1903 New Times at the LA Times

Going to need a glossary to understand this one.  So here goes:

1.    The Los Angeles Times, once a great newspaper, was founded 136 years ago.  It was locally owned most recently by the Chandler family which didn’t know what to do with it until Otis Chandler started running it. That’s when it stopped being an antique version of Blightbart. And before it started becoming Daily Variety.

2.     It later bought Newsday and other papers.  The company formerly known as the Chicago Tribune -- now “tronc” -- bought it and continued to drive it into the ground, something that began with Chandler’s death.

3.    Patrick Soon-Shiong supposedly is the “world’s richest doctor.” But he didn’t get to be that by administering flu shots at a clinic. He founded several companies, invested in others and declared war on cancer, which he says he intends to conquer in the next few years. He was born in South Africa where his parents fled during Japan’s ruination of their native China.

Other pertinent facts:

1.    Dr. Pat as he likes to be called is paying $500-million for the paper.

2.    That is twice what Amazon’s Bezos paid for the Washington Post and seven times what John Henry paid to buy the Boston Globe.

Okay, now what? Another ailing newspaper is sold to another billionaire.  But the LA Times is different because

1.    Los Angeles is a company town and the company is a conglomerate called the Movie Biz.

2.    It is impossible to report on the Movie Biz without one’s journalistic nose in the company’s butt at least occasionally because No Sources, No News.

3.    Chandler turned the Times into a major paper with bureaus all over the place and brought it to national prominence.

4.    The Times has been in constant personnel turmoil for the past 15 years or so.

So now there’s a doctor in the house. And if any ailing body needed a doctor, it’s the LA Times.

Triage:

1.    Tronc has saved Dr. Pat from the necessity of canning publisher Ross Levinsohn, recently suspended without pay caught in a #metoo event.

2.    Tronc also has absorbed Levinsohn back into its ailing body as yours would reabsorb a cyst and put him in charge of a division no one pays any attention to which may be more than he deserves. Or less.

3.    The Times has gone through more editors than the cartoon Charmin bears go through toilet paper... with equally smelly results. Put someone in charge, Pat.

Long Term:

1.    Dr. Pat will lose megabucks in trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

2.    He can afford it.

3.    The readers and advertisers of the LA Times deserve it.

4.    Brilliant editors restored the Post and the Globe to their former glories almost overnight. In fact… it was the same guy at both papers. Find someone like that.  And not Dean Baquet ex LA Times and now in over his head at the NY Times as were the three immediate predecessors all lined up at the NYT turnstyle to Oblivion.

Caution:

Billionaires don’t get to be billionaires by giving flu shots at the free clinic.  Let’s have a look at Dr. Pat and let’s do it in One Big Hurry. If he turns out to be another Sheldon Addlebrain, forget all of the above.

Further reading:  My laudatory piece Otis Chandler  here -- it’s from 12 years ago.

SHRAPNEL:

--Beside being expensive and time and energy consuming, trump’s proposed military parade in Washington is a sign of weakness, not strength… but may foretell the future. Only third world dictatorships stage those kinds of parades.  They don’t show gratitude to service men and women, they show threats to a potentially disobedient civilian population.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody

© WJR 2018

1902 Martin Luther King, Jr. the Truck Salesman

“I have a truck.”

Fiat-Ram used parts of a speech by MLK to pitch its trucks during the Stupor Bowl. Shame on you.

You have $5 million to spend on a 30 second spot, but couldn’t spend a few nickels to fix 1.8 million trucks that like to jump spontaneously out of “Park” and start rolling until they had to recall them? Shame on you.

While it may have been nice to hear Dr. King say something beside the four words that everyone on earth now has heard, what were you thinking?  Shame on you.

Equal rights to buy a truck?  We have that already.  Serving the community? We have that already except for some places. But the number is growing as the government shirks its duties to the people.

Earth to Highdive Advertising, the Chicago-based mini agency that created the ad:  Shame on you.

Ram says the King family approved the ad.  The King center says otherwise.

What’s the big deal?  The big deal is you don’t commercialize an important preacher’s words, spoken decades ago in order to push tin off the lot.

Fiat owns Chrysler, maker of Ram trucks, Dodge and Chrysler vehicles.  And it has repeatedly proven it (a) doesn’t know how to do business in America and (2) knows a whole lot less about building cars than it should for a company that has building cars since 1900 and modifying them so they will suitable for use in the third world countries of Europe, Africa and Latin America. And here.

Fiat’s ineptness is legendary. Which is kind of a continuously running shockwave. Look at the rest of Italy: Da Vinci. Vivaldi. Toscanini. Pizza. How can a place of such magnificent marathon achievements allow itself to build cars the punchline for which is  Fiat stands for “Fix It Again, Tony?”

This run of inferiority now evidently includes choosing an ad agency.

