January 03, 2016
Source: Shutterstock
2016 will be a hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year that the greatest Greek writer since Homer will turn 80, but we won”t mention this fact for quite a while yet. Our world is so stuck in reverse that a stabbed woman in Miami during the Art Basel shindig who was bleeding and begging for help was mistaken for “art” and ignored. The woman survived, but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some.
And speaking of con artists, I”ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have stolen the idea of Facebook from a couple of innocents, and who now pledges his $45 billion fortune to charity. He has created an investment vehicle, not a charitable foundation that has nonprofit status. Instead, and the public relations bonanza his pledge attracted aside, he created an LLC, the limited-liability vehicle that allows one to do anything they wish with their money without the rules and oversights or transparency requirements. Smart little feller, this Zuckerberg, but sort of a con man nonetheless. It will also cut his tax bill, thank you very much.
2016 should also be a vintage year for social media, those nice apps that terrorists use so cleverly to help them murder innocent and unarmed people. While the Middle East remains a stagnant pile of poverty, intolerance, and tribalism, the West keeps taking the hits from the scum we accepted to our shores who get radicalized via those apps that have made billionaires out of geeks who would have had sand kicked in their faces otherwise. Time for governments to step in”and for your high-life correspondent to say this, something’s really wrong.
Radical Islam caught on about political correctness and how it shackles Western military might and will play it to the hilt in the future. Time is on Islam’s side. We will continue to curb freedom of speech, even after that crypto-Islamist Barack Obama is out of office. It is a mistake of historic proportions. The idea that the link between Islam and terror cannot be admitted is as outrageous as the claim that Islam does not preach violence against infidels. Days after the California massacre by an Islamic couple, Donald Trump was warned by the attorney general of the U.S. that the First Amendment does not protect actions predicated on violent talk. In other words, if you tell the truth about Islam we just might throw you in the pokey. Nice.
2016 should not be a good year for my old Swiss friend Sepp Blatter. (And if you believe that I”m a friend, you need help.) After years of graft and kickbacks and making money, the show is about to close. The gusting winds of change are rattling the windows of the great edifice to dishonesty built not by Blatter alone, but by all his predecessors as well. Football is as rotten and dishonest a game as there is, and in my country alone the owner of Olympiakos, the No. 1 team, has been caught red-handed bribing referees yet is still allowed to own the team and call the tune. Bribes, fraud, kickbacks, crooked banks”this is the modern version of “the beautiful game,” as the hucksters who publicize it call it.
