Archive for June, 2023
12 Jun 2023

Trump Attorney Answers George Stephanopoulos

, , , ,

11 Jun 2023

Another of Our Corporate Overlords Join the Boycott List

, , ,


Nickmerc’s Call of Duty operator skin, a formerly popular sales item.

Independent Journal Review reports on the latest case of crazed corporate Wokery.

One of the most popular video games in the entire world has just interjected itself into the ongoing “pride month” controversies erupting across the country — and could soon be joining the likes of Bud Light and Target on the ash heap of history.

So how did a video game synonymous with wanton violence (as most “first-person shooter”-type games like “Call of Duty” are) become entwined with allegations of being “woke”?

This sordid tale begins in, of all places, Glendale, California.

That particular West-Coast city was the place where a school board meeting devolved into utter chaos when upset parents showed up to protest the LGBT propaganda that one typically associates with California.

It was a reasonable request from parents, who would rather their children learn how to formulate grammatically correct sentences instead of formulating delusions of transgender grandeur, and yet was somehow still being presented as some sort of bigoted, anti-LGBT backlash.

Any parent can commiserate with the feeling of wanting to raise their children as they see best — not what some leftists see as “best.”

Completing this poll entitles you to our news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Enter popular Twitch (the world’s biggest video game streaming platform) streamer Nickmercs. According to his YouTube profile, Nickmercs’ real name is Nick Kolcheff.

Kolcheff, who primarily streams the wildly popular game “Call of Duty” on his channel, chimed in on a comment from a fellow streamer about the Glendale ugliness:

Well, this was too much for the Woke powers that be at Activision and they were quick to respond.

RTWT

10 Jun 2023

Kari Lake for President!

, ,

———————-

And to the former conservatives at National Review, we non-RINO conservatives will not forget today’s column.

10 Jun 2023

Ouch!

, , , , ,

The Omega Watch Company Museum paid $3.4 million USD at auction for a rare example of one of its own brand watches that has recently been proven to be a fake. link

The 1957 OMEGA Speedmaster that sold at Phillips for a record-breaking USD$3.4 million (AUD$4.6 million at the time) has been revealed as a fake. The immaculate Ref. 2915-1, which was described as the Swiss maison’s “most historically important model” first made headlines in 2021, when it appeared in the lineup for Phillips’ Geneva Watch Auction: XIV. Seen as the holy grail of Speedmasters and a design often thought lost to the world, the model drew the interest of many avid collectors, each clambering to hold a piece of history in their hands. Less than two years later and a string of reports have revealed the most expensive OMEGA ever sold, was simply too good to be true.

But that’s just the beginning.

Bloomberg is reporting that the 1957 OMEGA Speedmaster Ref. 2915-1 is not an original example, but rather a piece constructed using parts from other vintage watches. According to Sydney-based registered watch and jewellery valuer Damien Kalmar, the end result of this process is referred to as a ‘Frankenwatch’, a term used within the industry to demonstrate the lengths and sophistication of the forgery. While not uncommon, these pieces generally take the form of a vintage Seiko or OMEGA Seamaster, due to the ubiquitous and collectible nature of the design.

“Copy (or fake) watches have been around for a very long time, and forgers have been making copies of OMEGA watches for decades,” the Kalmar Antiques director tells us. “Whether they are models produced post-1969 dubbed ‘moon watches’ after Buzz Aldrin famously wore one on the landing of the moon, or the ‘pre-moon watches’ dating prior – Speedmasters have always been highly collectable watches and remain popular in the current market.”

So, with that knowledge on hand, the question begs to be asked, how did a watch that was supposedly OMEGA’s “most historically important model” manage to slip through the cracks?

According to the brand, the very expensive mixup was an inside job. In the Bloomberg report, OMEGA claims that three former employees were behind a very intricate scheme to dupe collectors, auctioneers and the brand itself. Considering the actualised price was around 25 times the pre-sale estimate, they were damn close to pulling it off.

As per OMEGA’s allegations, a former employee of its museum and brand heritage department “worked in tandem with intermediaries to purchase the watch for the OMEGA Museum”. On the advice of this employee, OMEGA purchased the watch for its in-house collection with company executives reportedly told that it was a “rare and exceptional timepiece that would be an absolute must”.

