Category: Stuff I’ve read

I don’t know if this is a metaphor, a call to action, or just a series of unconnected events, but… When I picked Spike The Accord up from his previous home in Birmingham, I thought I smelled something odd. More than odd. Just plain bad. It was a relief to fire Spike up and get a whiff of that 103-octane unleaded. Although it was seventy-two perfect degrees outside, I didn’t roll my windows down until I was fifty miles north of the city.

At the time, I put it down to being tired/irritable/oversensitive. Turns out that I wasn’t the only person to think that there is something rotten in Birmingham.

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No, I’m not talking about the book of that title by nerdist writer Cory Doctorow, although there are some fascinating ideas in said book that are gradually manifesting in real life — most notably, the idea of Whuffie. I’m talking about people who spend their day smiling for children and spend their evenings struggling to find a meal or lodging. People who play princesses or wizards at Disneyland but who are powerless to break the spell of their own poverty.

The New York Times just did a piece about poverty-stricken workers at Disney’s California resort. (The link is an archive link, because fuck the Times, fuck their transparent agenda, and fuck their puppetmaster Carlos Slim.) The most damming part: “According to the report, 15 percent of employees who responded to the survey said they have received food stamps or visited a food bank.”

I’ve never personally visited Disneyland, although Danger Girl has been there many times. I’ve probably been to Disney World in Florida a dozen times, starting when I was six or seven years old and including a trip I took there with DG a while back so I could see the places she worked when she was an intern with the company. I’m not sure I’ll go back now. Disney is an obscenely profitable firm that espouses a variety of social-justice causes, up to and including rotting the Star Wars Universe from within via the mandatory inclusion of Mary Suewalkers. That’s fine — but to talk the SJW talk without walking the social justice walk seems a little too much even for me to accept.

A few weeks ago, when I was with my son in California, we looked at the cost of a ticket to Disneyland. It was $135 per day. A hundred and thirty-five dollars. To walk around in a place where young women are paid eleven bucks an hour to smile at my boy then go “home” to a car parked by the side of the road with homemade curtains drawn around the windows. It’s a hell of a business model, and it must thrill the investors, but it stinks to high heaven. Something is rotten in the Magic Kingdom.

My long-departed (from my house, not from this earth) first wife had a lot of suggestions for me during our marriage: Stop skipping work! Don’t leave stuff all over the kitchen! Quit buying things you don’t need! Tucked in among those absolutely ridiculous ideas, however, was a rather brilliant one. She thought I should write a book called Self-Service Nation about the bizarre lengths to which modern corporations will go in order to offload labor from employees to customers. I told her I’d get around to it as soon as I cleaned up the kitchen, which never happened.

Too late now, of course. We now expect as a matter of course that we will be self-servicing much of our interaction with everybody from Wells Fargo to Kroger to Google to the airlines, via Byzantine web forms with unique logins and mandatory 12-character passwords that expire every afternoon at 3:01. We understand that when we call for help that we will be forced to navigate through a deliberately confusing touch-tone questionnaire in which the penalty for making a single mistake is to be disconnected and pressing the “O” key out of frustration results in a snippy-sounding recording of a stoned Valley Girl saying, “Hmmm… I didn’t get that.” Bitch, of course you didn’t get that! You’re not real!

They promised us that service and retail work would replace the factory jobs that were sent to China, but the minute people got uppity about wanting to earn the inflation-adjusted equivalent of 1968’s minimum wage the corporate cash taps get opened and all of a sudden an insane amount of money is being spent on machines to replace those service and retail jobs. The most obvious and obnoxious example: the self-checkout machines at grocery stores and Wal-Marts across the country, which cost about $20,000 per lane and last five years, thus theoretically saving money over the $60,000 per year it would cost to staff a checkout lane sixteen hours per day.

The numbers really work. You could arguably have $250,000 worth of additional theft and shortages over that five-year period and still come up ahead compared to a human cashier. That’s about $150 a day of theft that you can just wink at.

Well, if recent reports are any indication, there’s a lot of winking going on.

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My father was an Armani man, but his thirtysomething son was a Zegna dude. Since the turn of the millennium the majority of the suits and sportcoats I’ve purchased and owned have been from Ermenegildo Zegna’s ready-to-wear line, most of them being made from whatever “Trofeo” grade wool looked most outrageous at the moment. Just last year I bought what will likely be my final pair of Zegna coats; the future for me is mostly Hickey Freeman on the low end and Richard Anderson on the high.

Like the nice folks at Rolex, the Zegna family has managed to put a relatively upscale and reasonably exclusive face on a company that moves a whole lotta product. Rolex makes over a million watches a year; Zegna is the largest upscale fashion brand with boutiques across the globe and a vertically-integrated manufacturing operation that does Armani and other brands behind the scenes. It’s all relative, of course. Rolex did $4.7 billion worth of sales last year and Zegna did a quarter of that. Still, it takes quite a few $11,000 watches or $3500 sportcoats to make those numbers.

Those of you who gag at the idea of paying motorcycle prices for machine-made suits might want to read the new Grailed piece on the history of Zegna. It’s impressive, to say the least. The company has never deviated from its vision. More importantly, in an era where most “luxury brands” are mere tentacles of LVMH or Richemont, the man who runs Ermenegildo Zegna today is named after the founder, who happens to be his grandfather. The company controls production from sheep to showroom floor. I’ll also say that they make a hell of a product. Eleven years ago I managed to fall out of a moving car while doing something remarkably stupid. I landed on my back and elbows, which were covered by a 1997-era Zegna standard-issue tweed coat. The impact was strong enough to scrape my skin beneath the clothes, but the Zegna coat remained intact and I wore it for another five years before misplacing it due to alcohol consumption at a press event. Try doing that with your Chinese sportcoat, why dontcha?

