Rush took the ticket

In light of this reported estate plan, there really aren’t too many questions about Rush Limbaugh having served as a gatekeeper for the Right once he reached the top:

A decade ago, the late Rush Limbaugh scoffed at the notion of leaving any of his money behind. We know this because he was reacting to us. Our coverage of Steve Jobs’ no-tax estate plan made a lot of waves. Rush felt the need to insert himself into the narrative by sharing his thoughts about legacy.

They were terse and tough. He didn’t want to leave anything behind. If he spent everything and died broke, he’d be happy, he said.

Now, a year after announcing he had terminal cancer, he’s gone. And as far as anyone can tell, he left a whole lot of money behind.

Some estimates put his net worth above $600 million. That’s probably just career earnings and not a real net figure, but it provides a sense of the amount of cash flowing into his operation over the years.

He was the biggest name in radio. It takes a vast amount of work to burn as much as $85 million a year and have absolutely nothing to show for it. We know that his “Southern Command” in Palm Beach alone can be worth up $50 million to his estate under the right conditions.

It’s unlikely that his widow will keep it around forever. She was decades younger than he was and has a lot of living left to do.

Either way, unless Rush made a whole lot more effort to look out for his posterity than anyone but the tabloids suggests, she’s the boss now.

There were no kids. She inherits it all.

Unlike most ticket-takers, however, I don’t think his initial success was the result of his ticket-taking. His success was unexpected, original, and almost certainly organic. It looks more as if his wife was the prize, and while his talent was returned to God, his massive accumulation of assets went to the Devil.

I always wondered how Rush could go so far and absolutely no farther no matter what information came to light, given his obvious intelligence and analytical skills. And I assumed that it had something to do with his desire to maintain his position in the media; his humiliation during the NFL debacle clearly clarified his thinking with regards to the difference between influence and power. But it appears he may have been even more compromised than I had assumed.

It is intriguing to observe that the more successful you are, the more fearful you appear to become if you do not fear God only. If your soul has a price, whatever it might be, sooner or later the Devil will find a way to make you an offer.

Corporate cancer kills

You may recall that I addressed the convergence of British department store John Lewis in Corporate Cancer.

John Lewis is the king of the Christmas commercial. Its famous 2010 Red Dress advert featured the life of one woman from birth to old age as she goes through all of the stages of life while wearing a red dress. It’s a touching little piece, a brilliant advertisement that is well worth seeing, and it boosted Christmas sales at John Lewis by 39.7 percent that year.

The 2017 ad, which featured an oversized Muppet called Moz and a little mixed-race boy was equally well-received, but only by the marketing experts. They were particularly excited by the diversity and the interracial aspects of the ad.

Hurray for seeing some diversity on such an epic advertising moment—my surprise at the mixed-race parents shows how rarely we see it in the advertising world.

—Zoe Harris, group marketing director and head of invention, Trinity Mirror

How rarely indeed! However, the 2017 Christmas season was marked by an unusual series of identical rarities. It wasn’t merely John Lewis, but also Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Sainsbury’s, who each independently decided to feature mixed-race couples celebrating Christmas together in their big holiday advertisement. Even more remarkably, every single one of them just happened to feature a black man with a white woman, which, given the present UK demographics, can only be described as extraordinarily improbable.

After all, there are more Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, and other Asians in the UK than there are blacks. Where were they?

Unlike the USA, the United Kingdom tracks ethnicity rather closely, so we can accurately determine exactly how statistically improbable these expensive Christmas advertisements were. As it turns out, there is only a one-in-327 chance that such a couple would be randomly selected. And the chance of all five commercials just happening to feature that particular pairing is one in 3,738,856,210,407.

That is one in 3.7 trillion, more or less. So, it wasn’t just a series of coincidences. It was evidence of convergence in the British advertising industry.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that these converged commercials did not prove to be very popular with the British public over the 2017 Christmas season. As a result, John Lewis was forced to cut its prices to prevent its year-on-year sales from falling and stated that its holiday sales “will negatively affect full-year financial results”.

Corporate Cancer was published in 2019. Two years later, the business news about the outlook for John Lewis will not surprise anyone who read the book.

John Lewis could close eight more of its remaining branches, with larger older shops most likely to close for good, it is claimed. The department store could shut a fifth of its 42 remaining stores, as negotiations with landlords continue and hundreds of jobs are put at risk, The Sunday Times reports. 

