Month: August 2018

Greetings photography enthusiasts. After about five weeks, this series is back. It’s Friday, and time for a new (almost) monthly foto flog. This is one of some clouds after a recent storm passed.

Please note that this is a reboot of a series that went to seed a few years ago. I know that there are some photo hobbyists like me who post here already. As always, I am hoping to incite a bit more “community behavior” in our community blog. AndiF and BobX used to curate the old foto flog. Others contributed quite regularly. Folks like Hurria, JimF, KNUCKLEHEAD, dada, olivia, ask, tampopo, Man Eegee, and a whole host of others posted photos at one time or another. I am sure I have missed someone in that list.

I don’t use anything especially fancy. Right now my Samsung Galaxy s6 keeps humming along well enough, and it continues to serve me well for most general photography purposes. Unless that phone goes bad, I plan on keeping it for at least the next year or so. I may switch over to the Google Pixel, depending on how one of my younger relatives likes his. Probably going to proceed as planned with a Galaxy S9 sometime in the next year.

Some of our regulars have actual professional equipment, and before Photobucket turned into such a drag, we were graced by some absolutely stunning landscape shots, close-ups of flowers and insects, and some abstract photography. I’ve often marveled at the creativity of the folks who have meandered in and out of this community over the years. I use flickr to host my photos for the time being. I have tried out imgur as well. So far, so good.

Consider this series as a homage to its predecessor, and dedicated to the spirit of its ancestors. Enjoy.

In Part 2 of Sears, a tale of the retail apocalypse at Booman Tribune, I wrote “As Sears closes more stores, expect to see more scenes like this.  When that happens, I’ll post a third part to this mini-series.”  Last Thursday, Sears Holdings did just that, as Wochit Business reported in Sears Closes 46 Store Locations.

Business Insider reports, “Sears is closing even more stores. The department-store chain was once the largest retailer in the United States but has cut its store count in half in the last five years.” Forty-six of it’s [sic] store locations are set to close in the next year. They include 13 Kmart stores and 33 Sears stores. Their closing sales are starting on August 30th, and after these next 46 locations close that brings up the total number of their locations that have closed to almost 300. The company made this announcement, “We continue to evaluate our network of stores, which is a critical component to our integrated retail transformation, and will make further adjustments as needed.”

The map above shows one of the locations in this latest wave is in Jackson, Michigan, which is in a mall where I shopped when I I lived out in the country.  I found an MLive story about the closing, but no video.  The article mentioned that it was the only Michigan location closing announced last week, but noted that stores in “Flint, Traverse City, Dearborn, Troy, and Sterling Heights” were already in the process of shutting down.  Troy?  That wasn’t on the list of outlets I referenced in Part 1 of Sears, a tale of the retail apocalypse.  It turns out that it was announced in July, as WDIV/Click on Detroit reported in Sears closing at Oakland Mall location in Troy.

The Sears at the Oakland Mall in Troy will be closing.

My wife and I have shopped at that Sears, although we prefer the Macy’s there.  Just the same, this is the first sign that the Oakland Mall, which I thought was getting a little long in the tooth when we went there, is starting to die.  It will take a while for it to close like Northland Mall, but unless it gets a replacement anchor, the process has officially started.  That hurts, although my wife and I have a Sears just a bit closer at Twelve Oaks Mall.  I don’t think that one will close until the entire chain goes under, which should happen next year, as Twelve Oaks Mall is still thriving.  When that happens, it will hurt.

I conclude today’s episode of the ongoing story of the Retail Apocalypse with USA Today explaining the emotional impact of retail chains declining and closing in Why seeing Sears stores close hurts hearts.

With Sears closing stores amid a mountain of debt, the end may be drawing near for the iconic American retailer, and many of us aren’t ready.

I’ve been mourning ever since I posted Vox on America’s dying malls as failed third spaces in April at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.

Heart of the Rockies commented on Booman’s most recent Casual Observation post:

Everyone I know is dealing with burn out.

I am active in a local group working to register and inform voters and GOTV.  We are all struggling and trying to prop each other up until we get through this election season.

