And in marketing failure news, the rest of the world pushed back on Jaguar because 99% of normal people are tired of Woke, DEI and LGBT crap being rammed down their throats.
Get this:
As the mockery of Jaguar’s massive brand relaunch continues, one company exec is speaking out against the “intolerance” from the public.
Managing director Rawdon Glover said in a recent interview with the Financial Times that the campaign messaging was drowned out in “a blaze of intolerance” on social media. Glover also claimed that the colorful new ad was not meant to be “woke.”
“If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out. So we shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand,” Glover told the outlet.
“We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.”
The Jaguar exec said there have been “very positive” reactions to the campaign but that he’s been dismayed by “the level of vile hatred and intolerance” to the viral ad.
Glover added that the rebrand was done in part to attract new customers. “This is not a depiction of how we think our future customers are,” he said. “We don’t want to necessarily leave all of our customers behind. But we do need to attract a new customer base.”
Guess what? Your customers aren’t perverts or racists. They want a good product (something Jag needs to work on since the 60’s). This won’t turn out well
Three years ago today, the Taliban seized Kabul, causing the Afghan government to collapse, and Joe Biden responded by ordering a quick evacuation from Afghanistan, which was completed at the end of August.
On the eve of the 3rd anniversary of Biden and Kamala's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban are parading around Bagram Air Force Base, which they abandoned for no reason, with the $80B+ of American military gear they left behind for them.
As a reminder, Harris was the last person in the room when the decision was made and openly celebrated Biden’s “courage” afterward.
“This is a president who has an extraordinary amount of courage,” Harris boasted. “He is someone, who I have seen over and over again, make decisions based on what he truly believes … is the right thing to do.”
Jim Hoft reported last year that the Taliban previously released photos of the abandoned equipment in Afghanistan and the Regime tried to lie their way out of it.
More
They are rubbing the worst military decision since Viet Nam in our faces.
Feminism made the error of telling us to behave and think like men
Historically, of course, the feminist argument had valid points. In the old days, when members of my sex were bound first to their fathers and then to their husbands, they undoubtedly led disagreeable lives. If a woman had a good education, however, she could make a comfortable living and remain independent of male approval. When the desire for marriage and children overwhelmed her, she would almost certainly lose her job, and in consequence become tied to her house, compelled to perform a thousand trivial and demeaning tasks unworthy of her ability.
But the world has changed in a way the early feminist would find incomprehensible and grotesque – indeed, she would view today’s flag bearers as hollow and preposterous nothings. I sometimes think the West has outgrown the feminist philosophy entirely and should cast it off.
Where, for instance, does it leave women like me, when we have reached the age of 54, as I have, and find ourselves both single and childless? Hugging the collected works of Proust, or engaging in furtive sojourns to the pub that bring remembrances of things pissed? One in 10 British women in their 50s have never married and live alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.
I saw it my whole life. They loved to be like men (while hating them in words), but always had regret when the biological clock ticked midnight. Then I heard the regret.
It finally came out. AB is truly woke. Their main customer base for decades is men, the beer drinkers. I don’t know the white/black breakdown other than 13% of the population is black, so I’m guessing more white beer drinking men.
Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, has pledged to purge its white, male employees in an effort to have a “more diverse and inclusive environment,” according to footage found on the company’s website. The company has seen its sales collapse since the disastrous Dylan Mulvaney advertisement campaign which wiped billions off the firm’s value, and chased millions of customers away.
In the video, one employee of Anheuser-Busch explains, “we’re still 40 percent women, and 60 percent men, still predominantly white: so there’s still work to be done.” The “work” to be “done” is apparently replacing white male workers with alternatives.
In doing this, another employee says, “I feel like I finally found my voice as a black woman, and I’m not prepared to lose it.”
Discussing the #CheerstoDiversityAndInclusion campaign, Anheuser-Busch’s European Diversity and Inclusion Manager, Lara Laila Gärber explains, “at AB InBev, what we wanted to do is ensure that diversity and inclusion is fully integrated in our business strategy.”
Anheuser-Busch has lost billions of dollars as a result of its decision to embrace diversity by partnering with Dylan Mulvaney for the now infamous ad campaign. The stock has also since been downgraded by HSBC.
Back to me.
As a person sitting in the grandstands watching the shit show, I’d say they were cutting their own throats. Not everything is for everybody every time. Different people like different things. Why you don’t promote your customers instead of demeaning them for the sake of woke and pleasing Blackrock ESG for your proper CEI scoring (how woke you are for DEI, CRT, etc.).