Any announcement of closures is expected to take place alongside the company’s annual results on March 11. John Lewis Partnership’s chairwoman Dame Sharon White has reportedly put forward eight shops for closure in an effort to further cut costs after the company suffered a £635m loss last September, The Sunday Times reports. 

The news follows the closure of eight John Lewis stores, including John Lewis’ flagship Birmingham store, and the loss of 1,300 jobs in July last year – which was followed by a further 1,500 jobs axed from head office in November. 

The Voice of Saruman

The Forge of Tolkien Episode 20, THE VOICE OF SARUMAN, is now on UATV.

Standing at the base of the Tower of the Cunning Mind, Gandalf warned Pippin and the others to beware of Saruman’s voice—but what power did Saruman of Many Colours have over the company, if his most dangerous weapon was his speech?

In this episode, recorded on the feast of the Epiphany, Professor Rachel Fulton considers what Tolkien reveals about the dangers of trusting politicians by way of his characterization of Saruman and Gandalf as “messengers” of a particular kind. What kind of creatures were the Istari, and why did they have the powers—and limitations—that they did to influence events in Middle-earth? What does Saruman’s temptation and fall reveal about the meaning of Power, and how did Gandalf defeat such a powerful foe?

In other Unauthorized news, Razorfist has brought his Metal Mythos music documentary series to UATV, which videos are now being featured in their own eponymous channel.

To guarantee deletion

Post your comment twice. Or three or four times, as some moronic would-be commenters do. In case you  still haven’t figured it out, the comments here are moderated. So, when – not if, when – your comment does not appear right away, that is not an indication that something went wrong somehow and therefore you should repeat your comment.

And frankly, if this concept was ever difficult for you to understand, you probably should not be commenting here anyhow.

Every comment that is posted more than once will be deleted. Repeat offenders will have their comments spammed, which will eventually lead to none of your comments appearing at all. And no, the moderators are not even a little bit interested in the usual excuse of how “the preview didn’t work and my comment didn’t appear, and so I thought that if there is even a slight possibility that readers here might be deprived of my Very Important Opinion, it was imperative that I submit it again.”

Allow me to spell this out for the gammas: never, ever, enter a comment twice more than once. Yes, this means you. Even you. And especially you.

This rule is ontologically applicable. This rule applies regardless of whether you think your comment went through or not. This rule applies under every possible, imaginable, and hypothetical scenario. There is NEVER any excuse for submitting a comment twice. And if a comment is submitted twice, both iterations will be deleted by the moderators.

The amusing thing about this reiteration is the whining protests of the gammas. They know perfectly well that they’ll be the most affected by this.

UPDATE: Apparently this is yet another problem we can blame on Boomers. Two double comments, both Boomers, including one on this very post.

The education offensive

If you don’t understand the concept of 5GW, or what the Chinese call Unrestricted Warfare, this expose of the systematic purchase of England’s private schools should help you grasp the basic concept:

Hundreds of independent schools left in dire financial straits by the coronavirus pandemic are being targeted by Chinese investors, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Experts anticipate a ‘feeding frenzy’ as firms, including some run by high-ranking members of the ruling Chinese Communist party, seek to expand their influence over Britain’s education system. Seventeen schools are already owned by Chinese companies, but that number is set to rocket.

Amid rising concern about Beijing’s tentacles reaching into British classrooms, an investigation by this newspaper can reveal:

Nine of the 17 schools under Chinese control are owned by firms whose founders or bosses are among China’s most senior Communist Party members; Princess Diana’s preparatory school is owned by a Chinese group that openly trades on her name; Schools are using educational tools for teaching children a ‘whitewashed’ view of China; 

One firm admitted its acquisition of British schools is aimed at supporting China’s controversial Belt And Road strategy, which aims to expand Beijing’s global influence.

This is only one front in the education offensive. Another one is aimed at higher education in the USA:

Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored Confucius Institutes on college and university campuses around the world, providing teachers, textbooks, and operating funds. Until recently, an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Hanban, oversaw Confucius Institutes. In the wake of widespread criticism, the Chinese government has reorganized Confucius Institutes under a new organization, the Chinese International Education Foundation.

In April 2017, the National Association of Scholars released Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, a comprehensive report on the way the Chinese government infiltrates American colleges and universities to enhance its own image. At that time, we counted 103 Confucius Institutes in the United States.

