Category Archives: culture

A Simple Enough Solution

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And straightforward, too.

Nike thinks it has supply chain and marketing problems with its shoe manufacturing.

Nike Inc’s quarterly results highlight how some US brands have too much inventory at home and in markets like China, where the companies have placed big financial bets.
The sneaker giant on Thursday said revenue from China in the August quarter fell 16% to $1.65 billion, citing Covid-19 lockdowns in different cities hurting store traffic.

The People’s Republic of China represented some 13% of sales and 29% of earnings for Nike in its quarter ending last August.

Nike offered a number of excuses for its problems, including the PRC’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns, a heat wave in the PRC that the PRC claimed affected energy production, and inflation.

These are, though, just excuses. Nike’s problem—and it’s a political and a moral one, also—is that it does business inside the PRC.

These problems wouldn’t exist if the company moved is manufacturing facilities out of the PRC. Neither Vietnam nor Japan nor Australia have lockdown or heat wave/energy problems affecting manufactury (Australia has made significant progress since its wind storm shut down its wind-power energy production in a western state a couple years ago).

Neither would Nike have a PRC-related inflation related problem with its PRC inventory or sales if it didn’t do business in the PRC.

Nike wouldn’t have any sort of supply chain problem, or delivery problem, were it to make its products in the US.

Nike would solve its political and moral problems (did company managers have the grace to recognize that these problems are real) if it had no business dealings of any sort with the PRC so long as that nation continues its genocidal behavior vis-à-vis the Uighurs.

Based on What Evidence?

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Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall claims the National Archives hasn’t received all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration. She wrote this to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) in all seriousness:

While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should[.]

And

Specifically, Mr. Ferriero informed you in his February 18, 2022, letter that NARA [National Archives & Records Administration] has identified that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.

Since Wall has succeeded in tracking down “missing” records of messaging accounts by tracking down the messages’ recipients, on what basis does she claim there are further such accounts—or is she simply…assuming?

In the end, if she doesn’t know, by her own statement, how does she know? Or is Wall just another Party acolyte making politically convenient allegations without any substantiation at all?

Wall’s letter can be read here.

It’s a Start

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Congressman Andrew Clyde (R, GA) has legislation he intends to introduce that would bar

federal officials from collaborating with Big Tech to censor Americans’ voices and create some legal recourse for those harmed by free speech infringement.

Explicitly, Clyde said,

It would also give an opportunity for those people who have been harmed by it to take legal action[.]

It’s a promising start, but I suggest a couple of fillips. One is to explicitly bar the agencies and departments of which those officials are a part from spending any money on the collaboration.

The other is to hold the agency and department heads and deputy heads personally liable for violating this law, regardless of who in their organization actually did the deed(s): these two are the MFWICs, and nothing goes on in their organization without their permission, if only because these two create the culture within which the misbehavior occurs and/or have the lax enforcement processes that let this sort of misbehavior go “unnoticed.”

In addition to that, and as a means of giving teeth to the responsibility deeming, the legislation should explicitly remove sovereign immunity and qualified immunity as defenses for the organization heads and deputy heads and the person(s) who actually did the deed.

Clyde needs to follow through on this, with the added fillips, as soon as Republicans gain majorities in both houses of Congress (whenever that happens), get the bill passed, and get it signed into law—or force President Joe Biden (D) to veto it, thereby demonstrating Progressive-Democrats’ continued insistence on government censorship of us citizens’ speech.

Well, Of Course

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Given the vasty numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the Progressive-Democratic Party stronghold of Illinois, State officials are predicting delays of as much as two-weeks post-election before results from the current mid-terms will be known.

The bulk of these mail-ins will be coming from Chicago and Cook County—Party fortresses within that stronghold.

Of course it’ll take those two weeks to get the mail-ins counted. Party will need the time to get the numbers from downstate (i.e., from outside Cook County) and so the numbers from Cook County and Chicago that are needed, and so how those mail-in ballots should be counted.

Party’s machine politics in action.

But We Need to Take your Guns Away

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A bad guy armed with a shotgun walked into a Florida store with the intent of robbing it. And bragged about being “from Chicago” in the process.

I got a big (expletive) (expletive) gun, but I’m not from around here is what I’m saying. I’m from Chicago bro.

Then, as paraphrased by Fox News, this armed thug

 ask[ed] the employee what kind of weapon he is holding.

Which the employee showed him, whereupon the thug left.

The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, the county where the attempted armed robbery occurred, has the right of it [emphasis added]:

He then fumbles for words, resorting to meaningless babble about being from Chicago. Words seem to fail you when your felony attempt is thwarted by lawful and righteous force.

But the Progressive-Democratic Party and its (what has become) mainstream Leftist supporters want us all disarmed. The store’s employee should have been left unarmed, helpless, and possibly murdered during the course of this robbery attempt.