Tag: woke corporations

Peak Woke

photog Current Events , ,

We seemed to have passed through what can be described as “maximum wokeness.”  Sometime after 2020 all of the stupidest delusions about race and sex reached their apex.  Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, LGBTQ madness like trans-everything and radical feminism like #metoo were all reaching a high tide.  Insanity was piled on insanity and all the stupidest beliefs ran amok.  People were fired and jailed and even killed during cancellations, purges and outright rioting.

But since 2025 many of these beliefs have been shown to be absurd or even dangerous and fewer and fewer people will admit to believing in these things.  Sure, in places like California, New York and Minnesota the lunatics are too numerous and too crazy to come to their senses but in many other jurisdictions the folly of what had been going on finally woke up enough people to the madness that things have been reversed to a large extent.  And with Trump in the White House and a conservative Supreme Court many of the worst excesses are being swept away.  Even old liberal attacks on constitutional practices, like racial gerrymandering of political districts are being overruled and eliminated.

With all that said serious damage has been done to a couple of generations of young men in this country who have been deprived of the career opportunities that were instead reserved for women and foreigners.  And this damage cannot be easily repaired.  If a man doesn’t have a stable, well-paid job how is he supposed to attract a wife and afford to raise a family?  And if he can’t do that then his line ends with him.  Multiply this by the millions and you’re looking at the cancelling out of America.

Currently you hear about young men avoiding college and professional schools and instead heading into the construction and other trades like welding and mechanics.  And this may be the only alternative to allow a generation of young men to earn a living.  Now, this may be necessary but it seems like a step backward for all the families who scrimped and saved to help their kids to become doctors and lawyers and engineers.  Now their grandchildren are back in the blue-collar world that they came from.  But then again maybe it makes more sense to take the jobs that do exist and strive to start your own business and not be beholden to corporations that despise you.

Now, I’ve got grandchildren in college and even one graduating soon.  And they are going to have to navigate these same obstacles.  And it’s very difficult to know what to tell them.  But I know what’s most important.  I need to do whatever I can to support them and encourage them to strive to succeed in whatever they find available to them to earn a living and raise a family.  Because, in all honesty, those are the only things that count in this world.  All the other nonsense about status and prestige is just that; nonsense.  The people you interact with are the essence of what we call human life.  And as long as they can live a happy life with them, they are rich.

Star Trek – Starfleet Academy – A Rant

photog Current Events, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , , ,

Paramount spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars on a tv series called “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  I guess they realized after the fact that it was unwatchable and so they put the first episode on YouTube for free.  But nobody watched it.  Now that’s an exaggeration.   Technically thirteen hundred (1,300) people viewed it.  But on YouTube that’s equivalent to zero.

So basically, they spent a hundred million dollars on something that no one wants to see.

If you watch the trailer you’ll understand why.  Starfleet Academy seems to be made up of fat lesbians.  Some are human, some are alien but all of them are fat and all of them are lesbians.  Once again this is an exaggeration.  They also have Holly Hunter as the captain or head schoolmarm or something.  And I believe there is a gay Klingon.  So, yay.

Just as with Star Wars, Star Trek has finally reached the epitome of destruction.  Over the course of the last sixty years or so it went from a mildly entertaining sci-fi adventure series to a Woke DEI Struggle Session.  Well, who wouldn’t pay to see that?

As with Star Wars, the makers of this new show miscalculated something about the audience and their products.  And it’s this:  The audience that enjoys the “message” they’re pushing in these shows doesn’t like science fiction.  And the audience that likes science fiction doesn’t like their “message.”  It’s like that day in math class where they explain Venn diagrams and unions and intersections and all that jazz.  Well, the circle of people who like the message and the circle of people who like science fiction do not intersect at all; open space between the blue and red circles.  No purple.

This show was green-lit before Paramount was purchased by David Ellison.  He isn’t woke.  I’m guessing that losing a hundred million dollars on a show nobody wants to see is going to make him very mad.  Hopefully this will result in the series being cancelled and the team responsible for this travesty being fired.

Coincidentally, Kathleen Kennedy has just been fired from running Lucas Films over at Disney.  It was described as her desire to get back to personally producing pictures for Disney but I’m pretty sure they’ve had enough of her “golden touch.”  She singlehandedly incinerated the Star Wars brand and lost many hundreds of millions of dollars at Disney by doing the same thing that the Star Trek franchise did.  They made a Star Wars brand for girls and girls don’t like science fiction.

