Author: photog

QTPOC and Coffee; A Heady Brew

photog Current Events

Here’s a first sample of a post that I find worth posting under my new mandate for relevance.  This guy Max Meyer is a midwesterner and there is a local coffee house trying to make a go of it in a small Iowan town.  He contrasts these sane normal entrepreneurs with the folks in Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland who see selling coffee as part of a revolutionary struggle in which employees, hopefully people of color and queer folk, confront the customer about white supremacy and the need to uproot and annihilate it.  And when this business plan is embraced, self-immolation and hilarity ensue.  Here are some highlights:

“One alleged instance of anti-blackness was that when a group of black teenagers stole the Mina’s World tip jar and customers ran after them to retrieve it, the owners didn’t defend… the thieves. Without a hint of irony, the employees also accused the owners of “wage theft.”

The radical accountability process came to an end in June 2022, when Egghart and Parikh agreed to the employee demands, including to turn Mina’s World into a co-operative that the employees would own as reparation. 

There was just one problem: Egghart’s mother, a Korean immigrant and successful accountant, and the owner of the building. She was having none of it and refused to subject herself to the struggle session. She put the building up for sale.”

And this one has so much karma to it:

“In Portland, Oregon — at the heart of the indy coffee movement — Coava Coffee Roasters shut down in May, citing criminal violence against employees. 

“The team members at this cafe have been on the front line enduring extreme violence and criminal activity on an almost daily basis for the last few years– crime and violence that is only increasing in frequency and severity,” wrote the owners.”

And of course no discussion of coffee in America can avoid the 800 lb gorilla, Starbucks:

“But what Starbucks actually did was begin punishing white employees. A white regional manager in New Jersey was ordered by company brass to fire a white district manager who had nothing to do with the arrests — on false pretenses.

Those pretenses: pay discrepancies between white and black employees. The regional manager, Shannon Phillips, knew these charges against the district manager to be false. She cried foul and accused the company of using the white district manager as a scapegoat. A month later, she was fired herself.

Phillips sued Starbucks, claiming that she was fired for being white. In June, she won over $25 million in punitive damages against Starbucks. A federal jury in New Jersey agreed with her claim that in response to the 2018 incident, Starbucks began discriminating against white employees to appease angry protesters.”

It’s a beautiful story of getting what you asked for.  Inspiring.

IT HAS ALL BEEN SAID

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, My Fiction, OCF, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, photog's Corner, Photography, Reviews

I’ve looked over my output for the last year.  It’s all the same thing.  It’s all been said.  I can’t say it again.

At this point talking about what needs to be done has very little value.  So, I’ll talk about things that I find interesting.  Maybe it’ll be technology or science or photography or science fiction or maybe it’ll be some current event that I think is noteworthy.  I’ll try to keep the outrage over Biden’s atrocities to a minimum since we all know they’re coming and talking about them doesn’t really accomplish anything.

If I see something happening that is progress, that’ll be discussed.  For instance, the red state governors sending illegal aliens to sanctuary cities worked!  It struck a nerve, it discombobulated them.  It was successful and that is newsworthy and worth discussion.  And if someone has some original and thought-provoking theory on how the world will be changing in the future and I think it’s worth discussing I might link to it and put in my two cents.

As I get a chance to make some progress on my sf book, I’ll probably put a few chunks of it up for comment.  And I’ll start doing more reviews of movies and books.  But banging on the “something must be done” drum has gotten too dull.  I’m preaching to the choir and the choir will start heading for the doors soon.

Things will be changing but hopefully folks will still find stuff here that they find interesting and worthwhile.  So, my daily announcement that the sky is falling has been cancelled and instead I’ll leave something entertaining.

 

Is Tucker Carlson Going to Interview Vladimir Putin?

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Now that’s an interesting idea.  Next thing you know he’ll have a debate between Putin and Biden on his show.  Now that would be fun.

The Great Sorting

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The powers that be are working to reshape the world.  It will no longer be an old-fashioned analog model where people can find their own place in the world and cobble together a life that suits their individual talents and preferences.  No, this new model is a quantized arrangement.  There are only a few allowable choices for profession, school, sexuality, race, religion, and only one choice for political party and belief system.  And that’s only the start.  Soon there will only be one kind of car, one kind of heating system and one kind of bathroom and kitchen.  And the power company will tell you if you’ve used too much power for your car or the air conditioner (if they even allow A/C to exist anymore).  And the city will tell you if you’ve taken too long a shower or flushed the toilet too many times.

But where it really gets tricky is if you aren’t from the right family and didn’t go to the right college but you still want to have a normal life.  You know, like having a wife and kids.  Well, that’s sort of a problem.  Because they don’t want just anybody having kids.  You’ve got to have the right pedigree and the right mindset.  Kids are expensive and it takes a village to raise them so unless you’re the kind of person the village approves of, you’ll just be messing up the orderliness of the hive.  So, the mechanism they’ll use is to make it almost impossible to be able to afford kids unless you’re the right kind of person.

It’ll cost a fortune to buy a house and it’ll cost a fortune to send them to good schools and even feeding and clothing them, unless you’re an illegal immigrant, will cost an arm and a leg.  So, many people, especially young men are just giving up.  It’s just not worth the effort.

