Facebook is everywhere. Our kids dance studio uses it to communicate with us. The Submarine Base in Groton uses it to let you know when the base is closed due to snow. The military’s Airlift Command uses it to notify people of upcoming flights. Facebook’s ease of use caused many places to use Facebook in place of email, website and texting notifications and updates.
All that dependency comes with a price, because Facebook is too big to care. Instead of being a neutral platform, Facebook took sides on issues. At first, it was non-controversial, like when Facebook would remove suicide videos or obviously pornographic images. But it became too much of a temptation, and it wasn’t long before Facebook was manipulating news feeds and canceling whomever it willed.
If your small business or club relies on Facebook for communication, you’re vulnerable. Whenever the military invades an area, the first thing they destroy is enemy communication platforms. If you can’t communicate, you can’t organize, and you certainly can’t get anything useful done.
To illustrate this point, I once spoke with firefighters that rescued people in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack on 9/11. One of the things not discussed is that there are a lot of cell and radio towers on the Twin Towers. When they came down, it crippled cellular communications in the area. Firefighters and police resorted to runners to pass messages while pulling people out of rubble.
You are much better off, and much safer, with a good email system, blog and website, plus a social media platform that respects you, like MeWe. Because if Facebook can cancel Australia, what stops them from canceling you?
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
Last Monday the Justice Department asked 56 U.S. attorneys to resign. There were two exceptions, John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, will stay on as the special counsel for the investigation of the Russian collusion hoax, and David Weiss, the prosecutor for Delaware, who is pursuing the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes, and presumably, more.
Among the others are John R. Lausch Jr., the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, which of course includes that cesspool of corruption, Chicago and suburban Cook County. Appointed in 2017, Lausch has been methodically hacking away at the blighted forest that is Illinois government ever since. Among those indicted under Lausch’s term are a Chicago alderman, two suburban mayors (one of them was also Cook County commissioner), and two members of the Illinois General Assembly. They have one thing in common–all are Democrats. Lausch has chipped away at the political machine of state Representative Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), who until last month had been state House speaker for all but two years since 1983. Lausch uncovered an alleged scam involving Commonwealth Edison, Illinois’ largest electric utility, that has led to the indictment of four senior executives at that company, as well as a longtime lobbyist with decades-long ties to Boss Madigan.
Madigan is the midwife of the Illinois pension debacle and he is the man who destroyed Illinois. Sadly, those aren’t crimes.
Lausch seems to be closing the ring on Madigan, who remains as chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party, a post he’s held since 1998. Madigan maintains his innocence and he has not been charged with any crimes. But he’s a tough one to investigate–Madigan doesn’t use email and he doesn’t own a cell phone. There’s a lot of smoke surrounding the 78-year-old legislator–but so far no fire has been discovered.
It took a lot longer than it should have but Illinois’ insipid Republican Party, the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters, finally pursued tying other Democratic candidates to Madigan, which led to a pretty good, but not great, general election for conservatives last autumn. The best result was the resounding defeat of the so-called Fair Tax Amendent, which would have replaced Illinois’ flat rate income tax with one with graduated rates. As I’ve quipped a few times before, Illinoisans finally figured out that if the Democrats were given an unlimited budget they would exceed it.
After the general election Illinois’ two Democratic US Senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, called for Madigan’s resignation as party chairman. No, they didn’t suddenly realize that Madigan is toxic to Illinois; Durbin and Duckworth didn’t like the general election results here.
The state House took care of the speakership problem, the Democrats ousted Madigan last month but replaced him with a longtime ally of the Boss.
The day after the Justice Department announced those federal prosecutor resignations, in what the Chicago Tribune called “a lame news release,” those two party-line hack senators called on Biden to keep Lausch on the job. I am very suspicious of their motives. Duckworth is up for reelection next year and if the federal investigation into Chicago area corruption stalls she might get the blunt of the blame for not convincing Biden to keep Lausch in place.
Durbin is the new Senate Justice Committee chairman and prefers not to be accused of keeping corrupt Dems in power in his home state. Back to gerrymandering and Madigan: Aftet the 2010 census the state congressional map was redrawn to be much more favorable to Democrats. The 8th congressional district was transformed from a competitive one to a layout favoring Democrats. In 2012 Duckworth ousted the Republican incumbent, future never-Trumper Joe Walsh.
Remember, for many Democrats Madigan has been very good to them. His skills at gerrymandering have produced supermajorities in the General Assembly and have bolstered Democratic numbers among the Illinois US House delegation. There may have never been a Senator Duckworth had she not won that House race in 2012. Through government and compliant corporations like Commonwealth Edison, Madigan has been able to hand out contracts, favors, and jobs to those loyal to him–as well as their relatives.
Lausch needs to be kept on the job in Chicago.
Biden’s nominee for Attorney General is Merrick Garland, a Chicago area native who was nominated by Barack Obama to the US Supreme Court seat that eventually went to Neil Gorsuch. But he hasn’t lived here in decades. Yet my guess is that Garland has kept his eyes on the fetid muck in Illinois. Perhaps he can put in a good word for Lausch to Biden or whoever is making the calls in the White House on federal prosecutors.
Sorry to be repetitive, but I have to keep mentioning this fact. Illinois has lost population every year since 2014.
I hit the road last week–to a regular stop for me–Detroit–my fourth visit there. Coincidentally last Monday, when I arrived, was the first day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lifting of Michigan’s ban on indoor dining, replaced by low-capacity dining, took effect.
Yet central Detroit was still nearly void of people last week.
