Tag: corpocracy

Adidas Endorses Gazacaust

The shoe company drops a Palestinian model because she stands publicly against the genocide and ethnic cleansing of her people.

German sportswear giant Adidas has dropped American model Bella Hadid from their advertising campaign for retro sneakers after facing criticism from Israel. Hadid, whose Palestinian father was born in Nazareth, has been a vocal advocate for the rights of the ethnonational group, calling for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza.

She has repeatedly criticized the Israeli government over the ongoing Gaza conflict, which to date has claimed over 38,000 Palestinian lives. In October 2023, the IDF launched a military operation in the enclave in response to a deadly Hamas raid that had left approximately 1,200 Israelis dead.

Bella and her sister Gigi, also a model with millions of social media followers, have participated in several pro-Palestinian demonstrations, publicly accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in the enclave. The Hadid sisters have also donated $1 million to support multiple Palestinian relief efforts in Gaza, including HEAL Palestine, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, World Central Kitchen, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

“Guess who the face of their campaign is? Bella Hadid, a half-Palestinian model who has a history of spreading anti-Semitism and calling for violence against Israelis and Jews,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote on X on Thursday. Adidas responded that the company would be “revising the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect without giving further details.

This may not turn out as the positive public relations statement for Adidas that the company assumes. Most of the world is now standing squarely against Israel’s attack on the Palestinian people, and it’s generally not a good idea to outsource your marketing decisions to a foreign government’s spokesman. I very much doubt this decision will end well for Adidas.

The fact is that no amount of crying Holocaust, Hamas, or “Israel has a right to defend itself” can justify either the October 7th green flag or the IDF “response” that was obviously planned well in advance. Everyone knows very well that the Netanyahu regime is attempting to complete the ethnic cleansing that was begun in 1948, which is why everyone around the world, both left and right, now despises it.

Netanyahu might still get away with his gamble, but it was always going to be very difficult trying to sell ethnic cleansing for me, diversity for thee.

In the meantime, Israel’s war with Yemen has now officially gone hot. No doubt the Yemenis will be duly chastened and release their stranglehold on the Red Sea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has praised the Israel Defense Forces for carrying out a “precise and successful operation” over 1,700 kilometers away from the country’s borders, which he says serves as a clear warning to all enemies of the Jewish state. The Israeli military launched its first-ever direct large-scale air raid against Yemen on Saturday, targeting the port city of Hodeidah. The attack triggered a massive fire at the port’s oil terminal and left at least 80 people injured, according to a preliminary tally by the health ministry in Sanaa.

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The Unaccountable Executive

The buck stops with her, but she refuses to take responsibility for her failures.

During a portion of an interview with ABC News that was aired on Monday’s broadcast of “World News Tonight,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle stated that the assassination attempt on 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump “should have never happened” and “The buck stops with me,” but she does plan to stay in her position.

Cheatle said, “This is an event that should have never happened.”

ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas then asked, “Who is most responsible for this happening?”

Cheatle responded, “What I would say is, the Secret Service is responsible for the protection of the former President.”

Thomas followed up, “So, the buck stops with you?”

Cheatle answered, “The buck stops with me, I am the Director of the Secret Service. It was unacceptable, and it’s something that shouldn’t happen again.”

Thomas then said, “The president and homeland security secretary said today they had 100% confidence in you, but there are some members of Congress calling on you to resign.”

Cheatle responded, “I appreciate the secretary’s comments, and we’re going to continue to be transparent and communicate with people.”

Thomas then asked, “Do you plan to stay on, absolutely?”

Cheatle answered, “I do plan to stay on.”

What’s fascinating to me is the way men know how women are highly reluctant to take responsibility for anything in their personal lives, and yet usually somehow fail to anticipate that women will tend to exhibit precisely the same behavior in their professional lives. That’s the reason for all those meetings, after all, to occlude and spread out the perceived responsibility for any corporate decision, no matter how trivial.

If we all agree it’s a good idea, then no one needs to be held accountable when it fails.

Even if the attempted assassination wasn’t a green flag – and at a minimum, it was a green flag – there is no way that Director Cheatle was ever going to resign her office despite her agency’s egregious and comprehensive failure. Unfortunately, the feminization of the boardroom is such that men no longer expect to be accountable for their executive failures either.

The buck never stops with anyone anymore.

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Booktopia Goes Under

The combination of Amazon, an increase in paper prices, and a foolish decision to spend $12 million on a roboticized warehouse killed Australia’s largest book retailer.

