ‘Seventeen innocent people are dead and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it,’ said Governor Scott.

Not only that, but police were called out to Cruz’s house THIRTY-NINE times. So let’s not pretend that the police are going to do one single thing to stop a messed-up lunatic like that, whether there was one more law or one hundred more laws on the books.

The police are not about protection or prevention. They are merely there to clean up after the fact and make the community feel as if the authorities are doing something.