Bud Light sales began dropping in the first week of April and kept falling for weeks. The boycott has hurt other Anheuser-Busch beers, too, including Budweiser, Michelob Ultra and Busch Light. Sales volumes for rivals Coors Light and Miller Lite in the first week of May were up about 16% and 17%, respectively, according to Bump Williams.
Sure, it’s easy to say go woke, go broke, but this would be in textbooks in colossal marketing mistakes, except the colleges are just as woke. They’ll provide cover for this unless someone wants to actually teach success.
No spin in the world is going to be able to hide the sales numbers. They thought it would blow over, but they underestimated how sick the normal person in America is getting from having this woke crap shoved down our throats by the coastal elites.
Keep hiring those Harvard grads to lower your sales even more. I’d be hiring a bunch of male toxicity employees who actually understood the product and the customer. I bet Don Draper would do better in his sleep than this.
Bias is bias, discrimination is discrimination. Disparaging someone for the color of their skin, any color is racist. It’s sexist to judge against another sex. Funny how they promote dozens of genders, but discriminate against males. They are doing what they blame others for, the heights of hypocrisy.
By death, I mean the first time it was allowed to be fully implemented and the world can see the destruction of deficit spending. It is how it will end when Keynes is allowed to play out without interference.
I’ve always wondered what could happen in a pure Milton Friedman or Keynes economy. It’s been more Friedman since the failure of the The New Deal, a Keynesian try and spending your way out of a depression. Of course WWII and a good economy actually did it, supporting Friedman, but it hasn’t stopped many presidents since then of trying it. Friedman’s capitalistic ideas brought more freedom and prosperity than the current philosophy
I don’t think they believe anything about Keynesian economics other than the part about government spending, because the Keynesian politicians use to to launder money back to into their pockets.
We know the New Deal (like the Green New Deal) failed and just spawned other failures like welfare, the Great Society and now Build Back Better.
At least we know how it turns out in a Keynesian model now, Build Back Broke. It gives power to the few and the government, which is not how our republic succeeds.
Everyone can see our economy being destroyed. Gas prices, food shortages, wars, inflation, border security…all there in back and white. They are socialistic policies that have a zero record of success.
The motto of the interloper now serving in the White House is “Build Back Better” – and the trillions to “build back” is an updated version of the New Deal on steroids. The Dems spend to a new level of excess which, for them, is ecstasy. In fact, a better name for their spend, spend, and spend more programs should be “Excess Ecstasy Exhilarates.” The foundation of the New Deal was found in the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was a British economist who developed the theory of ‘deficit spending’ – the idea that the government going into debt would jump-start the depressed economy which, then, would experience reinvigoration. There would be more employed, tax-paying citizens as well as corporate profits which would, in turn, restore the needed balance to the federal books. The deficit spending would restore a solvency that was lost due to the Great Depression.
In practice, this did not work out (unemployment was still in double digits throughout the 1930s), but because of the passage of the Wagner Act, which made it easier for workers to organize into unions, and because of the use of the radio for the well-known “Fireside Chats” – a real novelty in American politics which intensified public support for FDR – and because of residual anger towards the Republicans who had maintained power throughout the 1920s and were thus assumed to be the ones who had caused the Depression, Keynesian economics became the go-to model for economic policy in the United States for all decades since that time.
However, the Keynesian model has been weaponized under Build Back Better in a most sinister way. The present shift is to make us more amenable to the globalist fantasies gaining popularity in recent decades to ensure a transition towards world governance and a cooperative world economy (rather than a competitive one) under the cloak of “meeting needs” and “sustainability.” These two concepts are key pillars in a document written and published by the United Nations called Agenda 2030. Although the original United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 stressed the need for individual rights after WWII and promoted those rights in nearly every sentence of that document, the present document – Agenda 2030 – only refers to rights in one of the ninety-one sections: Section 19.
Instead of rights, needs are emphasized. This is consistent with the Communist Manifesto authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. A key principle in that document is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The actual needs of people would be the uppermost goal of envisioned communist society rather than ideas like rights, freedom, responsibility, property ownership, pursuit of happiness, or even security. The new communistic premise is that if needs are met then people will automatically experience security and happiness and will not need the abstract fluff of such bourgeois, outdated, and elitist ideas as rights, freedom, or ownership. Further, the meeting of communist needs must be based on sustainability. If we run out of energy, clean air, or water at some point in the future, we would then not be able to meet peoples’ needs. Therefore, plans and actions to sustain all the materials and planetary conditions that will keep us from running out of the natural resources are “necessary” – even if that means enslavement and tyranny. ‘Sustainability’ works in tandem with the ‘meeting of needs’ as a combination that is a cornerstone for a new world governance policy.