Australian online book retailer Booktopia has gone into voluntary administration, leaving customers in the dark about the status of their orders. An “urgent assessment” of Booktopia’s assets has been flagged, with a possible sale or restructure the focus of three administrators from McGrathNicol Restructuring, who have been appointed to head the evaluation of Booktopia Group Limited and three subsidiaries.

The company’s shares have not traded on the ASX since June 13 while it was attempting to secure additional funding. In its initial public offering in 2020, Booktopia issued shares at $2.30 and debuted on the ASX at $2.86. The stock has since lost more than 98 per cent and last traded at $0.045.

Booktopia suffered a $16.7 million loss for the six months to December 31, compared to a $3.9 million loss a year ago. The company has said that economic headwinds and the continued soft performance of the Australian book market had diminished its core business which was selling books via two websites,

The company was founded in 2004 by current executive director Tony Nash, his brother Simon Nash, and Steve Traurig. A transition to a new $12 million robotic warehouse in the Sydney suburb of South Strathfield that opened last year had also been plagued with difficulties and had not resulted in the cost savings the company had expected.

If you’re ever frustrated with how long it takes Castalia or Arkhaven to get a book out to you, or how long Arktoons can go between episodes of a popular series, please recognize that our zero-risk philosophy is why we are still around and going strong when so many newer, more successful, and bigger publishing houses have gone under.

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The Last Comics Publisher

It’s probably apparent to a fair number of you why Arkhaven matters, and why a non-comics leather book snob like myself nevertheless troubles to do what I can to keep independent comics infrastructure alive. The decline and ongoing collapse of DC and Marvel and IDW has been well-chronicled, after all. But what you may not know is that the same forces, indeed, in one case, the exact same corporate vehicle, is now targeting the two alternatives to the mainstream comics industry for destruction.

First, Japanese manga:

Blackstone launched a 275.8 billion yen ($1.74 billion) bid to take Japanese digital comic distributor Infocom, including a tender offer for a per-share price of 6,060 yen, Infocom said on Tuesday. The tender offer will amount to 141.4 billion yen, Infocom said. The company’s current parent Teijin said it will sell all of its 58% stake in Infocom for 134.4 billion yen in a share buyback after the buyout is completed. Infocom operates digital comic site Mecha Comic, which is among Japan’s largest, according to its website.

Second, Webtoons:

Webtoon Entertainment, which describes itself as the world’s largest web comic platform, has set its market value at $2.67bn (£2.11bn) ahead of its US listing. Its shares are due to start trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on 27 June at $21 each, the top end of their marketed range. The Los Angeles-based company is owned by South Korean technology giant Naver, which has been boosted by the growing online popularity of Korean and Japanese comics. Webtoon says it has 170 million monthly active users in more than 150 countries around the world. The company is aiming to sell 15 million shares and raise $315m in the initial public offering (IPO).

The world’s largest fund manager BlackRock has expressed interest in buying up to $50m of shares.

BlackRock is Disney’s second-largest shareholder, controls several seats on its executive board, and owns about 78 million shares in the company, or the equivalent of $9.5 billion.

It’s really fascinating to see the massive amount of money suddenly being pumped into converging these culture war vehicles, especially in light of the obvious superiority of the best that Arktoons has to offer vs the best that Webtoons has on display. Below is a comparison between the #1 most popular Webtoon which is apparently about lesbian furries vs the recently updated Silenziosa:

So, in the coming months, you can expect to see a number of changes and improvements at Arkhaven, including subscriptions to specific comics, comments, and other features. The best way to support this right now is simply to subscribe for free to the Arkhaven Substack, where we’ve recently launched a daily serialization of Alt★Hero that begins with The Gods of Peaceful Sleep.

Now, of course, it’s easy to say “I’m not a comics guy, what do I care?” But do you really think the clowns running BlackRock and Blackstone care about comics, much less manga? It’s not about money either. They will never make their money back by driving these things into the ground. It’s about complete control of the cultural space, control that our community will never cede them.

We’ve also modified our approach to text serializations on Arktoons based on what we’ve learned from the substacks. Instead of running an episode once a week, we’re going to run them straight through, every day, with the exception of Quantum Mortis: A Mind Programmed, which will run on weekends. Since Chuck Dixon’s Snakehand ends today with Episode 56, Sidewinders will continue with the second novel in the series, La Gringa.

We’re looking for more volunteers to help chop up comics into Arktoons-presentable episodes, so if you’re willing and able, please get in touch. And authors who want to serialize their published novels are welcome to join the party too.

