All galleries can be seen through the ‘Gallery’ link in the header, or click here (especially if you’re on a mobile device). I append to this entry through the month.
Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we were in, never fooled us.
I wonât name them as Iâve no wish to add to their notoriety, but hereâs the real kicker: both had the means to do well legitimately if they each followed through honestly.
The first one was clever enough to rope in people from very different parts, essentially setting up a publishing operation. But it was a swindle, and people were left in debt and jobless.
However, if it had been legit, it would have actually done quite well, and if the con artistâs aim was money, then he would have made some, over a long period, which would have sustained him and his lifestyle.
The second was not clever but came to a business partner of mine with a proposal to become a shareholder. We heard him out, he proposed an amount, and we drafted a cast-iron contract that could see him get a return on his investment, and protect the original principal. The money never came, of course, and we werenât going to alter the share register without it. He might have hoped that we would.
Again, he would have got something from it. Maybe not as good a return as property but better than the bank.
The first is now serving time at Her Majestyâs pleasure after things caught up with him and he was extradited to where he had executed an earlier con; the second, after having had his face in the Sunday StarâTimes, was last heard from in Australia where he conned his own relatives. He’s wanted by the police here.
I donât know where the gratification is here. And rationally, leaving honesty and morals aside (as they do), wouldnât it be better making money regularly than swindling for a quick fix that nets you less? Is it down to laziness, making them less desirous to follow through?
On the first case, I did have the occasion to speak to one lawyer pursuing him. I asked him about my case, since my financial loss was relatively small compared to the others taken in (namely a FedEx bill that a friend of mine helped me get a decent discount on because of her job). Whereâs the con? I was told that it might not have been apparent as the con artistâs MO was to draw different strands, sometimes having them result in something, and sometimes not.
Whatever the technique, it failed him anyway.
And what a waste of all that energy to create something that not only looked legit (as in the TV series Hustle) but could have functioned legitimately with so many good people involved.
That did make the 2010s rather better than the 2000s when the shady characters included a pĂŠdophile (who, to my knowledge, is also doing time), a sociopath, a forger, and a US fashion label that conned a big shipmentâs payment out of us. I doubt Iâd be famous enough to warrant a biography but they would make interesting stories!
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
Iâm surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its two syllables.
The words on the headline included the work wank, which was even starred there (w*nk) for the really sensitive. I realize this is an American website but I didnât even think that was a word they used. For most of us in the Anglosphere, itâs nowhere near offensive. Itâs not uncommon to call someone a wanker and the word is never bleeped on televisionâitâs that throwaway. I learned of the word wank when I was 11, and wanker I heard before that. Kids would probably know of it even younger now. A younger reader would not link it to anything sexual and if they did, theyâre a dirty little kid. (Same with bugger, which infamously even appeared on television commercials for Toyota here, and I know in Australia, too.)
The second word that appeared was cock, a colloquialism for penis, but also it has other meanings. Letâs not get into those: itâs clear the context suggested penisâin the same way an American might call someone a dick, I suppose. Again, hardly offensive, never bleeped, and, I donât know about the US, but here itâs the word that children might learn to refer to male genitalia.
But, hereâs the real kicker: the image was from the front page of a national newspaper. Not the top shelf wrapped in a brown paper bag or plastic at a convenience store.
Looking at the classifications, M is for adults-only stuff, with âstrong suggestive or violent language.â O was already suggested by NewTumbl staff as suitable for politics, including COVID-19 posts (this qualified), and the language by any standard was mild (feel free to come and give your reasoning if you were the mod and you want to defend your decision).
So Iâve had a post removed for a word that an 11-year-old uses (remember, O is for âolder teensâ) and another word that children use, and both appeared on the front page of a national newspaper.
I have used these words on a website run from a country that thinks itâs OK to show people getting blown away in violent movies and cop shows (oh, sorry, âpolice proceduralsâ), where guns are commonplace, but words are really, really dangerous. Thought you guys had a First Amendment to your Constitution.
The conclusion I am forced to draw is that the post was removed because, like Facebook, there is a right-wing bias shown by a moderator who does not like a conservative government criticized here. Good luck, because Iâll continue to criticize a bunch of dickheads that even my right-leaning, pro-market, lifelong-Tory friends in Britain dislike. If this post is classified M then I will have to conclude that the reason is also political, because thereâs not a single word here that any right-thinking user of English would deem âstrong suggestive or violentâ.
I came here because I objected to the censorship at Tumblr, where, for instance, they hide posts referring to NewTumbl in searches. Thatâs pretty tame but enough for me to insist on free speech over silly, petty corporate decisions, the sort of games that other silly, petty corporations like Google play. I can live with NewTumblâs male nipple rule and other attempts to be non-sexist, but I also believe that if youâre moderating, you should be apolitical.