Well, the alternative is family helping out with providing a place to live until a house is affordable and providing resources for a down payment and maybe foregoing luxuries like vacation homes and expensive toys to provide help with medical expenses and other incidentals that are bound to come along.  And also providing advice and contacts for the young.

And in the past, I’ve kidded about opening up my own match-making business but I think it’s a real need that exists.  Women especially could get involved by finding eligible girls who wants to get married and have kids.  Sure, I know there are all kinds of dating services and maybe some of them are selective enough to help serious, normal men and women find mates.  But relatives and friends are still a valuable source for finding a man or woman for someone looking to start a family.

It may seem like this whole thing is a silly topic.  But I think it’s serious enough to think about.  There is a great contraction already in the works.  If you want your family to survive it then you’re going to have to provide some extra help to make it work.  Now, some people probably don’t care.  A cheap apartment, a streaming service and a small government check will keep things going until your health gives out and then there’s euthanasia so what’s all the fuss?  The path of least resistance is the preferred route for some of the young.  The government is just making the choice easier.

But for those of us who want a future that includes a fulfilling human life for our descendants then it’s time to take a hand in what happens to your kids and their kids.  Lend a hand.  Or go extinct.

25AUG2023 – 2024 Primary Thoughts

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We’ll be bombarded for the next year and more with the 2024 election nonsense.  And the important political races will be things like primarying Mitt Romney out of his senate seat.  Maybe Mitch McConnell is coming up for a leadership vote too.  These are feel good events that we can all embrace and enjoy.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that short of a nuclear war, nothing will keep the Democrats from holding the White House for the foreseeable future.  And since if there is a war, I won’t be around anymore I’ve decided not to get too excited about all the hoopla.  So, the Republican presidential primary race isn’t particularly important with respect to how it plays out.  But does it serve any purpose?  Well, maybe.

A case can be made that it can provide information on the Uni-Party.  The talking points of the most obviously anointed of the candidates can tell us a lot about what the official party line of the Republican establishment is supposed to be.  You might further ask what use knowing that could be.  Well, the obvious answer is amusement.  It’s always fun to know just how stupid they think we are.  Come to think of it most people really are that stupid.  In fact, I was one of those stupid people just a decade or two ago.  I actually believed that George W Bush was a conservative and that he cared about the people on the Right.  What a dope I was.

But being mugged by Operation Iraqi Freedom opened my eyes thoroughly.  So, hearing Nikki Haley talk about how unlimited spending for Ukraine is the highest priority for the United States is hilarious.  Right now, the Ukrainians are being blown to bits in the minefields of Zaporizhzhia trying to approach the first of Russia’s three defensive lines.  Funneling more money and weapons to the Ukrainians will keep the meatgrinder going until the last Ukrainian has been fed in.  When that’s done the plan is the Poles and Balts are next.  When they’re used up it’s supposed to be our children that get fed in.  Something tells me that’s gonna land with a thud.  The Right is who usually fights these wars.  Well, we’ve been smartened up.  So now the millennials and zoomers on the Left are up to bat.  But they already spoke up back during the middle eastern campaigns, “No way bro, let someone else take care of that.  I’ve got pot to smoke and artisanal beer to brew.”  So yeah, Nikki Haley’s talking points tells you that the Uni-Party needs our kids to fight the Russians.

Aside from entertainment, the party line is valuable to know because it gives us a chance to see which of the candidates aren’t complete shills for the donor class.  For people like Haley, Hutchinson, Pence and Christie nothing needs to be proven.  Their tickets are stamped coming out of the gate.  What about this Ramaswamy guy?  Can we parse what he stands for or at least pretends to stand for?  And how about DeSantis?  Has he revealed his bottom line.  He’s already flip-flopped on Ukraine.  So, we know his donors must have given him an earful over his initial position that the war was a local affair and none of our business.  Is Ron a bought and paid for neocon?  Maybe.  That’s important information to ferret out.  After all he’s been about the best Republican governor in years.  How do these two things square?

I guess the other information that comes out of the primary will be where the pundits stand.  We’ve already seen that Fox News is now enemy territory.  Their mission is to support the establishment positions and candidates and attack Donald Trump whenever possible.  It’s been interesting to see how Tucker Carlson has become an outpost of right-wing realism in an ocean of left-wing propaganda.  Elon Musk has shown a willingness to allow free speech on his “X” platform.  That has been a veritable miracle.

And the last thing that will be interesting in the primary is what Donald Trump tells us about his plans.  He’s been kind of vague on what he plans to do either in the election or if he wins.  Of course, he’s the same old Trump and whenever he talks about his accomplishments there are no mistakes or defeats.  So, it’s an open question if he really has a plan to defang the Deep State.  It’s possible his plans have to remain unspoken to allow for the element of surprise.  But I would be less skeptical if he could share them with us.

But there it is.  We’re going to be marinated in this clap-trap for the next fourteen months and just to stay sane we’ll have to address it somewhat.  I’ll do my best not to take it too seriously.  But who knows, maybe something incredibly compelling will occur during this madness and I’ll be caught up in the excitement.  You never know.