UPDATE: JDA’s more informed take on Fandom Pulse isn’t any more optimistic:

Manga fans have largely mocked American comic fans for years, calling American comics “dead” and laughing at the fans as Marvel and DC Comics circled the drain and slowly killed their content. Even superhero manga like My Hero Academia blew away the competition from Marvel and DC in American markets, which should have given the companies a signal something was drastically wrong…

Blackstone has already announced its plans to focus on female-centric content by focusing on genres with that target audience in mind. This means manga fans are likely to see a rampant feminization of their content out of the gate.

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AI Fraud and Fakery

It’s abundantly clear that “AI” is the current, and possibly last, bubble that the Clown World economy has inflated in order to let the vulture capitalists continue to feed upon the tattered remains of the US corpocracy:

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this – even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party’s intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can’t do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like “Maybe we should revoke the engineering team’s remote work privile – whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?”. Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated – something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet?

A friend of mine was invited by a FAANG organization to visit the U.S a few years ago. Many of the talks were technical demos of impressive artificial intelligence products. Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked. The products didn’t work. They just hadn’t solved some minor issues, such as actually predicting the thing that they’re supposed to predict. 

It’s really remarkable how much shameless fakery is taking place in the tech sector these days. It makes the dot com boom look relatively restrained by comparison. At this point, I’d almost be willing to believe that Suno is actually a collection of semi-talented musicians in India who rapidly record two-minute clips in response to the user’s prompts.

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The End of an Era

Restaurants closing in 2024:

  • Fuddruckers is expected to close ALL locations by the end of the year
  • Old Country Buffet is closing ALL remainder locations
  • IHOP is closing 100 locations
  • Buffalo Wild Wings is closing ALL Canada locations as well as 60 locations in the US
  • Applebee’s is closing 35 locations
  • Red Lobster is closing 50 locations as they enter bankruptcy
  • Denny’s is closing 20 locations by the end of the year
  • Marie Callender’s is shutting down ALL remainder locations
  • Pizza Hut is planning to close 500 locations
  • Outback Steakhouse is closing 41 of their 700 locations
  • Sai Baro is closing a total of 50 locations with majority being mall locations
  • Mard Pizza is closing a total of 27 locations
  • Ruby Tuesday is closing 16 more locations in 2024.
  • BDQ is closing 8 of their 59 locations.
  • Joe’s Crab Shack is closing 41 of their 60 locations
  • Bonefish Grill is closing 7 locations

This is what cultural and economic decline looks like. Apparently 60 years of relentless immigration are not, in fact, good for the economy or the traditional culture. I wonder, however, how much of these failures are related to economic contraction, reduced consumer spending, and excessive debt versus the lack of appeal held by these traditional restaurant franchises for the newcomers.

UPDATE: A reader writes to explain what he saw at Outback Steakhouse:

Your assessment of the restaurant closures is spot on. I worked at an Outback for 5 years in a nice Chicago Suburb. When I started, Outback was still in its prime but only a year in they began to shift their marketing campaign. Between couponing, offering deals like “all you can eat shrimp”, and bending over for any customer that had the slightest complaint by comping their meal, it slowly but consistently brought the level of the clientele down. This was especially frustrating for myself and the servers alike that were used to 20% tips being the norm (when good service was provided of course) – however with the cheaper and more diverse customers, the tips became less and less. I think what happened is that Outback as a corporation became short-sighted and wanted to attract new customers but in the end it only caused them to be hurt by having to shrink margins to just keep these new customers happy by giving away so many freebees. A few years after I left, to no surprise, the location that I worked at closed.

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Nothing They Can Do

It’s such a shame that no one can do anything about Sean Combs beating the hell out of a young woman, despite the fact that there is clear video evidence of the assault.

LA District Attorney George Gascón says he is not able to prosecute Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs over the 2016 assault on Cassie Ventura caught on video because it happened too long ago. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office has announced that they cannot prosecute Sean “Diddy” Combs over a video showing him assaulting Cassie Ventura at a California hotel.

“The conduct would have occurred beyond the timeline where a crime of assault can be prosecuted,” implicating the statute of limitations in an Instagram post on Friday. California’s statute of limitations is one year for simple assault and three years for felony assault.

The footage, initially obtained by CNN, depicts the rapper in March 2016 grabbing Ventura, his then-girlfriend, by the neck, throwing her to the floor, and kicking her multiple times.