This is a story I’ve told before, but I will tell it again here. More than a decade ago, I sat across a restaurant table from a gorgeous woman in her late twenties. She had weaponized her beauty for the corporate world, wrapping her luscious figure in a beige Ann-Taylor-ish suit and pulling her hair back into a demure ponytail that let her perfectly symmetrical face shine through its light touches of makeup that cost a small fortune because it didn’t look like makeup. She was my handler/recruiter/counselor for technical assignments. Of the one hundred and ten dollars per hour paid by our client for my “engagement” onsite , forty-three and a half went to me in a grudging acknowledgement that there had to actually be a pair of boots on the ground after the post-coital euphoria of a successful sale had faded. The rest went to her and the despicable organization that she represented in much the same way that a fresh-faced and flawless carved goddess might adorn the bow of a rotting pirate ship.

As we listlessly chewed through a seventy-dollar lunch, I complained to her that the company had silently and seamlessly transitioned over the previous six years from gainfully employing two hundred four-eyed American citizen-nerds to ruthlessly exploiting a mix of approximately eighty percent overseas workers and twenty percent people like me who were still too stubborn to get the message and walk away. “It’s not sustainable,” I snapped. “What separates our company from any of the other body shops? What’s to stop some of these people from starting their own companies and undercutting us?” She considered this for a long moment, then she smiled in a way that caused a passing waiter to stumble over his own feet.

“Oh, Jack,” she laughed, the glass of sparkling water halfway to her perfect lips, “the company will be fine. You see, the talent in this business is… well, it’s like a commodity. No offense meant.”

“None taken,” I replied through a clenched jaw.

“The quality of the product isn’t that important. It’s the connections, the human factor, the long-term relationships that we maintain with our clients. That’s not something that a bunch of … overseas resources… could ever duplicate.” And I immediately thought of a bastardized couplet:

No matter what happens, we have got
The perfect white corpo-hookers, and they have not

Shortly afterwards, the company made plans to go public and thus make its two founders ultra-rich rather than merely rich. But they waited just a moment too long. Their high-end clients were swept away by IBM Global Services, whose reps were even better-looking and also had the advantage of being able to seductively whisper the long-venerated industry phrase: “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM.” On the low end, they were overwhelmed by a tide of Indian-owned-and-operated consulting firms that could speak the native language used by the “talent” and, increasingly, the managers of that talent. They are still in business today, but if you look at their website you will see that their “success stories” are old and their management team is tired and their “talent” consists of cast-offs. And the stunning young woman who told me that she was irreplaceable and I was not? Long gone.

The moral of the story here is simple: If your product is generic, you will not survive permanently on marketing alone. As you’ll see below, however, nobody ever thinks that it applies to them — until it’s too late.

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The author currently known as “Vox Day” has linked to us in the past, so we’re returning the favor. Click the image above to order his new “alt-right” comic book. I will admit that my personal history with comic books began and ended with the Transformers comics thirty-four years ago, but I know that they are important to a lot of people and I think Vox is doing a public service here by offering an alternative to obsese GI Joe. And if you haven’t read SJWs Always Lie, it’s worth a look. Note that both the image and the link above are part of Riverside Green’s Amazon Affiliate program. The purpose of this program is to raise enough money to buy a blimp so I can use one of my domain names to make a very certain type of pornography. Thanks, as always, for reading — and I will award Worthless Internet Points to the first reader who recognizes the allusion being made in the title.

A reader sends this in, regarding the bizarre multi-million-dollar world of mattress-website referrals and their accompanying lawsuits. It certainly makes Electrek’s quarter-million or so in Tesla freebies and/or cash seem small potatoes indeed — and if anything could make the incestuous and thoroughly seedy world of automotive journalism look half-decent by contrast it would be a world where a couple that met on ChristianMingle can rate mattresses based on how good they are for sex. Check it out.

It’s odd to consider, but it’s true: The Confederate States of America were conquered by the Union before the modern state of Germany was brought into existence. When Otto von Bismarck created the German political entity, my alma mater (Miami University in Oxford, Ohio) was already more than fifty years old. Of course, there had been various unified German tribes and regions since the time of Julius Caesar, but the German state that went to war in 1914 was a younger institution than the band Aerosmith is today.

Also odd to consider, and equally true: Germany in its current form won’t see a Bicentennial. Forty percent of five-year-olds in Germany have a “migrant background”. Ten percent of the country is African or Middle Eastern today, a figure that will more than double in the next ten years and then double again in the decade following. The new Germans are overwhelmingly young and male. It’s not a migration so much as it is an invasion by brute force, and one that will have longer-lasting consequences than William the Conqueror’s trip across the Channel. By the time my son is my age, Germany will be Islamic and any vestiges of its two-thousand-plus-year ethnic past will be of concern chiefly to the historians among us.

What killed Germany — or for that matter, Western Europe as a whole? There are many legitimate places to point a finger, from the adoption of pleasure-seeking atheism as a national religion to the pernicious influence of modern media. Still, I think the loss of more than eight million young men in the two World Wars had a lot to do with Germany’s eventual collapse. Those conflicts killed the best and bravest Germans, leaving the rear-echelon types to father the next generation.

The agenda-based and staggeringly ignorant modern curriculum likes to paint those Germans as goose-stepping Nazis, when in fact the average soldier of the Wehrmacht viewed the Party with the same distant indifference that a modern American solider might apply to Antifa or the Oathkeepers. They were not political. Instead, they were a fighting force with virtually no equal in ancient or modern history — a fact conveniently discarded nowadays, but one that should be remembered by all of us with German heritage.

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