Reaction to the ad lit up the Twitter-verse immediately after it ran. Can you imagine all the football crazies watching the game taking time away from their viewing parties to tweet their dissatisfaction?

The tweets were so numerous and so quick that even trump couldn’t get his two cents on the web. Nor could the Associated Press which spends almost as much effort making traffic and clickbait for Twitter than it does on running its wires.

But there are two things this ad did that many others don’t. It got our attention, and we remembered the product.  Ordinarily, this would be good business.  In this case: Shame on you.

SHRAPNEL:

--The US Supreme Court has rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ plea to stop rebalancing the state’s lopsided congressional districts.  PA’s districts look like a picture wall chart of skin cancer variations, all of which allow republican members of congress to choose their voters and win elections in a state that usually goes blue. Now, if the lawgivers of Harrisburg won’t make the changes, the courts will.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“Rejected.” (without comment)  -- US Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito ruling on republicans’ plea to leave gerrymandered PA congressional districts in place.  Alito is the justice who hears “emergency appeals” from Pennsylvania.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody

© WJR 2018

1901 You Can’t Get There From Here

Welcome to this week’s edition of American Conspiracy! Ryan Seacrest is off this week.  But no worries.  The votes are in and this week, you’ve chosen transportation as your winner.

Trains and boats and planes join buses, self driving cars, cruise ships, motorcycles and even Captain Kirk’s transporter room in a secret and major effort to defeat your ability to travel to or from wherever you want whenever you want.

Never in the history of the United States has it been so difficult to travel from point A to point B no matter where either point is, including down the block.

Yes, sure, the covered wagon crew had it rough.  But they never faced the Transportation Safety Administration, never rode a Greyhound trained to flip on command or an Amtrak that leaps from the rails, or tries a non-stop nose dive into an immovable Penn Station bumper.

They never had to travel on the Long Island Expressway, the 101 in California, or route 80 in Lodi.

With all the airport and plane problems that beset us… with deadly train accidents… with all those extra Uber and Lyft cars on the road, and with overworked and under-rested texting bus truck and cab drivers, it’s a miracle that you can get anywhere.

Take a cruise? Bring your own water and porta-potty.  Try to get a shopping cart through the supermarket aisles?  This can’t all be coincidence and accidents.  There must be a secret agency coordinating this stuff.

But who?  The Koch brothers?  The CIA? The Zionist Marxist cabal that runs the previous two suspects?  Hollywood? trump?  Harvey Weinstein’s bathrobe maker?  Wells Fargo?

Maybe it’s the work of the evil geniuses who mis-run the New York Subway System.  The transit authority has all that money and seems never to fix a busted car.  They must be using it to make themselves look good compared to MegaBus, American Airlines, Amtrak and the Jersey Turnpike.

There can be no other possible explanation.

Wessays (™) questioned a former FBI agent who said his agency was experimenting with mass hysteria hypnosis as far back as the Korean War era.  He (or she!) said the basic idea was to keep Americans home, give them cabin fever and provoke intrafamily violence as a way to reduce the population.  The FBI has declined comment saying it can only deal with one major conspiracy at a time, and this one is not a high priority.

Not a high priority? Why they’re erasing one of our great freedoms, the freedom to travel when and where we please. It’s all happening below the surface.  Well… not exactly “all.”

The other day cops in Keokuk, Iowa caught a bus driver crouched near his front tire and searching in the dark for what was discovered to be an ice pick!

His obviously concocted excuse was that he dropped the ice pick which he had intended to use to clear the frozen windshield.  A likely story. You know those tires were moments away from disabling punctures.

And then there was the case of the missing Legionnaires Disease virus, stolen from a still secret lab belonging to a drug company that’s actually a clandestine subsidiary of the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Lauderdale.  Who was caught red handed with the loot?  Why none other than the HVAC chief and a plumber’s assistant employed by the owners of a cruise ship about to sail for the Bahamas.

What do you think they were going to do with THAT stuff?

This has been American Conspiracy, Simon Cowell Executive Producer. We’ll be back at this same time next week with another edition, a little something to watch because every other channel will be broadcasting the Olympics except CBS which has hired a defective metronome to read the Evening News.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody

© WJR 2018

1900 A Face in the Crowd

Biograph Studios photo 1957 

It was a movie starring Andy Griffith about an adulation-hungry, sex-mad drifter who lucked into a broadcast job and held the nation in the palm of his hand until someone left a mic open during the closing credits and we learned what the character, Lonesome Rhodes, really thought of his listeners and viewers.

Toward the end of the movie, we see Rhodes making a speech to an audience of two.  One is one of his lackies, who is operating (2) a machine that plays recorded cheers and applause and laughter.

When the film was made in 1957, such a machine did not exist.  But it does now.  So someone please find one and give it to the president.  As Rhodes spun out of control, the applause got louder and louder.