Well, here we are.  A decade into the complete feminization of action adventure and all the major franchises have been rendered toxic and unwatchable.  Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been losing money on its girl-boss outreach program.  Now what?

I guess we’re all hoping that losing all that money will finally get the studios to step back and reflect.  We’re about to find out.  Summer 2026 is right around the corner and we can expect to get some kind of answer from the tent pole summer movie list.  If it’s more estrogen laden, DEI boiler plate then I guess they still have some more money to burn.  But I can always hope.

It Might be Good Enough

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , , ,

I was watching a video on YouTube that discussed the cratering of movie attendance after 2020 and how even after COVID was no longer a thing, how movie attendance has never recovered to pre-2020 numbers.  But the truth is that even before COVID the movies were steadily losing ground since around the year 2000.  So really COVID just hastened a trend that was already under way.

Well, that clarifies things somewhat but I think there are things to consider about this whole trend.  It’s not just a situation where a change in technology is disrupting an old business model.  Without a doubt that is happening.  But there is another phenomenon at work simultaneously.  And that factor is ideology.  For at least the last ten years there has been a concerted effort on the part of the movie making industry to restrict films to what they consider “acceptable” themes and characters.

And I think the drop in ticket sales reflects this change.  A solid thirty five percent of the country consists of people who aren’t motivated to see these types of movies, at all.  And this accounts for the drop in attendance and box office.

I guess the question that must be answered is, can the industry survive without this segment of the population?  The jury is still out but I think the answer is no.  Theaters have already become a low margin industry and without the enthusiastic patronage of key demographics financial viability won’t exist for much longer.  Then, what are the possibilities going forward?

One possibility is for some newer players in the movie making industry to modernize their operations to lower costs to the point where profits can be made with niche projects that can depend on a reliable demographic to support them.  This could work for the superhero films if the movies cater to the expectations of boys and young men to be entertained with an adventure story that appeals to their instincts.  By the same token a film that caters to the expectations of an LGBTQ audience or a young female audience or a baby boomer audience could also make money if its budget doesn’t swamp out its box office.  And so that could be the future.

I guess it’s possible that Hollywood could become so frightened by what has happened to their profits that they decide to do an about face and start making the kind of movies they made twenty years ago; ones that appealed to the bulk of Americans without trying to divide them by race and sex.  But somehow, I seriously doubt they’d succeed.  I don’t think they still have the wherewithal to recognize what goes into a movie like that.  Even if they tried to recreate that kind of movie making their instincts would betray them and the same woke tropes and characters would appear.  So the first scenario with new players seems more likely.

But I do not think any of this will happen quickly.  The entertainment industry is currently in turmoil.  Video games are currently the most popular form of entertainment for the younger generation.  Super hero movies in the last two or three years have bombed at the box office pretty consistently.  It will be a little while before the new money from Silicon Valley has had a chance to completely usurp the crown from the old Hollywood studios.  It’s definitely already happening but it’s not there yet.  When it does, I think we will start to see some very interesting changes.  It will never look like what we had.  Because we are not what we used to be.  But if it provides products for all of the larger audience types it might be good enough for my movie viewing pleasure.

Get Woke, Go Broke, Eventually

photog Current Events ,

I was talking with a very old friend of mine.  We got on the subject of the feminization of the modern corporations.  The gist of the conversation was to acknowledge just how thoroughly almost all American companies have been converted into centers of female culture.  I gathered that this friend felt that the problem had no solution.  I’ve since been thinking about this.  In a sense he’s right.  These companies will never recover from this situation.  The women in charge will never relinquish control over their environment.

But that isn’t the only way to avoid this situation.  As has been noted, by many observers, companies that make feminism and other “diversity” efforts their primary purpose quickly become inefficient and eventually incompetent at the original function their corporation was supposed to be performing.  So, if a pharmaceutical company starts hiring engineers and scientists based on the color of their skin or the sexual-fetish they indulge in or because they’re women, then pretty soon the supply of new drug products will dry up and the company will have to figure out another way to fill its pipeline with new medicines.