Read on.

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Heart…

That is precisely the thing that I have been seeing and reporting upon regarding my travels through PA/NY/NJ TrumpLand over the last several months.

Burnout!!!

Anxiety burnout.

And…this is exactly Trump’s winning tactic. He learned it from Roy Cohn and has used to good effect it in his business dealings, in his (un)reality show, in his primary run, in his presidential run and he is now using it in his presidency.

He just keeps on hammering…low-effort hammering like Twitter and ego-stroking/self-fueling-for-a-narcissist hammering, like his rallies…and assigns the real work to his subordinates, almost all of whom eventually “burn out” themselves after he hammers on about getting “More!!! More!!! MORE!!!” from them.

Or else, of course?

You’re FIRED!!!

His ultimate weapon.

Now? He has finally reached the most powerful “firing” position in the world.

All I can say is…no matter in what manner you choose to work against him (and/or perhaps against other, opposing forces that are as crooked as is he):

Do

Not

Burn

Out

Please!!!

I hear and see this everywhere these days.

From working class and middle class whites.

From smart millennial academic types.

From all angles except the truly poverty-stricken, who have either been “burned out” for a long time or have an anger-driven fire that is hard to quench.

Even Booman has been suffering from it.

People are exhausted from the continuous stress.

Anxiety burnout.

That’s Trump’s game.

All I can say is…do whatever you need to do to refresh yourself and then go on about your work.

The alternative is totally unacceptable.

I’m lucky, in a manner of speaking. What I do…make real music…is what refreshes me, so I get stronger while I fight.

Tonight, for example? (8/30/18)

With The Awakening Orchestra…a wonderful, ground-breaking composer’s (Kyle Saulnier) large ensemble…at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, a great performance space run by Matthew Garrison, the son of John Coltrane’s long-time bassist Jimmy Garrison.

Pretty much pro bono, and worth every hour of the many rehearsals and performances we have done over the past several years.

Highly politically charged, as well.

The set:

Prelude & Fanfare: The Patriot.

Lux Aurumque

I Can See My Country From Here

The Words, They Fail To Come.

We live, as long as we continue to fight.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

MEDIASTRIKE!!!

CULTURESTRIKE!!!

VAYA!!!

Fight your own way.

But continue to fight!!!

As I said…the alternative is totally unacceptable.

Later…

AG

I’m still taking a break from this kind of stupid:

On December 2, 2017, after [Michael] Flynn pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that he had lied to the FBI about the conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador, President Trump appeared to confirm what the timeline had recorded. “I had to fire General Flynn because he had lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” the president tweeted. The White House, in an effort to contain the damage from this admission, said that the tweet had been ghostwritten by one of his personal attorneys, John Dowd, and was not accurate. But a source with direct, first-hand knowledge of the matter told me that Dowd’s tweet was based on what had been recounted in the McGahn timeline, as well as what the president and other senior aides had affirmed to Dowd about what had transpired in Flynn’s firing.

Who needs that kind of unthinkable idiocy in their lives?

Welcome back, music lovers. It may no longer be Wednesday on the East Coast, but it is still Wednesday somewhere, yeah? I tend to have a full schedule from the moment I get up til the moment I come home from my side gig at night. But enough of that. You are here for some tunes.

This week I want to focus on some of the music that influenced my formative years. Because of some quirks in my dad’s business travel schedule, I was allowed to stay up late quite a bit. Whether that was necessarily a wise judgment call on my mom’s part is another matter, I suppose. Then again, I was already naturally inclined to be nocturnal. The cool thing was I discovered some late night TV, include the classic era of SNL. The wide variety of then-cutting-edge musical guests was quite mind-blowing, at least for an early adolescent living in one suburban wasteland after another. The series and the music seemed to fit whatever teenage angst I was going through at the time. I never heard pop or rock music in the same way again. I’d discover a few other late night shows, that would expose me to all manner of artists who would have made my parents cringe at the time. So let’s do a bit of time traveling, shall we?