I often find myself in accord with my friend Victor Billot. His piece on the UK General Election can be found here. And yes, Britain, this is how many of us looking in see itâlike Victor I have dual nationality (indeed, my British passport is my only current one, having been a little busy to get the Kiwi one renewed).
Highlights include (and this is from a man who is no fan of the EU):
When reporters with their TV cameras went out to the streets to ask the people about their concerns, their motives, their aspirations, they recorded a dogs dinner of reverse logic and outright gibberish. BoJo had screaming rows with his girlfriend, made up policy on the go and hid in a commercial fridge. Corbyn however was seen as the weirdo. âI donât like his mannerisms,â stated one Tory convert as the hapless Labour leader made another stump speech about saving the NHS. âBritainâs most dangerous manâ shrieked a tabloid headline.
Corbyn made a honest mistake in thinking that people may have been concerned about waiting lists at hospitals. It turned out that voters are happy about queues as long as they donât have any foreigners in them, or doctors with âforeignâ looks at the end of them.
The Murdoch Press machine: predictably, business as usual.
and:
A curious aspect of the election is how the behaviour of the leaders seems to be measured by a new matrix of values. The more boorish, and arrogant, the better, in a kind of pale reflection of the troglodyte Trump in the midnight dim of his tweet bunker. BoJo, a blustering, buffoonish figure with a colourful personal life and the cocksure confidence of an Old Etonian, can be contrasted to the measured and entirely decent Corbyn with his Tube pass and allotment. Perhaps this is an inevitable side effect of the growing rage and alienation that bubbles under the surface of society, providing the gravitational pull towards the âstrong manâ who will âmake our nation great (again)â in a world of other people who arenât like us.
I shan’t spoil the last paragraph but it all builds up to that nicely.
I thought I could be archaic on a few thingsâI still use diphthongs in text in our publications (ĂŠsthetic, CĂŠsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at â/100 km and too few countries use km/â. However, even I had to cringe at Jacob Rees-Moggâs style guide as revealed by ITV. This has now been circulated to his House of Commons staff. It is not satire.
His first rule is âOrganisations are SINGULARâ. (No, this isn’t licence to write ‘Organisations is singular.’) I donât mind this as itâs one I adopt myself (admittedly inconsistently), but note the spelling of the first word. Itâs French. The correct spelling is organizations, and the switch to the French in the Anglosphere appears to have happened postwar. Go to English books that are old enough, and youâll find the z to be more commonplace. (Please donât comment that z is âAmericanâ before doing some research.)
His sixth rule is âDouble space after fullstopsâ. Now, the last word should be two words, but the rule itself has even been abandoned by the newspaper that Rees-Moggâs father edited for so many years. Most compositors in Britain abandoned large spaces at the start of the 20th century, by my reckoningâmy interpretation of the reading studies by Tinker et al is that the single space is sufficient, and web convention agrees. If we are to follow The Times in, say, 1969, we also need to insert spaces around certain other punctuation marks. If you find a copy from around that time, I can promise you it won’t be easy to read.
What is apparent to me is that the rules have been typed up, at least, by an amateur, which accounts for the poor spacing and inconsistent capitalization, and generally it shows a disregard for professional style guides (again, we return to The Times). Sometimes, the acorn does fall far from the tree.
I note that Imperial measurements are to be used again: none of this newfangled metric system nonsense. As I do some transactions in pounds sterling, I am going to refresh my memory on shillings, half-crowns and thruppenny bits in case currency decimalization is reversed. You never know, Johnson’s Britain may find the decimal system too Johnny Foreigner for its liking. ‘They cannot, and will not, change our sausage!’
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lotâI dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than I ever could. (I hope the image appears in the embed below, since I see no img tagsâit seems reliant on Javascript.) Presumably this is either the Chicago Daily News or the SunâTimes.
Someone kept an American newspaper from 50 years ago for its historic #MoonLanding coverage. This opinion piece was in it.
Facebookâs woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They donât care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you werenât looking.
And itâs nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wiredâs Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louiseâs article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isnât big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that itâs the victim. Sorry, youâre not. Youâve been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebookâs value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, âAll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weâve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookâs record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyâs promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.â
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: âFinance is broken.â Itâs not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you canât trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonestyâand millions doâwill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. Thereâs less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: Iâm here because of my kidsâtill the kids depart; Iâm here because of my friendsâtill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebookâs user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
Itâs a very simplified analysisâof course brand equity is made up of far more than trustâand doubters will point to the fact Facebookâs stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg wonât be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so theyâre not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isnât the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.