For a large company that formerly was highly profitable and still has large profits rolling in from its legacy business, a strategy to keep the place profitable is to buy small talented drug companies that have new products of their own.  This can work quite well for a good long time.  But the problem is that the parent company eventually steps in and imposes the woke culture in these new subsidiaries and before you know it, they’re just as inefficient and incompetent as the parent company.  And as the parent company adds more and more woke entities to its network, the sales from this bloated, useless conglomerate become too small to produce decent profits.

Now this sounds like a very slow process of failure.  And it is.  But really the only way to improve the situation is to compete against it.  Those small companies that get bought up provide an alternative to the woke mega-corporations.  These small companies can base employment on merit and provide generous stock options to their best employees.  Then even after being bought up they serve a purpose.  Those that work there, cash in their stock options and when the bought-up company begins to turn woke, they search around for the next start-up where they can barter their skills for money.  And so on.  And over the course of time the companies that base employment on merit and knowledge instead of identity politics will inherit the Earth.  Well, eventually.

So, this is a kind of sad depressing tale.  I currently know of real companies like the first case.  These were once places filled with brilliant scientists and engineers who put together processes and systems for discovering, testing, piloting, proving and manufacturing cutting edge biopharmaceuticals that revolutionized their industry.  Now that they’ve chased away all the straight white men, they’re fumbling around trying to get their diversity dream team to learn how to do what those before them invented and optimized.  And it sure isn’t looking pretty.  I hear from the few of my friends that are still there, mostly as contractors to fix what’s falling apart.  The managers put a brave face on it but they can’t admit that they don’t know what they’re doing wrong.  And they never will admit it.  So, things are going to get worse.  Good.

Okay, Let’s Talk About Journalism

photog Current Events , ,

So, we all laughed while Taylor Lorentz wailed about the “Slaughter of the Innocents” among the millennial generation of journalists.  Of course, we did.  Everyone on our side despises them because they are everything that is wrong about the mainstream media.

They are dishonest, stupid, lazy and almost completely unqualified to perform their primary mission; discover what is happening in the world and communicate it to the people reading, listening and watching their news outlets.  Instead, they have become the Ministry of Truth.  And thereby, they have deserved the monumental collapse in public trust in them and also the huge drops in paying audience.

Now, fair to say, a part of the lost audience is not directly related to their lack of skill and honesty.  The internet has upended the financial model that used to govern how newspapers and other forms of journalism made their money; advertising.

Google and Facebook have swallowed almost all the advertising dollars by means of their surveillance of people’s search histories and other internet activity.  So, it’s not fair to blame media’s collapsing profits completely on their lousy work.  And in fact, some countries (e.g., Australia) are now forcing Facebook to pay news sites for the content that they allow people to post on their Facebook pages.  But the new world is what it is.  News sites are struggling to keep their doors open.

Well, okay.  What that means is that news will become a subscription-based product.  People will have to pay for what they want to read or see.  And most people tend to be unwilling to pay money to be insulted.  Which means one of two approaches must be adopted by the news corporations.

The first approach is to continue with what they currently do.  They can keep up a far-left-biased version of the news which insults half of the viewing public.  And this means building their financial model based on whatever payments they calculate they can get from the left-leaning half of the country.

The second approach is to try to perform objective journalism and get money from anyone who wants to know what’s actually going on in the world.  Now this would be a wholly novel idea.  So far, it’s never been tried by any major news organization.  And for all I know maybe it would produce less income than the first approach.  But I tend to believe that providing unbiased news coverage and separating it completely from a program that featured opinion pieces from both sides of the partisan divide would serve the public better and at the same time would make more money.

And why do I think unbiased news would make more money?  Because we’ve seen what the opposite looks like.  The opposite of unbiased news is Taylor Lorentz.  And that model is crashing and burning from coast to coast.  And it will get worse.  Eventually, people will get to pay a la carte for their media.  When that happens places like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News will either have to provide the public what they want or go out of business.

And all of this is actually for the good.  We pay for the awful cable companies with our cable bill and we never get our money’s worth.  I would pay extra if none of my money went to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and certainly not MSNBC and CNN.  Of late Fox News has been barely half a step better than these.  If my internet provider would charge a fair price for access to the internet and I could choose from the media options that I preferred and paid for nothing else it would be a much better world.  Instead of five or ten large leftist media outlets there would probably be one or two at most.