The Build Back Better plan superficially appears to be an updated and extravagant Keynesian or New Deal-style spending program, but the endgame is not economic recovery that forever establishes federal government dominance over the states in the socio-political realm. Rather, this BBB is the connection of an enlarged federal government and authority with a depreciation or elimination of U.S. sovereignty in favor of global, communist-style governance. But as if the endgame were not sinister enough, we see this updated Keynesian expansion of expenditures is not a result of economic collapse due to a devastating Depression, as was the justification in the 1930s.
Rather, simultaneously with expanded spending, the goal of the BBB plotters is to weaken the economy and usher in economic and socio-political chaos and mayhem. The southern border hands-off policy is literally facilitating the entrance of millions of unvetted persons. By limiting or eliminating natural gas and oil production in the territorial U.S. under the guise of protecting the environment, the feds incentivize other countries to expand their production of these energy sources. That production, which still means higher energy prices here in the U.S., has an equally negative effect on the world climate as fuel production in our country. But the brooding minds behind BBB want to see inflated prices. They want to see shortages. They want to see racial unrest. They want to see upsurges in crime as new theories of law inform the release of repeat offenders and shorter sentences to destabilize society. The BBB autocrats want to see a society that increasingly identifies as LGBTQ because this radical individualism weakens the social fabric. They want to see Chinese fentanyl imported to kill our citizens who are weak-minded and susceptible to drug use.
Thus, despite its resemblance to the New Deal, the BBB’s so-called governance (properly called betrayal) is at the front end linked to global health, green initiatives, and “interdependence” as an excuse for diminishing U.S. sovereignty. Initiation of these policies was not to combat financially depressive conditions but rather designed to undermine the freedoms and economic viability of the U.S. This might be likened to prescribing chemo to a patient who did not have cancer, and then, in order to justify the perverse treatment plan, injecting the patient with cancer cells in order to justify that plan. The goal of the sinister and aberrated “plan” would not be the recovery of the patient and return to normal living, but to place the “cured” individual into custodial care rather than independent living. That is the equivalent of a United States with diminished sovereignty in a world governance system.
I was in a meeting with Sam Palmisano (then chairman), who said that it wasn’t that big of a deal. It could have been, but wasn’t.
I worked with the people in IBM Research and they are some of the most creative and intelligent people on the planet. Some are so far out there that we couldn’t let them talk to reporters as they’d tell the world the keys to the castle. There has been stuff that never made it out the door, which would have started billion dollar businesses. TPTB at IBM couldn’t recognize this, or it wasn’t strategic (read make money on mainframes). They dropped the ball again on this one.
It is the marketing pukes that grab onto something at IBM and try to ride it for publicity and sales. I saw through it then and it is coming to fruition. That’s why I wrote what I did in 2012. Gini Rometty failed on this one. Sam handed her a golden goose and it got fiddle farted away in the AI world.
International Business Machines Corp. IBM -1.12% agreed to sell the data and analytics assets from its Watson Health business to investment firm Francisco Partners, the companies said Friday.
The deal is the latest step by IBM to refocus its core business around the cloud. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that IBM was exploring a sale of its healthcare-analytics business as a way to streamline the computing giant’s operations and sharpen its focus on computing services provided via the internet. The Watson Health business uses artificial intelligence to analyze diagnostic tests and other health data and to manage care.
IBM had big aspirations for its Watson artificial intelligence to help in medical research and improve patient outcomes, but the technology’s impact has fallen short of early hopes. Partners and clients have moved away from projects that were built around Watson technology in recent years, although IBM had spent billions of dollars making acquisitions to bolster the business.
“IBM took a risk of becoming a disrupter in the complex health care industry but was only able to garner limited success,” UBS analyst David Vogt said in a note Friday. He added that the Francisco transaction probably wouldn’t have a big financial impact for IBM because of the unit’s limited success.
The big IBM secret is that it is a mainframe company still. It’s software sales are all big iron related. It’s re-focused cloud strategy runs on, you guessed it, a mainframe. They have jettisoned divisions that weren’t money makers and Watson had outlived it’s marketing hype and didn’t cure cancer.
IBM is admitting AI failure by calling it the sale of a non-strategic asset. This message of course like most of the stuff coming out of IBM is bullshit.
At the end of the day, it won Jeopardy. Deep Blue won chess. IBM sells mainframes.