Talking Heads quickly became a go-to band for me. They had just the right blend of talent and quirkiness, and they would end up being one of the gateway bands to such talents as Brian Eno, Adrian Belew, and Jon Hassell. More to come. Stay tuned.

Outrageous charges from for profit hospital

The link details the financial dilemma of a teacher with a horrendous bill despite “good” public school insurance.

Look at the 2,000% markup on the stents and the overall 400% overcharge against “reasonable and proper”. Because they can. Because the law protects the wolf and not the lamb.

If you are under Medicare they cannot legally charge you more than 15% above the Medicare approved rate even if they don’t participate. That should be the limit for everyone whether they are in medicare or not.

But Centrists tell us all is fine with Obamacare and we don’t need any socialist Medicare For All.

For the remainder of this week, I’ll be doing very light blogging. I have to find some time during the year to get a break from this bullshit, and late August is usually pretty slow as far as political news goes. So, if I’m blogging like crazy on Thursday and Friday, you can be pretty sure that something has gone wrong and also that CabinGirl is contemplating murder.

When I get back to the normal routine, I am going to have to make some difficult decisions about what to do with Booman Tribune. The site was designed in 2004-5 and it is hopelessly obsolete. It had about a three year run as an actual revenue generator before a variety of factors caused most blogs to go completely broke. Since that time, the site barely pays for itself. I’ve kept it going out of love and a bit of stubbornness, not because it pays the bills.  Over the years, many generous donors/readers have helped me sustain Booman Tribune, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

We now have thirteen and a half years of material, both from the front-pagers and from the diaries.  Unfortunately, all of it is at risk. The server is old and the management company keeps warning me that if anything breaks they cannot guarantee that they’ll have the parts to fix it. That means I have to migrate the site again and that is always an expensive proposition.  I’m not really interested in laying out the money to do it because I won’t recoup it, but I also don’t want to lose everything we’ve created together.

Maybe what is called for is a complete site redesign. I’m thinking of something that will preserve the archives but be modern and fresh and fun.  I had a false start on doing something like this back in 2014 with Progress Pond, but I lost my programmer, ran out of money, landed a different job, and basically sidelined that project.

Another factor that has been troubling me is the increase in malicious attacks on the site which caused me to have to hire at a significant monthly expense an outside company to protect us from denial of service and other hacking attempts.  You may have noticed that the front-page went down this summer for about a week.  Of course I don’t know who is responsible for these things but dealing with it isn’t free.  I think I spent about $600 bucks solving that problem and there’s a limit to how often I can put up with that kind of unanticipated expense and aggravation.

Anyway, there’s a lot for me to think about, and of course you might influence my decision making.  I guess the most important thing is that I have to figure out is how to secure what we already have produced, both the posts and the comments. That alone will be a project. But I don’t see the point of investing that time and money and then coming out the other side with nothing but what we have now, which is an old site that badly needs updating and that doesn’t generate almost anything in the way of revenue.

I’m going to leave up the donation button this week, and if you’d like to help support the effort to preserve the site, maybe you can make a contribution. Your thoughts and comments will also be welcome. I think I can steal some time to read them without too much risk of CabinGirl’s wrath.

Thanks, and I’ll be back one way or the other at full swing next Monday.

Considering that there is a sexual-assaulter-in-chief sitting in the White House, it’s hardly surprising that the Republican Party isn’t having the kind of success they’d hoped for in increasing the number of women in their congressional caucuses.

Republicans were successful in recruiting a record-breaking number of women to run for seats across the country, an effort meant to reshape a GOP conference that now includes just 23 women out of 236 members.

However, given the political headwinds facing the GOP in this year’s midterm elections, it appears the party will be fortunate to get voters to back even that many of its female candidates. And in a worst-case scenario, the party could end up having 10 fewer GOP women in the 116th Congress.

“2018 is the year of the woman — except on the Republican side, where the ranks of GOP women are likely to shrink,” said David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report. “It’s a fairly dire situation for Republican women in the House.”