As of February 17, 2021, NAS counts a total of 55 Confucius Institutes in the United States.  

That number will almost certainly begin rising as long as Biden appears to be the President. If it does not, this will definitely count as another post-election anomaly. 

And how is that a bad thing, exactly?

U.S. States are beginning to follow the lead of foreign governments like Australia in breaking the power of Big Tech:

Last month, a lobbyist approached Kyle Davison, a North Dakota state senator, with an unusual proposal: a law to stop Apple and Google from forcing companies in the state to hand over a share of their app sales.

Mr. Davison, a Republican, was focused on bills related to a $200,000 literacy program and birth records for the homeless. But he was intrigued by the lobbyist’s arguments that the tech giants were hurting small businesses, and he thought such a law could attract tech companies to North Dakota. So he introduced it.

“She said to me that this could be big. But to me, that means the local newspaper is going to come with a camera,” Mr. Davison, 60, said. “I would not be truthful if I said I expected the reaction.”

At the Capitol in Bismarck, a 21-story Art Deco tower that’s the state’s tallest building, a hearing on the bill last week drew Washington lawyers, North Dakota newspapers and Silicon Valley executives. Siding with Apple and Google was Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group funded by the Koch family. On the other side was the Fargo Chamber of Commerce. One person called in from Alaska.

Supporters of the bill said it would help smaller companies and only hurt Apple and Google’s revenues. Apple’s chief privacy engineer, Erik Neuenschwander, testified that the bill “threatens to destroy iPhone as you know it.”

Siding with Apple and Google was the conservative group funded by the Koch family. And you wonder why conservatives always lose? They literally side with their enemies. 

And destroying iPhone as we know it is a feature, not a bug.

Everyone hates Andrew Cuomo

It’s fascinating to see how quickly the Narrative has shifted on Gov. Cuomo, who has gone from hero to target of a two-minute hate campaign.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for an investigation into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mounting nursing home crisis.

“I support our state’s return to co-equal governance and stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during COVID-19,” the Queens Democrat wrote in a statement Friday.

“Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the Secretary to the Governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”

The Cuomo administration is under fire over its alleged cover-up of New York nursing home deaths, which a state attorney general probe found were 50 percent higher than state authorities said.

Last week, The Post revealed that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, privately admitted to state lawmakers that the administration deliberately withheld data on COVID-19 nursing home deaths from federal prosecutors out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us.”

Even Alec Baldwin is piling on. What’s next, a stern denunciation by the woman who ate Taylor Swift? We haven’t hit peak curiousitude yet. Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser…. 

Even Google can’t abide SJWs

If one of the most-converged corporations on the planet is purging its most extreme SJWs, why isn’t your organization doing more to keep them out?

Google has terminated the head researcher on its AI ethics team over what the tech giant deemed a violation of its “code of conduct,” as the company faces an internal revolt over a previous firing of a black data scientist. Margaret Mitchell, who led Google’s Ethical AI unit, announced her termination in a brief tweet on Friday, saying only “I’m fired” without offering further detail.

Google’s own statement on the matter was also somewhat vague, confirming Mitchell was let go over “multiple violations of our code of conduct,” while adding that she ran afoul of “security policies” by downloading “confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.”

The move comes after the AI team’s co-head, Timnit Gebru, was fired in December during a dispute over a research paper she authored that was critical of large-scale AI language models, which are used in many Google products. The company demanded she remove her name from the work and fired her when she refused. At the time, Gebru said she had offered a number of conditions on which she would take her name off the research paper, but was forced out regardless. 

Both Mitchell and Gebru have also taken Google to task for an alleged lack of diversity among its staff, with Gebru writing in an internal email just before her firing that “your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people” at the company, and that she’d been “constantly dehumanized” by superiors.

Mitchell was highly critical of Gebru’s ouster, penning a lengthy message to the company last month voicing concerns about its “relation to sexism and discrimination,” also noting she had been “cut off” from Google’s internal messaging system. According to a source cited by Axios, the lock-out came after she scoured company correspondence for evidence of Gebru’s claims of harassment and discrimination, consistent with Google’s statement on Friday about her unauthorized access to “confidential” documents.

SJWs are so destructive that even corporations that more or less share their views and values can’t permit them to run amok for long. 

Good news, bad news

In case you’re not up on Greek history and you didn’t read the entirety of The Thirty Tyrants article on Tablet, you should still be aware of what could be in store in the event it turns out to be a predictive model:

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

After eight months of misrule, they were overthrown by armed rebels.