There are plenty of clips from the movie online. But not this one. If we could get one of those machines to Washington, we’d probably be better off because trump would get all the adulation he needs and leave the rest of us alone.

The machine is only one aspect of the way this 1950s Paddy Chayefsky film based on a 1940s short story by Budd Schulberg is prophetic.

That populist rhetoric doesn’t travel well once the populist is shown to be a scam artist.  And a scam artist is who we have in the White House.

It doesn’t really matter whether he has ties to Russian and other mobsters.  What matters is what he is and what he does or doesn’t do.

At this writing, there’s only one congressman who has seen the documents underlying that iffy Nunes memo questioning the FBI Russia investigation.  That congressman is Trey Gowdy (R-SC.) Gowdy Doody, as Joe Galloway calls him announced he won’t seek re-election so he can become active in “law enforcement.” For a while everyone thought he’d be nominated for a federal judgeship.  

But Doody says he doesn’t want that… he wants to be a prosecutor.  

This may be a case of obstruction of bribery.

So the real crime with the trumpettes is nothing that’s on the books.

And please don’t come back with “well, Hillary did this…” or “Obama did that.” These are false equivalents. It’s not “all those bums,” Republicans and Democrats alike. The democrats certainly have their flaws, but well organized and well financed are not two of them.

And it isn’t even real Republicans, such as there are left of them. It’s the Crazy Caucus. Maybe we’ll all get sane. Or better yet, maybe we’ll stop allowing ourselves to be led by the crazies.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“I had the gun in my backpack… it fell and the gun went off.” -- unidentified 12 year old girl in a Los Angeles classroom whose gun shot a 15 year old in the head, another in the wrist. Police have ruled it an accident but cuffed the girl who will be charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm on school grounds.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody

© WJR 2018

1899 The US Ambassador to the United States

Okay, big government lovers, here’s a suggestion for a new addition.  We need to establish diplomatic relations with the United States of America.  It’s not enough to live here.  Or to be a citizen here.  We need full diplomatic relations.

So let’s build a nice embassy on a quiet, dignified street in, say, Georgetown and appoint someone with some gravitas to represent our interests to this budding third world nation.

We could call the building something truly stately, oh… like the trump Tower South. Make it bigger than those of lesser countries like Britain and Germany.  And we could do what US embassies all around the world have done since the dawn of electrification:  spy on everyone else. Including ourselves.

Think of the parties we could throw. Think of the enormous influence a US Ambassador to the US could have in our capital, Cairo on the Potomac.

If nothing more, we could serve as an example to the witches and warlocks in the White House.  Nah. Forget that part.  The White House witches and warlocks have shown they can’t learn new tricks. Like diplomacy.  Or rolling over. Or playing dead. Or saying much beyond “Polly Wanna Cracker.”

Since prior experience is a foreign concept to the newly installed ambassadors from here to -- wherever, let’s find a nice sensible person with no known credentials in international relations but who meets the trump administration standard of being a stable genius with an excellent memory and presidential grade sartorial elegance.

Someone like Mark Zuckerberg.  Or Cee Lo Green. The US ambassador to the US should look humble as befits our emerging status as The New Bangladesh. Or flashy as befits our status as the Next Duchy of Fenwick.

There’s a problem here.  What happens if this country feels the need to recall its ambassador to itself?

SHRAPNEL:

--The State of the Union speech is over. But who was that guy who delivered it, someone who sounded almost human?  It certainly wasn’t the fella we sort of elected, and it probably will go down in history as one of the longest series of lies and tall tales ever told.

--There are two kinds of State of the Union speeches, the long detailed lecture ala Clinton and the attempted heart tugging, ala Reagan and Kennedy. Last night’s was an attempt at the latter.  With a little war monging and racism thrown in.

--Amazon, JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway are going into the health insurance business.  That’ll mean a change in the way you’re billed.  Pay with your Chase check, then stick it in the Amazon drone that comes to your door, collects and then sends it to the nearest Burlington Northern station where it’ll be rail-delivered to an accounting center in South Dakota.

GRAPESHOT:

-This year’s big Grammy winner, Bruno Mars, isn’t a real person… he’s a computer animation based on a combination of Michael Jackson, Gerald McBoingboing and Jennifer Hudson.

-Google AdSense has rejected this URL as an advertising venue which means that any ads you see here still are parody.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2018

1898 Battle of the Browsers

It’s the war between Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.  And no one fights clean because both warring nations can grab hold of your computer and do things to it that mere customers can’t control.

The Windows 10 operating system comes with Edge.  The latest version of Google Chrome is easy to download, and when you do, it imports all the stuff you’ve used for years on all kinds of other devices.

When you turn on the Win10 Computer, the first thing you see is a full screen ad for Edge. “X” it out and it’ll be back before you can say “Intel Inside.” “Hey, we’re here for you. We’re fast. We don’t have the shortcomings of Windows Explorer. We’re really cool.  We have “Bing,” which is the Sprint Network of search engines in that it puts on a great show but the call drops.

