Farewell the Gutenberg Galaxy; hello, the Zuckerberg Zoo...

http://splash247.com/farewell-gutenberg-galaxy-hello-zuckerberg-zoo/

Today the world has seen the end of two centuries of Anglo-Saxon dominance – a hundred years of Britain, from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the Battle of the Somme, and a hundred years of the United States, ending today, with the election as president of the US of a fascist ‘television personality’ married to a nude model.

‘Decadence’ is the term that we need, here – decadence on a scale not seen in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire – which fell in much the same way, for much the same reasons.

Chinese readers will recall the story of Zhou Enlai meeting Nikita Khrushchev; Khrushchev said to Zhou, “You are the son of an aristocrat, but I am the son of a peasant!”
“Yes”, replied Zhou, “And we both betrayed our class!”

We have now seen a hat trick of ‘democratic’ events in which men who come from the elite, and who have betrayed their class – Roderigo Duterte, in the Philippines, on May 9, was the straw in the wind, he was followed by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the UK, on June 23, and today by Donald Trump in the US, and they have, with the use of the internet social media, most especially Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, successfully suckered the soggy mass of lazy, ill-educated, ill-read and ill-informed proles, and a good supply of what V.I. Lenin called “useful idiots”, in three nations, into putting them into power, by telling lies and by promising the proles what they want.

What the proles want is ‘good jobs’ but with the ability to buy the stuff they buy now at cheap prices, because it is made by under paid, hardworking, men and women in other countries who have ‘stolen their jobs’, and they want ‘no foreigners’. They can’t have this, of course, but no matter, they don’t read, they just look at ‘memes’, and the damage is done.

The common factor is the ‘seeding’ of the ever-so friendly Facebook, full of pictures of kittens and food and grandchildren, with its oh-so clever algorithms to deliver onto your screen the very things that you want to see, be they things you might want to buy or people who think like you, with lies and deceit – really wicked, evil, lies and deceit – and the poisoning of minds against the ‘mainstream media’, who actually – can you believe this – who actually think that facts matter, and who really do employ people to check them, because they are out dated enough to think that their advertising revenues depend on their reputation and that their reputation depends on them telling the truth.

How very Gutenberg of them! How very ‘Broadcast!’ Zuckerberg has destroyed all that, and as recently as three days ago he was still protesting that his empire is “…a tech company, not a media company!”

So, what does the end of the Anglo-Saxon World Order mean for shipping?

First, obviously, world trade follows the USA, and indeed silly little England, into a man-made recession, next year. Maersk Line have already taken a hit, and if Maersk catches a cold, everyone else in this business gets pneumonia.

Next, the dollar becomes – and will the mighty Disney Corporation please understand that I allude here to their pre-WW2 merchandising – Mickey Mouse Money. The Fed won’t raise that interest rate – it will be printing dollars like they are going out of fashion, because, indeed, they will be going out of fashion. We can’t use gold to pay freight with, and the Yen and the much abused Euro will benefit, but the big winner will be the Renminbi Yuan, the currency of the new global super power, the only nation wise enough to keep Zuckerberg and Co out.

Keep in mind that the adoption of the RMB Yuan as the default currency of world trade will automatically solve the problem of the Chinese debt spiral, just as it once solved, but will no longer solve, the problem of US debt. “The winner takes it all,” as a Swedish pop group sang, and the winner is the People’s Republic of China.

The upheavals consequent on this event will be enormous. As was said in 1790, when the wheel of fortune was turning the other way – and I have only changed a couple of Lord Macartney’s wise words…

“The United States of America is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom”

“The breaking-up of the power of the USA (no very improbable event) would occasion a complete subversion of the commerce, not only of Europe and North America, but a very sensible change in the other quarters of the world. The industry and the ingenuity of the Americans would be checked and enfeebled, but they would not be annihilated. Her ports would no longer be protected by her Navy; they would be attempted by all the adventurers of all trading nations, who would search every channel, creek, and cranny of Europe and America for a market, and for some time be the cause of much rivalry and disorder. Nevertheless, as China, from the weight of her riches and the genius and spirits of her people, is become the first political, marine, and commercial Power on the globe, it is reasonable to think that she would prove the greatest gainer by such a revolution as I have alluded to, and rise superior over every competitor.”

In the course of the “rivalry and disorder”, there will be fortunes to be made, amidst the general collapse. And our industry is very good at finding those. The really good news is that there will be such a shortage of investment capital that shipping returns will rise as investment becomes scarcer.

Good luck!

Please tell me that you wrote this article whilst high as a kite on mind-altering recreational substances washed down with liberal amounts of Don Papa.

Has it finally hit home that sneering, smug elitist liberal luvvies do not have a divine right to rule?

I wrote it between four and six o'clock in the morning, in response to a phone call from my editor, before spending three hours in a car driving to work. Not all of us are retired.

Are you honestly expecting Trump to "get the Mexicans to pay for a wall", deport eleven million people, bring back all those jobs in manufacturing whilst at the same time allowing the people in those high paid manufacturing jobs to carry on buying stuff at the prices they pay now, "bomb the hell" out of ISIS, and "make America great again".

Or do you think that those who hold the common people in such contempt that they are happy to lie to them have a divine right to rule?

Enquiring minds would like to know.

Oh, silly question. Here's my answer:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...crown-prosecutors-cps-complaint-a7403161.html

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

It's the "serfs" who are going to suffer, be they the call centre workers being laid off in the Philippines or Americans who think they can have the jobs that were "stolen from them" by foreigners who work harder for less whilst at the same time getting paid enough to buy the same cheap products and services - made overseas - that they are getting now.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-donald-trump

Andrew, you are in danger of being mistaken for an arch-liberal who's in denial of the reality that liberalism is no longer fashionable or desirable.

Mark I am not much interested in fashion. I am more concerned with what is right.

I watched Michael Moore on the TV last week. I watched him tell blatant lies saying that the UK had made a mistake voting Brexit and said there was a Poll were 4 million people voted realising that mistake. I tweeted him telling it was no mistake just sore losers who couldn't accept the majority. He didn't respond

Ever considered the possibility that what you believe to be right may in fact be wrong?

Perhaps you would like to identify the"lies" that you allude to?

Trump voters will not like what happens next
Garrison Keilor

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers, people who make their own pasta, opera goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.

Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next.

To all the patronizing B.S. we’ve read about Trump expressing the white working -class’s displacement and loss of the American Dream, I say, “Feh!” — go put your head under cold water. Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the land where the waitress’ kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.

We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long , brisk walk and smell the roses.

I like Republicans. I used to spend Sunday afternoons with a bunch of them, drinking Scotch and soda and trying to care about NFL football. It was fun. I tried to think like them. (Life is what you make it. People are people. When the going gets tough, tough noogies.) But I came back to liberal elitism.

Don’t be cruel. Elvis said it, and it’s true. We all experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us, to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.

Back to real life. I went up to my home town the other day and ran into my gym teacher, Stan Nelson, looking good at 96. He commanded a landing craft at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and never said a word about it back then, just made us do chin-ups whether we wanted to or not. I saw my biology teacher Lyle Bradley, a Marine pilot in the Korean War, still going bird-watching in his 90s. I was not a good student then, but I am studying both of them now. They have seen it all and are still optimistic. The past year of politics has taught us absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. The future is scary. Let the uneducated have their day. I am now going to pay more attention to teachers.

Indeed you are!

That'd be just about every prediction put out by the Remain side!

What's wrong with nude models ?

The one I used to date had 'A' - Levels.