Washington Post-Mortem

The Washington Post is gone.  What's left is merely a penny-ledger version of its former self.

The once-proud newspaper cut 30 percent of its staff, eliminating its book-review section when it became apparent that people in Washington, D.C. don't read (it's never been what you would call a literary town), and, in an admission that its major-league teams suck, eliminating the sports pages.  The Post tried to put the best face on the fileting of the staff.

"If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape," Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor said. "And after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles."

Yeah.  Right.

Jeff Bezos (above), who famously brought the Post in 2016 and hoped to make it a showcase for how a newspaper would and could thrive in the digital age, but given how artificial intelligence has rendered his original plans useless and given also how the media landscape is becoming ever more fragmented as more people move toward independent media, it's clear that saving the only prestigious newspaper in the nation's capital (the far-right Washington Times is run by the Moonies) was never a priority for Bezos, who demonstrated his loss of interest in it when he refused to let the paper endorse Kamala Harris for President in October 2024 and turned his attention to Blue Origin and other endeavors in the hopes of keeping lucrative contracts with the government under Trump. 

Democracy hasn't yet died in darkness, but the Post died in broad daylight.  It has lost so many employees as a result of these cuts, it will have to strive for years just to reach the quality of an exurban Gannett newspaper.

Maybe letting billionaires whose interest in journalism wanes when their priorities and interests change buy media outlets wasn't such a good idea.

I'm going to have to rethink my association with Amazon now.  I've been a Prime member for a couple of years, ordering only items that I need when I need them, but when I don't need anything, I still pay for a service that guarantees overnight delivery that I'm not using.  Why should I line Bezos' pockets even more?

Oh, that's right . . . because more often than not, when I do need an item, I can't find the item I need anywhere else! 

Compact discs?  I don't have much room for more, and I think I'll start collecting albums on a flash drive from now on.  

It's Only a Movie

At a time when ICE is murdering people in the streets of Minneapolis and threatening to take their road show elsewhere, Donald Trump is promoting the allegedly long-awaited documentary on his wife.

Melania Trump is particularly in a bad mood because of what is happening in Minneapolis, and not because two people have been brutally murdered.  She's upset because all of the brouhaha there is overshadowing to the premiere of her documentary this week.

I've seen other examples of heartless callousness before, but this takes the kremšnita.

Melania, it must be remembered, is as much a grifter as her husband is.  And like Donald, she only cares about herself and has only one purpose, to make as much money as she can before she dies.  The only reason this documentary exists is because Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, looking to mend fences with her husband, offered $40 million to produce such a film.  In exchange, Bezos expected from Trump - and got - relief from Trump's threats to raise postal rates that would affect Amazon's bottom line, and - more important to Bezos - a chance to get some really lucrative contracts (*cough cough*, Blue Origin, *cough cough*).  Bezos ended up spending 75 million simoleons on the movie, with the additional $35 million for marketing.

Now the movie is premiering nationwide tomorrow, and it's already a flop.  Tickets for advance sales have sold so poorly, the theaters can't even give them away.   People are posting on social media things they'd rather do than watch Melania, such as prepare for a colonoscopy, have their wisdom teeth taken out, or watch the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie twice (and I've already done all three!).  Melania is likely to be the be the lowest-grossing movie of all time, grossing even less money than Zyzzyx Road, a 2006 thriller that only took in thirty dollars in a very limited theatrical release.  But then, it starred Katherine Heigl. 

Melania, by all accounts, is likely to win a Razzie award for playing herself.  As for Jeff Bezos, he got what he wanted, and the $75 million he spent to get influence Trump is just pocket change for a multibillionaire like him.   In the meantime, following a private screening at White House this past Sunday, Melania has its world premiere tonight at the Trump-Kennedy Center.  A slew of D-list celebrities are attending, and this premiere is likely to have all of the glamour of a home movie being shown in the family den, but who cares when all that mattered is to provide an outlet for lower-middle-class entertainment for the undereducated to appreciate?  That, of course, is nothing new for the Trump-Kennedy Center, which was a second-rate showbiz venue long before Trump added his name to it.

All that notwithstanding, Melania is sure to close in the theaters faster than a storm window in the current brutal cold snap that is currently gripping the Northeastern states (which still haven't seceded like I'd hoped).

The Ballad of (YUCK!) Jeff and Lauren

So big bad billionaire Jeff Bezos finally married his bimbo babe . . .  just before the big bosses of the Senate gave him a tax cut as a wedding present!

And he got married in Venice, a city most Americans will die without ever seeing.  Some of them may die after losing medical care to pay for Jeff Bozo's tax cut!

I think this cartoon sums it up, but then I'm biased.  I drew it. 

All Spaced Out

In my blog post on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos from this past January, I wrote that Bezos has capitulated to Trump to prevent Trump from getting postal rates on packages raised, which would be a detriment to Amazon.  I had completely forgotten that, while Musk has own own outer-space pursuits and has contracts with the government in relation to that endeavor, so does Jeff Bezos.  I forgot about Bezos' own space-exploration company, Blue Origin.  