“Don’t do what you want. Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.” – Chuck Palahniuk, Author of “Fight Club”
The more difficult the struggle, the greater satisfaction from the accomplishment. That saying is from both my Mother and me.
No one gives a rats ass about a participation trophy. We want to win. To win you have to struggle, train, learn and fight for what you want. Look at what athletes do to attain victory. There is only one winner and second place is first loser.
There is only one CEO, but that person sacrificed along the way in time, travel and lack of attention to their family.
Dedication, training and commitment to any goal is necessary to achieve and succeed.
Overcoming what you are afraid of is and equal victory. The sense of satisfaction we get from beating our demons is as great for some as is winning a competition or succeeding in life. We were made to overcome obstacles in life and learn from that struggle.
Don’t give up or give in. Relish the sweet sense of victory or vanquishing what held you back.
“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine!” — The Count of Monte Cristo
This is one of my favorite books. I’ll be honest that I don’t remember this line, but when I came across it I found it to be the story of everyone’s life.
How you face adversity should be with the same intensity that you face success. The emotion will be different, but the effort should be equal.
Your hopes will be dashed on the rocks more than once. Learning how to handle that without being destroyed gets you through the next dashing.
Conversely, when you succeed, how you handle it should be as if you have done it before. There should be internal satisfaction with no need to put down the opponent, other than the hurdle you overcame.
You can only win in the game of life if you play. Those who stand and watch others don’t get to play or live life.
Some sit on the sidelines and watch. Some want to play but are too afraid. Others jump in and never worry what happens and some can fall into a mud puddle and come up wearing a dry cleaned tuxedo.
Most of us do all of these things, but not trying is the worst sin of the above. There is no shame in trying and failing if you learn and try again. Use what you learn and apply it to the next situation.
Failure is but a paragraph in the book of each human life. It is the pages that follow that ultimately define you.
I’m not sure who said this, but it is true. If someone knows, please put it in the comments and I’ll give the proper attribution.
You can get back on to the saddle of life and and ride after you fail, or you can give up. Treading water is as bad as giving up.
I’ve learned more by failing than succeeding. I learned not to make the same mistake again and how to avoid similar potential mistakes. Some never learn and repeat what doesn’t work. Such is life for humans.
Economists have either followed Friedman or Keynes for Economic Theory over the last century. Keynes is being used currently and you can judge the results for yourself. For me, it does not seem to work, nor has history shown it to have worked for any of the presidents who have based their administration on Keynesian theory anywhere in the world.
I quote one of the best authors of our generation on economics for this article.
If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he was more needed — he would be one hundred years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman’s death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.
Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like “Free to Choose” or the TV series of the same name.
In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his profession and also at a level that the average person could readily understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes.
Like many, if not most, people who became prominent as opponents of the left, Professor Friedman began on the left. Decades later, looking back at a statement of his own from his early years, he said: “The most striking feature of this statement is how thoroughly Keynesian it is.” No one converted Milton Friedman, either in economics or in his views on social policy. His own research, analysis and experience converted him.
As a professor, he did not attempt to convert students to his political views. I made no secret of the fact that I was a Marxist when I was a student in Professor Friedman’s course, but he made no effort to change my views. He once said that anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
I was still a Marxist after taking Professor Friedman’s class. Working as an economist in the government converted me.
What Milton Friedman is best known for as an economist was his opposition to Keynesian economics, which had largely swept the economics profession on both sides of the Atlantic, with the notable exception of the University of Chicago, where Friedman was both trained as a student and later taught.
In the heyday of Keynesian economics, many economists believed that inflationary government policies could reduce unemployment, and early empirical data seemed to support that view. The inference was that the government could make careful trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, and thus “fine tune” the economy.
Milton Friedman challenged this view with both facts and analysis. He showed that the relationship between inflation and unemployment held only in the short run, when the inflation was unexpected. But, after everyone got used to inflation, unemployment could be just as high with high inflation as it had been with low inflation.
When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the 1970s — “stagflation,” as it was called — the idea of the government “fine tuning” the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government’s “stimulus” spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer.
This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word — someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are, he wrote a book titled “Tyranny of the Status Quo.”
Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institution ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.
As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct increased my respect for him.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.
He also wrote this:
When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the 1970s —”stagflation,” as it was called — the idea of the government “fine tuning” the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government’s “stimulus” spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer.
This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word — someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are, he wrote a book titled “Tyranny of the Status Quo.”
Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institutions ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.
As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct increased my respect for him.
Delusions of Adequacy 