And from where I stand that would be a vast improvement.  Because that would mean that about eighty percent of the obnoxious leftist journalists currently employed by these woke fake-news corporations would be driving cabs and waiting tables in New York and DC.  Sorry Taylor Lorentz, but that’s what should happen.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 28NOV2023 – Disney Woes

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, TomD , , , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

 

Just read this in PJ Media (link)

Reports of Disney’s Death Are (Not?) an Exaggeration
Stephen Green | 5:11 PM on November 27, 2023

As Disney’s two-time CEO Bob Iger prepares to host the company’s annual town hall on Tuesday to provide “hints or guidance for what the next phase of ‘building’ will bring after the problem-solving phase,” it’s time to ask if Iger is able “to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.”

The first quote comes from a Hollywood Reporter item on Monday detailing the company’s Wall Street woes. Traders and managers will be watching Iger on Tuesday for “possible color, body language or even outright updates on various topics,” ranging from the company’s ongoing series of box office flops to troubles at their fabled theme parks.
The second quote is courtesy of Jonathan Turley. His Monday column — almost in time for Adam Smith’s 300th birthday — shows how Smith’s “invisible hand” has undone the company’s woke agenda. Disney is now “negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers,” Turley writes, and is “even reporting a decline in licensing revenue from products associated with Star Wars, Frozen, Toy Story and Mickey and Friends — iconic and once-unassailable corporate images.”

“Wish” is Disney’s latest animated effort that isn’t a sequel or reboot and it opened over the long Thanksgiving weekend to middling reviews and worse box office sales. Well, not entirely not a reboot — one of the characters is the glowy Star, as in Pinocchio’s “When You Wish Upon A Star.” “Wish” looks to be another big money-loser in a yearlong series of them, including “Indiana Jones and the Whatever McGuffin,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the live-action Little Mermaid, and most recently, “The Marvels.”
The Disney+ streaming service is losing money and eyeballs. Impressions — the streaming measure of viewership — is down 14% from last year, the company says.
The worst news is that Disney’s intellectual properties — the company’s seed corn for future growth — are in terrible shape.

The good news is that $7.5 billion in cost-cutting measures have restored some sense to the company’s balance sheet. The bad news is that the maintenance-heavy Disney World and Disney Land are reportedly looking a little worse for wear. Or as Wall Street’s Jamie Lumley warned, “As the business looks to slash costs and make streaming profitable, there are sure to be concerns about cutting too deep and impacting the business going forward.”

But the company can’t cut its way to health. It needs to start selling tickets again to the kinds of movies and theme park experiences people expect when they see the Disney label.

Walt Disney and his brother Roy were jealous guardians of the Disney name and reputation. Given so many more recent changes, this seems like much longer ago than 1983, but I’m reminded of “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” It was considered a Very Big Deal at the time when Disney produced a Ray Bradbury film with such a dark mood and storyline. At the time — Walt had died and Roy was no longer involved in day-to-day operations — Disney was looking to branch out from family fare like the Herbie movies and “Pete’s Dragon.”

Results were mixed at best, and I’m being overly generous.
It took a 1984 hostile takeover attempt and a long-term recovery plan courtesy of incoming CEO Michael Eisner to restore Disney’s luster. Eisner understood Disney’s creative strength — and it wasn’t in jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon with “The Black Hole,” or another cheesy Love Bug movie.

It was in getting back to classic animation with “The Little Mermaid,” and in recognizing similar strength in the fledgling Pixar Animation Studios.

Iger can cut costs but, in the end, what he needs to do is remember what the Disney brand means — and work as furiously to restore it as Eisner did, and as Walt and Roy used to work to protect it.

Unless we see evidence of that in Tuesday’s town hall, Disney shares might be up a bit on Wall Street’s hopes but I ain’t buying.

Disney Has Some ‘Splainin’ to Do. To Their Shareholders.

photog Current Events , ,

This is an incredibly boring document written in corporate double-speak.  But in PART I, ITEM 1A.;
Risk Factors, it says

“We face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses.”