As we reported back in November 2021, the 1957 model represented the perfect culmination of time periods and design language. Only in production between 1957 and 1959, the Ref. 2915-1 and -2 models received the ‘Broad Arrow’ minute and hour hands, alongside a metal bezel – as opposed to the standard bezel with black insert. Additionally, the rare piece was said to sport slightly different dial graphics, distinguishable by the oval O of OMEGA, which later became perfectly round.

“In terms of design, it was the first chronograph to feature a tachymeter scale (or, as OMEGA called it at the time, the Tacho-productometer scale) on the bezel, rather than on the dial,” Phillips wrote at the time. “In terms of movements, OMEGA did not go for a brand new calibre, turning instead to calibre 321, an extremely robust and reliable column-wheel chronograph, which it recognised as the best available option for its new Speedmaster.”

Alas, it was not meant to be. OMEGA has not named the ex-staffers it claims were responsible for the con, however, CEO Raynald Aeschlimann told Swiss newspaper NZZ that the deception had been “to the massive detriment of OMEGA”. Even more bizarrely, the watchmaker apparently doesn’t know who consigned the watch to Phillips for the auction, making the entire ordeal all the more strange. A Phillips Spokesperson confirmed that the auction house obtained confirmation from OMEGA of the date of manufacture of the numbered movement, serial number, the model of watch that the movement was fitted to and the date it was sold

“Until last week, nobody had ever suggested this OMEGA watch was not authentic, the watch was inspected by specialists, experts and even the manufacturer at the time of the sale and nobody raised any concerns over it,” the Spokesperson told Man of Many. “Even now, we have not seen any reports or had access to the watch to carry out an in-depth analysis of the watch regarding those claims.”

“We understand representatives of OMEGA saw the watch before they purchased it. We believe OMEGA is bringing criminal charges against the perpetrators.”

RTWT

Personally, I find that brown dial ugly.

10 Jun 2023

From the Indian Forest Service

, ,

06 Jun 2023

Our Hedge Fund Dictatorship Speaks

, ,

—————————-

06 Jun 2023

Silicon Valley’s Decline

, , ,

Joel Kotkin, in the Spectator, finds the former hub of innovation today sunk in decadence and decline.

    ‘We used to build the future. Then we designed it, now we just think about it’

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is the latest indicator that the Valley – site of nothing less than an economic miracle in recent decades – is now in big trouble. Other signs include mass layoffs in the tech sector and a post-pandemic real estate downturn. The Valley, it seems, is entering a period of decadence that raises the prospect of long-term decline.

The start of this decline has coincided with a shift from the physical to the virtual. The Valley’s roots were in the old engineer-driven economy, one connected to the rest of the country, and to working-class America – somebody, it’s easy to forget, has to make the hardware. Today tech is dominated by a cognitive elite of Ivy Leaguers, management consultants and MBAs. ‘We used to build the future,’ Leslie Parks, who formerly directed redevelopment efforts in San Jose, once told me. ‘Then we designed it, now we just think about it.’

But the Valley has slowly left the industrial battlefield – it has lost over 160,000 manufacturing positions over the past two decades. It bought into the idea that the unique genius of its financial and corporate culture would be enough for it to thrive and profit as production headed first to Japan, then China and, more recently, to other parts of North America.

This is a familiar story. Consider, for example, how British industry lost its edge: the Industrial Revolution created a new class of tycoons; then the tycoons’ sons sought a return to the aristocratic past, eschewing dirty factories for elegant postings in the City or a relaxed life in their country estates. More recently, Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.

To be clear, the Valley is not done as a major tech centre. It still boasts a venture capital community, a remarkable concentration of engineering and other management talent, powerful universities and the headquarters of some of the biggest companies in the world. And it remains home to many of the tech giants that now exploit their monopolistic advantages. But that is not the same thing as being the place where the world looks for a vision of the future, as it once was. Even if the Valley still matters, it may no longer dominate the future as its denizens once assumed it would. Instead, it will face fierce competition for tech supremacy – from other countries, and other parts of this one.

This reflects two different phenomena: rising competition from other regions – and an internal rot that has infected the Valley. In its first few remarkable decades, the Valley was defined by its openness, its culture of competition and connection to the general economy. The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs were, foremost, industrialists. They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money.