Chrome takes the high road. “Hey, we’re here for you like we always have been.  And you get a whole lot of free services with us that you don’t get from… from… you-know-who which charges you for the same functions.”

Ah for the good old days, where Bill Gates would sit around at college-style bull sessions at Microsoft and tell his frat brothers to “cut off the air supply” of competitors. At least he was honest about it.

It’s tough to think of Gates as anything but the one man charity he’s become, after fellow bazillionaire Warren Buffett shamed him into unlocking the vault.  But history is history.

The Google guys are much sneakier.  They hide behind that northern California Flowers in Your Hair persona while secretly working behind the scenes to build what they doubtless think of as a stealth monopoly.

In truth, no home or business tech outfit can do anything widespread without Google, Microsoft or Apple.  So why, then, are they fighting over crummy little-guy solo practitioners?  No answer to be found here. But think about some of the hobbled former giants. Anyone remember Netscape? Don’t you miss those little discs that AOL used to give away by the millions?  When was the last time you used Alta Vista to conduct a search for anything?

If you want office software you have three basic choices: MS Office, Google Drive and Open Office.  As of now, there’s no Open Office (which is free) for use on a Google Chromebook. And if you want MS Word for Chrome, it’ll cost you $100 a year in subscription fees.  These things are no accidents.

When was the last time you used WordPerfect or WordStar? These older programs either are gone or shrunken to the point they’ve become family farms.

But there’s a history lesson worth recalling.  There was a time long ago that General Motors sold 60% of the new cars manufactured in this country.  Technically, that violated the spirit if not the letter of the antitrust law.  But no one balked because General Motors was forever. Until it wasn’t.

So while these big three companies have something of an oligopoly and continue waging war on small almost microscopic battlefields, somewhere out there, there’s a kid in a dorm room who is likely to be working on something that will make her the next Japan Inc.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
All sponsored content on this page is parody.
© WJR 2018

1897 I Don't Know

1897 I Don’t Know

We have lost the ability to say “I don’t know.”  In an era when there’s the entire world’s accumulated knowledge, wisdom, history and foolishness is available in an electronic device that weighs less than a deck of cards, we are assumed able to look up anything and therefore to be able to answer any and every question.

“I don’t know” has become an admission of guilt. Or ignorance or ineptness or laziness.  Quick, now: what is the cubic root of 17? You don’t know, right?  The answer is a little over 2.57.  It took eight seconds to look that up.  It’s not the kind of question you’re apt to be asked unless you’re a table waiter at a restaurant and asks me “Do you have any questions?”

Even here in a college town with math majors abounding, people don’t know this and there’s really no reason to.  But to say “I don’t know” is a mark of inferiority -- at least in the minds of many of us.’’

The questions get dodgier. “Why doesn’t the guy across the street take in his garbage cans after the trash is collected?”  I don’t know the guy. If I did, I probably never would think to ask him.  But somehow, I’m expected to know. And so are you.

Put that question into a search engine and you will not get a direct answer. If Google doesn’t know, no one does, right?

Of course, you can look most stuff up.  When were the Peloponnesian Wars? Who fought? Who won?  To this you can whip out your iPhone and say “I’m not sure, but I’ll look it up.”  That’s usually the start of an actual answer.

But when you ask cousin Bert why he hasn’t called after you sent him that nice birthday present, he’ll hem and haw and make excuses.  But the honest answer probably is “I don’t know.”

There is no shame in not knowing.  At least not that I know of.

SHRAPNEL:

--Radio Story: I was doing the business news on “Rambling with Gambling,” the forever-running morning show on WOR in 1990 or 91. Off air, John A. Gambling (the one of three Johns Gambling with actual talent) said he was going to ask me such and such a question during the segment and if I didn’t know the answer I should say “I don’t know.”  I was shocked.

--trump ordered Mueller’s firing last summer but didn’t follow through when White House Counsel Donald McGahn threatened to quit, reports the New York Times. McGahn said it would have had a “disastrous effect on the presidency. He was right and trump backed down, at least temporarily.

--Give it a rest, John Kerry.  The former senator and secretary of state says he’s thinking about another run at the presidency. Nah, John, give someone younger and less haughty a chance.

--A new computer brings new tsuris to the Wessays (™) Secret Mountain Laboratory. Switching over never is as easy as it should be. But the real sticking point at this time required a birth date and it wouldn’t go backward from 4/28/2018, which it also helpfully pointed out hasn’t yet happened.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“I have just signed your death warrant.” -- Judge Josephine Aquilina in Lansing, Michigan, sentencing child molesting team doctor Larry Nassar to as long as 175 years in jail for molesting around 150 young gymnasts.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

© WJR 2018