And further down in this section they state:
“Further, consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.”
“Misalignment with public and consumer taste.”  Hmm.  “Achieve certain of our environmental and social goals.”  Well, well.
So when five or six of your movies are duds and you lose a billion or a billion and half dollars, it turns out your shareholders start to notice.  Imagine that!  How judgmental!  How crassly materialistic!  So uncool!
Well, I guess they’ll have to figure out how they can align with these philistine parents who don’t want their kids groomed.  They must strive to prevent perceptions of their efforts to achieve certain of their environmental and social goals from presenting risks their reputation and brands.
So on one side you have all this blah-blah couching what they do in double-speak.
And then you have South Park cutting to the chase and making it perfectly clear.
I think for the sake of transparency it would be reasonable for Disney to include the South Park Panderverse episode as part of their annual report.  After all the public’s opinion is much closer to the South Park opinion than it is to the double-speak version.
Or maybe losing a couple more billion dollars is the preferred route.  Time will tell.

Rufo’s Short Film on the “Cluster B Society”

photog Current Events , , ,

Christopher Rufo has made a ten minute video claiming to define the current psychopathology of the Left as the “Cluster B Society.”  It describes four different personality disorders that taken together allow for the phenomena that we see at work in the world today.  And being an academic he is able to draw the clearest examples from the college campus where narcissists, border-line personalities, sociopaths and hysterics have indeed captured the campus and established their own stable institutions that everyone else there must endure.

I don’t find myself competent to judge the accuracy or the importance of the details that Rufo is using to prove his thesis about the particular personality types that he points to in this video.  But the overall effect that he describes is familiar to everyone who has lived through the last ten years.  The feminized and hysterics-driven environment we find ourselves in is all too clear to those of us who grew up in a much saner world.

I’m not sure who is the audience for this video.  Maybe those with a grounding in psychology.  Even lacking that background I found it interesting.  But I’m not sure how it can be used to change the problem.  But I acknowledge that Rufo might find this explanation for the dysfunctional campus useful for someone like himself who is attempting to purge a particular college of its shrieking madwomen.  Kudos to him for that.

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.

Will Iger Retreat from the Woke Agenda that is Ruining Disney’s Business?

photog Current Events ,

In the linked article the Financial Times speculates on whether Disney will sell off its television business or ESPN or Hulu or blah, blah, blah.  It also wonders about the recent spate of theatrical releases that have underperformed or out right lost money.  As it goes through the litany of business divisions that have problems it seems that one option seems to be ignored.  Instead of concluding that television or streaming or movies aren’t really the “core” business of Disney maybe they should be looking at why each of these formerly lucrative businesses is suffering.

In each of these ventures, Disney has attempted to take a winning formula and mangle it by substituting a woke alternative.  Star Wars was chloroformed to provide a platform for the “Estrogen = The Force” narrative.  Now The Marvel movies will follow suit.  Kill off Iron Man and Captain America and substitute Captain Marvel.  And finally Indiana Jones is wheeled off to an old age home and Unlikable Girl Jones is brought in.

And now in the most brilliant example of brand poisoning on record they are openly sabotaging the classic cartoon properties of the 1930’s.  Snow White is an empowered girl boss who “don’t need no man” and is too busy with her empire building to fall in love.  She’s doesn’t need Prince Charming and for all we know she doesn’t swing that way.

Honestly, you’ve got to admire a campaign as boldly insane as the Disney reset.  One thing they’re responding to is the future status of those movies from the thirties and forties.  It’s getting close to the point where their copyright protection ends.  Snow White was made in 1937.  2037 is in fourteen years.  At that point anyone can repackage that movie and sell it.  By then Disney may be known as the non-binary children’s entertainment company.  Somebody else could have an amusement park where the old fashioned “normal” male and female Disney characters walk around and entertain the kids.  Who knows, maybe the amusement parks will be the business that Disney sells off.  Maybe someone else will restore the brand with a more family friendly attitude toward these formerly wholesome places.  It’s a thought.

Iger’s vision for Disney is embracing the woke sensibility and make it the their brand.  It’s a bold decision but right now it looks pretty dangerous to the company’s profitability.  Whatever they think they know about the future of the children’s entertainment market it looks like most parents still want to bring their kids to see movies where the beautiful girl is saved by the handsome prince from the evil stepmother or the evil witch and they live happily ever after.

You know, I hope Disney continues down the road they’re on.  Killing off the biggest entertainment company in the world may be the only thing that can save that industry.  There’s something to be said for being a true believer.