Over the last decade or two, the Valley has outsourced much of its industry. Apple produces two-fifths of its products in China, more than four times what is made in the United States. Other tech giants don’t make anything. Rather than trying to build a better mousetrap, big tech now makes much of its billions off surveillance – the source of the wealth generated by Google and Meta – and by disintermediating retail businesses. It is a far cry from the optimistic promise of a better tomorrow on which the Valley was built.

Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertising revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales, controlling in some cases upwards of 90 per cent of the market. Even in bad years, they can persist by laying off employees, relying on inertia to garner income without worry of competition in what the author David P. Goldman neatly summarises as ‘the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies.’

Many progressives persist in seeing the Golden State, and particularly Silicon Valley, as harbingers of a better, greener, more egalitarian future. In the words of two leading academics ‘California Capitalism’ remains ‘distinctive,’ ‘a model of an environmentally friendly economy that epitomises fiscal responsibility, innovation’ as well as ‘inclusive, sustainable, long-term growth.’

This vision could not be further from reality. The stranglehold of mega-firms and the associated Wall Street and venture capital money machine has undermined competition in fields from video games to artificial intelligence to cloud services to the metaverse and AI. To be sure, there’s some competition among the giants, much as there was between aristocratic clans in Europe or Japan’s feudal daimyo, but there are vanishingly diminished opportunities for the sort of startup that made up much of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposit base. Tech today is largely a game played between giants who, if they see promising technology, simply acquire it. Tech entrepreneur turned author Antonio García Martínez has called the contemporary Valley ‘feudalism with better marketing,’ a ‘highly stratified’ quasi-medieval society ‘with little social mobility.’ With control of key markets, firms that columnist Michael Lind refers to as ‘toll-booth companies’ can exact money from consumers who have little choice of going elsewhere – a bit like feudal lords. And if these barons compete, it is against one another. Largely ignored has been the impact of these changes on the people who live in the Valley. In the Eighties and Nineties it was heralded as ‘an exemplar of middle-class aspiration.’ No longer. And that, too, is thanks in part to deindustrialisation.

The kinds of tech jobs being created in the Valley produce opportunities only for a narrow subset of highly skilled, well-connected or credentialed employees. The Bay Area has been described as ‘a region of segregated innovation.’ Lower- and even mid-level workers at firms such as Google sometimes sleep in their cars while others have been forced into mobile-home parks or even homeless encampments.

RTWT

04 Jun 2023

34 Years Ago

, , ,

The Establishment Media and the Western Community of Fashion have conveniently forgotten, but “Yuri Bezmonov” remembers and serves up a very appropriate commemorative posting.

Comrades: Know your history. Today marks the 34th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. In modern clown world, we are living through a simultaneous slow-motion Tiananmen Square and Cultural Revolution.

Although the real death toll of Tiananmen Square will never be known, the thousands of peaceful protestors who were slaughtered are a rounding error compared to the tens of millions killed by the CCP in the past century. While the Nazis, Soviets, and Bolsheviks are long gone, the CCP is still in firm control over the world’s most populous country. They have crushed the spirit, culture, and history of one of the the world’s oldest civilizations. However, they martyred Tank Man into an immortal symbol for all dissenters.

Shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, China was admitted to the WTO. Since then, many leaders of the “free world” have become CCP court eunuchs. The most craven bootlickers like Canada’s Castro Jr. openly covet Xi’s mandate from heaven style of absolute power. Our senile President Joe Brandon and his crackhead son Hunter took bribes from the CCP, so they will never condemn them even after COVID. Even more senile Senator Diane Feinstein had a CCP spy driver for decades and Dem Rep Eric Swalwell fell for a CCP honeypot named Fang Fang. Every major Western institution from McKinsey to Harvard to the NBA has been bought off and castrated to never criticize the CCP. In their twisted minds, CCP slave labor is good for ESG because their sweatshops build the solar panels and batteries that will save the planet!

03 Jun 2023

Australian Road Signs

,

02 Jun 2023

Driving Frazier Nashes at Goodwood!

,

Personally, I think Frazier Nashes rank very high among the coolest British sports car marques of all time. Think of it: chain drives!

———

Take note, Buchananites. These guys have all got stickers on their vintage cars expressing support for Ukraine!

Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted for June 2023.
/div>








Feeds
Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)
Feed Shark