Disinviting Baen

To the surprise of precisely zero Rabid Puppies, Baen Books shuttering the Bar didn’t suffice to appease the SJW swarmtroopers after Jason Sanford pointed-and-shrieked at it. As an expression of gratitude for cowering before the mob, Worldcon has disinvited its 2021 Guest of Honor, Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf:

DisCon III condemns the violent and hostile content found within Baen Books’ forums. We also cannot condone the fact such content was enabled and allowed to ferment for so long. We want to make it clear abusive behavior is not, and will not be, tolerated at DisCon III. Such behavior goes entirely against our already established policies concerning inclusivity and creating a welcoming environment for our members, which can be found here: https://discon3.org/about/inclusion/.

We knew simply saying those words with no actions to back them up would be unacceptable. Too often, we have seen individuals and organizations say they are on the right side of issues yet do nothing to act on those words. We knew we had to take a hard look at our own position and take action based on our established policies.

As a result, after discussion with her, we have notified Toni Weisskopf we are removing her as a Guest of Honor for DisCon III.

We know this decision was not as quick as some of you would have wanted, and we understand your frustration. Our committee’s leadership was always in full agreement that there was a fundamental difference between the values Worldcon strives to uphold and the values allowed to be espoused on the forums-in-question.

In the entire eighty-plus year history of our community, no Worldcon has ever removed someone as a Guest of Honor. To remove a Guest of Honor was an unprecedented decision that needed discussion, consideration, and consensus. Those mechanisms sometimes do not move as fast as some would want, and we thank the community for its patience.

We also want to let everyone know that we are not planning on adding additional individuals to our Guest of Honor list.

In fairness, this almost certainly would have happened anyhow, no matter what Ms Weisskopf did. But demonstrating weakness in front of SJWs is nearly as predictably counterproductive as doing so in front of an angry, snarling dog. And to say that this attempt at public humiliation has angered The International Lord of Hate would be the understatement of the year. SJWs, beware! You may come to regret awakening the Mountain to the true depths of your spite and provoking him to action.

Toni had been participating in WorldCons for decades. She grew up in your scene. She volunteered. She hung out with you. She helped out. When she got into the publishing business she kept on helping out, whatever you needed, she was always there for you. She became an editor, and a damned good one too (and you fucking know it).

In fact, she became one of the best and most successful editors in the history of the genre… yet year after year, she got no prestigious award nomination, and instead you just kept giving the award to the same assholes from the same publishing house, over and over and over, as you ignored Toni because she was at that publishing house. The uncouth one. You talk a big game about “honoring strong women” as you took turns rotating through the same cadre of old white dudes for best editor.

It took me, the barbaric outsider, to rally the barbaric outsider fans to finally get Toni some recognition in your sainted halls. And even though your bleating social justice contingent threw a fit, you know what most of you old time, old school, long attending WorldConners told me in private? Good. About time.

Because even though you hated me and my friends (and trust me, we’re cool with that) you knew that Toni deserved it. Toni had earned it. She had long since put in the work. As George R.R. Martin so haughtily proclaimed when he finally admitted I was right all those years ago, and that Hugos were not for everybody (as long claimed) but rather only for your elite select body of special fans, only people who had served their time deserved your fancy awards. Except by every fucking measure in the universe, Toni had served her time.

Then along came the awards, and you snubbed her. Hell, you didn’t just snub her. They openly mocked her, said all sorts of hateful shit, and you people who claimed to be her friends, you old timers who claimed to be all about the sainted dignity of WorldCon, you sat there, silent and afraid, as they did their little high school mean girl games. Toni got up and left the awards ceremony because she wouldn’t give the sicks fucks the satisfaction of watching her endure it. Unlike you, Toni has dignity.

You fuckers talk a big game about tradition. But then the instant there was heat you crumbled before the woke mob that doesn’t give a shit about your precious traditions either. You even renamed one of your awards just to placate their tantrum.

And when those assholes fucked her over last time, you did nothing. Some of you put up some timid posts, but overall you cowered before the mob you helped create, the same one you mocked me for warning you about. People who claimed to be Toni’s friends sat there, silent, worried that if they did the right thing the mob would come for them next. At least they had the decency to stab her in the front. You stabbed her in the back.

The lesson, as always, is this: no olive branches for SJWs.