Of course,  Bezos wants to keep his government contracts for his space-exploration endeavors as well, in this time where even the exploration of space and the expansion of human knowledge of space have been privatized, so of course that ties in with capitulating to Trump.  Bezos wants to be a player in this lucrative and relatively new business as much as Musk does.  And in order to promote his own interests, Bezos has to pull an egregiously dumb publicity stunt involving an all-female "space" crew to promote the role of women in space exploration even as Trump is purging references to female astronauts and going after programs in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designed to foster female astronauts in an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Here's what went down - or, should I say, up.  Bezos selected a six-woman crew to fly into the outer atmosphere of the earth for roughly ten minutes in a capsule and then come back down.  The "flight" was yesterday.  The women on board included only one real astronaut - Aisha Bowe, a former aerospace engineer for NASA.  The other crew members included, among others, TV newswoman Gayle King and former TV entertainment reporter Lauren Sánchez, who is better known these days as Jeff Bezos' fiancée.

Oh, and pop singer Katy Perry.

WHAT?????????????????????  

Katy Perry is no one's idea of a great singer.  She's a lightweight performer who's known for cottony songs and a superficial image.  Her career owes her existence to the influence of a certain single-named dance diva from Michigan who did more damage to popular music than cocaine.  Perry is, in a word, an airhead.  And her utter cluelessness in describing her "mission"  was obvious.

"It's about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging," said Perry, who somehow failed to bring up Trump's attack on women in NASA. "And it's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it . . ..  This is all for the benefit of Earth."

And just how is this more significant than Sally Ride becoming in 1983 the first American woman in space, who has been followed by dozens of American female astronauts?

"Space is going to finally be glam," added Perry, who, along with her traveling companions, discussed having their hair and makeup done for the "flight" with that noted science and aviation magazine, Elle. "If I could take glam up with me," Perry added, "I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

She's already done that on her own.

And to think Hillary Clinton made her a leading surrogate for her 2016 presidential campaign.  No wonder she lost.

This wasn't a scientific mission to see how women could fare in space or anything like that.  This was a publicity stunt for Bezos, for Sánchez, and for Gayle King,  whose participation in the stunt was covered by her employer, CBS.  King violated the cardinal rule of journalism.  She went beyond covering the story to being the story.  

But then, given that she moonlighted for CNN by hosting a talk show with Charles Barkley that was meant to be "centered around the news stories and cultural moments that Gayle and Charles are most interested in," that was likely to be expected.

Bezos remains the main villain in this sorry escapade of ego and superficiality in what was clearly a "news" story meant to be entertainment.  But Perry,  Sánchez and King shouldn't get off scot-free for allowing the trivialization of women in space.  As Maggie Harrison Dupré wrote in Futurism, there was "an insidious hollowness to the sweeping characterization of the flight as a great achievement for women that's somehow paving roads for aspiring future space travelers . . . that's deeply, and cynically, at odds with the way that new federal mandates about diversity policies are actively working to erase women's legacy in American space exploration."

I once foolishly included Katy Perry on my soon-to-be-terminated blog "Pictures of Beautiful Women" (POBW), back when I wasn't aware of what a joke she was, but I took her down a couple of weeks ago, as I no longer wanted her included on my blog in its final weeks of operation (I'm shutting it down on May 31).  But I also added Gayle King to my blog.  I now have to remove her as well.

The Unholy Trinity

Jeff Bezos found a niche market in online retailing when he started Amazon to make it easier for people wishing to buy certain books to go to his site and he would send the book to a customer in a few days, as opposed to the long wait one might encounter in ordering a particular title at Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore.   Then he began offering records and videos for sale, followed by everything else.  Today you can get anything you want or need at Amazon if your local store doesn't have what you're looking for - and usually doesn't.  He used his riches to buy the esteemed Washington Post to put the paper on a sound footing.  People who found that obscure classic novel their library systems don't have, that album from a British classic-rock band that never made it in America, or that compact Windows 11 laptop that the local Best Buy can't be bothered to stock owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff Bezos.

Elon Musk invested in a startup electric-car company in California called Tesla and got to work expanding its offerings from a single roadster to sedans and crossovers.  In doing so, he not only popularized electric vehicles as the effects of climate change caused in part by internal-combustion-engine vehicles became more apparent, he made Tesla the first successful American automaker to be started since Walter Chrysler founded his namesake company (now part of the Franco-Italian conglomerate Stellantis) in 1925 and gave the Big Three its first domestic competition since American Motors bit the dust in 1987.  Musk reopened the old GM-Toyota factory in Fremont, California to make his cars, giving people in the area jobs.  Teslas became legendary for their stellar performance - yours truly can attest to this, having test-driven one in 2015.  He went on to produce space rockets at his company SpaceX, reigniting intertest in space exploration, even as Tesla inspired GM, Ford, and, after the diesel-emissions scandal, Volkswagen to enter the EV market, as well as encouraging new EV startups like Lucid and Rivian.  People with Teslas owe a debt of gratitude to Elon Musk.