The Republicans have been lucky to win two out of the past five presidential elections despite losing the popular vote and every single ethnic, religious and sexual orientation group other than Mormons. They won’t be so fortunate if women come to see the Democratic Party as their natural home and the Republican Party as their implacable foes. But just as otherwise socially conservative Muslims are running away from the GOP, and just as potential supporters in the Asian and Latino communities are fleeing, this year is developing into an opportunity for the Democrats to make huge gains out of what is essentially a gift. The misogynistic white nationalist Grand Old Party is effectively excluding anyone who isn’t white, male, and at least fifty years old.

They’re doing this largely because they want things that way, even though it makes little medium-to-long term political sense.

William F. Buckley said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” But time doesn’t stop. Heraclitus was right when he noted that you can never step into the same river twice. The 1950’s aren’t coming back, and women aren’t going to keep going back to a party that doesn’t recognize their advances since then.

With the death of John McCain, the senior senator from Maine, Susan Collins, now ranks thirteenth in seniority in Congress’s more prestigious and deliberative body. Among Republicans, only Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, James Inhofe and Pat Roberts are more senior. Unsurprisingly, those senators hold positions of great responsibility. Mitch McConnell is the Senate Majority Leader. Richard Shelby controls the spending as chair of the Appropriations Committee. Orrin Hatch controls tax law as chair on Finance, while Chuck Grassley oversees the courts as the head of the Judiciary Committee. Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas sets agricultural policy and James Inhofe is now the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee. Strangely, however, Susan Collins is only allowed to chair the Special Committee on Aging, a toothless body that rarely meets and has no authority to draft legislation. Her only real power comes from her seat on Appropriations where she is allowed to chair the spending of the subcommittee of least interest to conservatives: Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.

To drive home the point, here are the other Republican chairmen of full committees and their seniority ranking:

• Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs: Mike Crapo of Idaho (17th in seniority)
• Budget: Mike Enzi of Wyoming: (15th in seniority)
• Commerce, Science, and Transportation: Roy Blunt of Missouri (50th in seniority)
• Energy and Natural Resources: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (22nd in seniority)
• Environment and Public Works: John Barrasso of Wyoming (39th in seniority)
• Foreign Relations: Bob Corker of Tennessee (34th in seniority)
• Health, Education, Labor and Pensions: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (24th in seniority)
• Banking: Mike Crapo of Idaho (17th in seniority) (24th in seniority)
• Rules and Administration: Roy Blunt of Missouri (50th in seniority)
• Small Business and Entrepreneurship: James Risch of Idaho (44th in seniority)
• Veterans’ Affairs: Johnny Isakson of Georgia (28th in seniority)
• Intelligence: Richard Burr of North Carolina (26th in seniority)
• Indian Affairs: John Hoeven of North Dakota (55th in seniority)
• Ethics: Johnny Isakson of Georgia (28th in seniority)

My point here is that Susan Collins has been in the Senate for a very long time and yet she has acquired shockingly little power or influence. You can shift the blame for that to her colleagues if you want. Maybe she’s a victim of sexism. Perhaps she just serves too blue of a state, although Donald Trump did pull one electoral vote out of Maine. It’s likely that she is not trusted on hard votes and/or is being punished for past transgressions, however minor. But whatever obstacles have been placed in her way, she clearly has not overcome them. She has not figured out how to force her Republican colleagues to respect her.

That’s why I have no tolerance for her remarks on the passing of Senator John McCain: “The lions are gone,” Ms. Collins said. “The lions of the Senate are gone. It is very sad.”

This would be an appropriate comment from a newly elected or appointed senator like Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana (96th in seniority) or Democrat Tina Smith of Minnesota (98th). It’s not an appropriate comment from someone who has been serving in the Senate longer than all but twelve senators and who now ranks seventh in her caucus. Collins praised McCain for his belief in the “Senate’s role in checks and balances” and “asserting the Senate’s constitutional role.” She said McCain “truly was a giant in the Senate, a towering figure and someone who really made a difference…” But why is she incapable of serving these purposes?  Why is she not a towering figure?