And yet, for some reason, he’s not being deplatformed, demonetized, or subjected to media hit pieces, and none of the corporations with which he works are refusing to work with him. Immunity to criminal prosecution is just one of the benefits of taking the ticket… until the Black Rider decides you’re no longer of sufficient use to him, of course.

I suspect the release of the video is a warning that Mr. Combs’s time is running out.

And in case you ever asked that very stupid question: “why doesn’t someone call the police?” this should answer your question. Because neither the police nor the justice system are allowed to touch the ticket-takers without permission.

UPDATE: No worries, justice is served, and we are assured that Mr. Combs is better now. In fact, we are even told that after going to rehab, he “continues to seek both therapy and spiritual work.”

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Non-Competes are No More

The FTC eliminates a corporation’s ability to limit the employment prospects of its former employees:

Pursuant to sections 5 and 6(g) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), the Federal Trade Commission (“Commission”) is issuing the Non-Compete Clause Rule (“the final rule”). The final rule provides that it is an unfair method of competition—and therefore a violation of section 5—for persons to, among other things, enter into non-compete clauses (“non-competes”) with workers on or after the final rule’s effective date. With respect to existing non-competes—i.e., non-competes entered into before the effective date—the final rule adopts a different approach for senior executives than for other workers. For senior executives, existing non-competes can remain in force, while existing non-competes with other workers are not enforceable after the effective date.

This is definitely a positive development. The idea that a corporation should be able to coerce an employee into agreeing not to work for a competitor without compensation is one of the pernicious consequences of Clown World’s contract morality, in which everything is permissible so long as the victim can be coerced, forced, scammed, or otherwise convinced to agree to it.

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Disappointment, Guaranteed

The naive optimism of the clueless cultural observer would be hilarious if it weren’t so tediously and predictably inobservant:

After the disastrous launch of their Gemini AI, which insisted that George Washington was actually Black and couldn’t decide whether Musk’s tweets or Hitler was worse, Google’s response was timid and weak. This was just a bug! A problem with QA! It absolutely, positively wasn’t a reflection of corrupted culture at Google, which now appeared to put ideology over accuracy. Really, really!

Anyone watching that shit show would be right to wonder whether one of America’s great technology companies had fallen completely into the hands of the new theocracy. I certainly did.

But now comes evidence that Google perhaps isn’t totally lost, even if an internal war over its origin principles is very much raging. One pitting the mission of organizing the world’s information and making it useful against the newspeak Trust & Safety goal of controlling narratives and countering malinformation (i.e. inconvenient truths).

This played out in stereotype as 28 Googlers occupied the CEO of Google Cloud’s office for 10 hours this week, defaced property, and prevented other Googlers from doing their work. Because Google provides cloud services to Israel, said the occupiers. And thus The Current Thing demanded it be stopped by whatever means possible.

But then the most amazing thing happened. There was no drawn-out investigation. No saccharine statements about employee’s rights to occupy offices, preventing work from happening, or advance their political agenda at work. Nope. They were just fired. Immediately. All 28 of them.

The firings aren’t the result of Google suddenly realizing that it is a business that shouldn’t permit its employees to prioritize politics and ideology over doing their jobs. Nor do they represent a belated rejection of what the author calls “the new theocracy”. It’s simply what happens when those lower in the ranks of the corporate ahrimanocracy offend those who are higher in its ranks.

Remember, evil revels in its own hypocrisy. The more subjective the standard, the more complete its control.

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Ejected by the Beast

You can declare yourself to be a Yellow-Winged Dragonkin. You can threaten your fellow employees with violence and blackballing. You can be incapable of distinguishing between the mythical Hydra and the legendary Medusa. You can be confused about your sex. You can invert your sexual orientation. You can contribute absolutely nothing to the corporate bottom line. You can work for years on a project that will never, ever have any hope of eventually reaching the market and keep your job at Google.

But there is one line no Googler can cross and hope to remain employed.

On Wednesday, the Alphabet subsidiary rushed to fire 28 employees who were part of Tuesday sit-in protests against the company’s provision of artificial intelligence and cloud services to the State of Israel. The protests were organized by a group called No Tech for Apartheid, which had declared Tuesday a “day of action” at Google. At issue: Google’s Project Nimbus — a $1.2 billion cloud and AI contract with Israel — and the Israeli Defense Forces’ use of Google Photos in Gaza, “which has led to the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of Palestinians with little to no evidence,” the group said. “It’s clear that the Israeli military will use any technology available to them for genocidal means.”

It’s always useful to understand Clown World’s priorities. Convergence is just another word for clownocracy.

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