Mark Zuckerberg started a Web site where Harvard students could connect with each other online when they couldn't do so in person.  Eventually, the network spread to other colleges and universities, and then the rest of the world.  Facebook then became a method for relatives and longtime friends separated by moves to different cities and towns to connect with each other again after years apart, and it allowed people to make new friends online that they wouldn't have otherwise made.  People who reconnected with their high school buddies or college chums, Cousin Jim, Uncle Fred and Aunt Julie and people who connected with new friends - including those of us who established connections with fashion models of the 1980s that we had severe crushes on back in high school - owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet, these three men are the worst people on the planet after Donald Trump.

The products and services Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg provided to the world earned them fortunes measured in billions of dollars, but instead of using their billions to make the world in general and America in particular a better place, they've used it to stifle competition, crush small businesses, and impose their underhanded business practices on the people of the world against their will so they, unsatisfied with the billions they've made, can make billions and billions of dollars more.  Bezos has put countless booksellers out of business, and if you're still old-school and listen to CDs without even considering streaming, Amazon is practically the only place to go for them.  Musk, the Henry Ford of the twenty-first century (not a compliment; Henry Ford was a horrible person too!), bought Twitter and renamed it X, which was not a sound business decision and left people scratching their heads until it became apparent that Musk bought it to have a platform to broadcast his racist, plutocratic and conspiratorial views and attracted like-minded people to join in on the bashing and slashing.  Zuckerberg built a social-media empire, Meta, by buying platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to ensure that people have fewer real choices in social-media sites, and he has encouraged users to hurl insults and bitter diatribes against each other to keep them on his site long enough to keep his business going and growing at the expense of civility.  And the algorithms he uses ensure that you could be hooked on scrolling through Facebook or his other platforms until you lose track of time and never consider once the negative impact of all of that nasty back-and-forth with people you hardly even know.

This trio's tech-related business activities and their influence in media in general have led them to make Donald Trump their best friend.  Bezos wants to expand Amazon, but with reporters at his paper giving Trump agita with their investigative stories about him, he can't have them continuing their exposés or let the editorial desk endorse any of his political opponents, else Trump will raise postal rates on the sorts of packages Amazon sends out from its fulfillment centers.  Now Bezos can rest easy by stifling his reporters at the Washington Post without Trump having to do it for him.  Musk, whose money helped elect Trump to another term, now has the upper hand in the EV market with Trump having ended the EV mandate, and he's secured his lucrative government contracts.  And by eliminating fact-checking at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg is allowing pro-Trump propaganda and conspiracy theories.  And by rigging the algorithms on Meta platforms, Zuckerberg has insured that no one who knows the truth can call out factually erroneous posts . . . because people who care about the truth will never see them.

I can only close with the famous quote from Matthew 12:26: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?"    

The United States of Amazonia

The late, great comedian Robin Williams once explained why boycotts don't work.  He explained how he and some of his friends wanted to boycott products made in China to protest Chinese abuses of human rights, but they ran into, shall we say, a great wall.  "Damn!  They make everything!" 

Which is why, as much as I'd like to, I can't boycott Amazon, the consumer-product mail-order company founded and run by Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013.  When Bezos (above) refused to allow his paper's editorial staff publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris for President to avoid pissing off Donald Trump, who met with executives from Bezos's space-exploration company over possible federal contracts for the firm, all hell broke loose. Post Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned, and several editors and columnists for the Post protested vehemently.  (At the same time, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy owner of the Los Angeles Times - the largest newspaper in Kamala Harris' home state - refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris, causing Los Angeles Times editor Mariel Garza to resign.)  And not only have many of the Washington Post's customers - 200,000, at last count - cancelled their subscriptions, many people have cancelled their Amazon Prime memberships and stopped buying products from Amazon and are asking others to do the same.  

Sorry, that's a non-starter for me.  

I have had to buy most of the products I've bought in the past several months from Amazon.  Among them are a mantel clock, a saucepan, a few car-care products, and the very laptop I wrote this blog post on.  I have found that, in many cases, finding the exact item I want in the stores is next to impossible.  Oh, I might find the right car polish or tire dressing I want in the local auto-parts store, but more often than not, I have to go to Amazon for what I want or need.  

And then there are books and records.   I bought a book about the history of the Volkswagen Golf through Amazon, a book published in Britain that cannot be found at the nearest Barnes & Noble.  And records - specifically, compact discs?  Sure I'd be happy to by my CDs at a record store - if I can find one.  You almost have to go to the ends of the earth to find a record store these days . . . Amazon has made them a little hard to find! 

Jeff Bezos is a genius - an almost evil genius.  He created a shopping system in which you're more likely to find the product you want or need through his company than in a mom-and-pop store, a big-box store like Wal-Mart or Target, or even a chain store at the mall.  And by the way, next time you go to your local mall, you may notice that that record store you used to browse in back in the 1980s is gone.  You might be able to find the album you're looking for at a locally owned record store - one of the benefits of Amazon monopolizing CD sales is that such record stores that survived Sam Goody and Record World are able to stay in business - but the the time and money you spend just to get there might not be worth it.

When you dominate the consumer-retail business so thoroughly that your business is always someone's best bet to get the product they want or need, you're more than powerful.  You're omnipotent.  So it's ironic that Jeff Bezos can't stand up to Trump.