As James Fallows points out in The Atlantic, the Senate is currently comprised of 50 Republicans and 49 members of the Democratic caucus (which includes two independents). On any issue, Sen. Collins has the potential to extract concessions from her own side because they will have no majority without her vote unless they can peel off a Democrat, and that’s becoming a less and less frequent event. Even before McCain’s demise, however, she only needed to find one Republican to join her to exert the same kind of influence. If she wants better committee assignments or a more consequential set of gavels, she could play hardball and threaten to bolt to the Democrats. But she doesn’t do these things and therefore is easily shunted to the corner where she can talk about aging and the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs without bothering the men who do serious business.

The only visible influence she has is the press’s persistent interest in her because they think (almost always incorrectly) that she’s a threat to use her influence. She gets them to pay attention by raising the prospect that she might stop the Republicans from doing things she officially disagrees with, but she almost always backs down in the end without getting anything tangible to show for it.  The “pro-choice” senator’s next fold will be a vote for Brett Kavanaugh to serve a lifetime appointment of the Supreme Court where he will fulfill the conservative movement’s decades-long goal of eviscerating or overruling the Roe and Casey abortion rights decisions.  She has the power right now to protect choice which is presumably what the “pro-” in “pro-choice” is supposed to mean.  When the Arizona governor appoints McCain’s replacement, she needs to find one colleague to join her–someone like the ostensibly pro-choice Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.  If she can’t accomplish that, she can at least keep her promise to take the pro-choice position on Kavanaugh, but she almost certainly won’t. And, so, where she could be extremely influential, so gets no consultation and no say in the choice of a Supreme Court Justice because her threats are not credible.  A political hack like Kavanaugh will get her stamp of approval even though his nomination flies in the face of the kind of “lion of the Senate” consensus building for which she too generously credits McCain.

Susan Collins could be that lion, or lioness if you prefer, but instead she’s a lamb.  We can only hope that she finds more to emulate from McCain in his death than she did during his life.

I concluded Part 1 of Sears, a tale of the retail apocalypse by writing a program note: “I plan on presenting the view on the ground on Monday, when I will share three videos from Retail Archeology.  Stay tuned.”  I begin with Come See The Deader Side of Sears.

A video tour and mini documentary about the dying retail store Sears. Footage was filmed in Mesa, AZ on 11/30/2016.

While this does not take the same long-range perspective as Sears: The Rise And Fall Of The Massive U.S. Retailer from CNBC, it still gives a sense of history though personal detail as well as serving as an example of the decline of Sears.  

The narrator mentioned that the Sears store in this video was in better shape than the one in Fiesta Mall, which he had just recorded.*  That store appears in Sears: Open For The Community? | FIESTA MALL LOCATION CLOSING JANUARY 2018 and shows a location in serious decline.

In this episode of Retail Archaeology we take a look at the Sears located at Fiesta Mall. It was announced on 11/2/2017 that this store will be closing in January of 2018. Filming for this video was done on a Saturday afternoon between 12pm & 1pm at Fiesta Mall. What the hell does “open for the community” mean?

All of the efforts to attract customers failed and the store was scheduled to close, as documented in Sears: Not Open For The Community | Retail Archaeology Dead Mall & Retail Documentary.

In this episode of Retail Archaeology we take a look at a Sears in the final stages of its liquidation sale. This is the Sears at the dead mall Fiesta Mall and is the same location I covered 6 months ago that put up the weird “Open For The Community” banner.

That’s every bit as sad as the closing KMart stores in Toys R Us closing down and Kmart may follow on my personal blog.  As Sears closes more stores, expect to see more scenes like this.

Retail Archeology has videos on other stores suffering during the retail apocalypse, including Macy’s, Penny’s, Radio Shack, Claire’s, and, of course, Toys R Us and Kmart.  I’ve already done a series on Toys R Us and plan on posting entries with videos on the other chains as well.  In addition, I have a third part of this series to post and might have a fourth after that.  Stay tuned.

*I may post videos of that mall’s decline and closing, too.