During my first visit, in 2015, while I noticed a fair amount of bustle on the streets and sidewalks downtown, I also walked past empty skyscrapers. On my next trip, two years later, most of those same buildings were occupied or being rehabbed. And the city’s light rail line, the QLine, an expensive and impressive showpiece, had just opened. As I noted at the time on my own blog, these trolley cars ironically echo Detroit’s monorail, the People Mover, the 1980s Stalinist boondoggle championed by Coleman Young, the five-term mayor of Detroit who may have been a closet communist. Both the QLine and the People Mover serve only the downtown area. They look stunning though.
Also in 2017 Little Caesars Arena opened in the adjacent Midown part of the city. It brought the Detroit’s NBA team, the Pistons, back to the city for the first time in nearly four decades. The NHL team, the Red Wings, made the short jump from downtown’s Joe Louis Arena to Little Caesars too. Since the early 2000s the NFL entry, the Lions, and its MLB team, the Tigers, have been playing downtown. Which made the many gamedays in central Detroit a magnet for hungry and thirsty people with fat wallets. Now the teams play in front of no fans.
Quicken Loans has been based in Detroit since 2009 and is now America’s largest mortgage lender. While Detroit is still the Motor City it is the Mortgage City now too.
But meanwhile in the neighborhoods the decline of Detroit continued. For urban explorers like myself, that is, people who photograph or shoot videos of abandoned homes, factories, offices, churches—am I leaving anything out?–oh yeah, schools, there is no shortage of material to work with.
Things looked even better for Detroit when I spent a day there in 2019.
Then COVID-19 hit. Whitmer’s statewide lockdowns have been among the nation’s most restrictive. As I witnessed in Chicago last year, the streets were also eerily empty in Detroit in 2020 according to media reports, such as this one from AP in October:
Downtown Detroit was returning to its roots as a vibrant city center, motoring away from its past as the model of urban ruin.
Then the pandemic showed up, emptying once-bustling streets and forcing many office workers to flee to their suburban homes.
And if you work for Quicken and its Rocket Mortgage wing, many of your job responsibilities, perhaps all of them, can be done from a suburban home, as Quicken performs most of its transactions online.
But lets say you need to come downtown for your annual review. What else is there to do? On Day 1 of the partial-lifting of the indoor dining lockdown, it looked to me that about half of the restaurants there were still closed. Most retail outlets were shuttered. And all of the shops and eateries were closed at the Little Caesars Arena, where I hoped to buy a hockey souvenir for Mrs. Marathon Pundit. But of course there is always Amazon to fall back on for that. Oh, Kid Rock’s Made In Detroit restaurant at Little Caesars closed last spring, although that departure had nothing to do with COVID.
So in downtown Detroit last week you still had to struggle to find a place to eat. Yes, there were a few of those ludicrous tents outside some eateries–by the way temperatures were in the 30s all last week during our visit.
Story continues below photograph.
Diners last Monday in downtown Detroit
Part of the allure of big-city centers has been the array of shopping and cultural choices offfered. That’s mostly gone now in Detroit. Sure, New York, Chicago and other large cities are facing similar challenges under COVID lockdowns, but many of their eateries and shops have been operating for decades. And yes, such businesses usually have narrow profit margins but being a going concern for many years means there will be an established customer base that might remember you a few years later. What if you are a Detroit boutique that has been open only for a couple of years?
The QLine and the People Mover haven’t run since last spring. There aren’t a lot of people in downtown Detroit to well, move. Buses are still running, however.
Back to those cultural choices: The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of America’s premier art museums. I wanted to attend Wednesday but the DIA was sold out that day. I was able to purchase tickets, online of course, for myself and my traveling companion the following day for one of the available time slots. And do you know what? Outside of employees there couldn’t have been more than 50 people inside the sprawling museum when we were there. I’m confident that Wednesday’s “sold out” day wasn’t much different. On the positive side I was able to stand and stare in front of the DIA’s four Vincent van Gogh paintings as long as I wished–there was no one to push me aside and tell me, “You’re done, now it’s my turn.” Yes, we were forced to wear masks and we had our temperature taken at the museum’s entrance. Precautions were taken.
My companion visited Dearborn’s Henry Ford museum on Tuesday–a fabulous place that I experiended in 2015–and it was nearly empty too, I was told.
The Motown Musuem in New Center remains closed, it re-opens February 18. Man, oh man, we really wanted to see that place.
Will COVID-19 and Michigan’s lockdowns kill Detroit’s revival?
Many people have their life savings and their mortages invested in small businesses that have been closed for months in Detroit and other large cities.
The dominos will start falling. Which is something most Detroiters know a lot about.
It does not matter what industry you belong to; if your company is not following the latest industry trends, you will be left behind. In this modern age, where businesses have access to so many technologies, it is crucial for them to choose the right options to get ahead of the competition. By investing in the right tools and software, you can strengthen your business’s position and can manage tasks more efficiently. One of these tools is Microsoft Dynamics AX, an excellent ERP solution for companies to organize, optimize, at automating their processes. It provides you with solutions that can save you time and can improve your ROI significantly.
Microsoft Dynamics AX allows you to automate your processes; you wouldn’t have to spend time and resources on development and training. It also has a simple, user-friendly interface that allows you to access information without complicating things. That way, you can get detailed insights into your processes whenever necessary. Microsoft Dynamics AX is a complete solution for any enterprise as it also strengthens the bond between teams and individuals of the company with its advanced communication tools. Overall it is a tool that will benefit all departments of your company. Let’s take a detailed look at some of the main benefits you can enjoy from Microsoft Dynamics AX:
Quick and Smart Decision Making
One of the major benefits of using Microsoft Dynamics AX is that I allow you to make a quick and smart decision. If you want to succeed in today’s competitive market, you will have to get innovative, and this software helps you do that. The software collects raw data and turns it into numbers that can help you with decision making. You can define KPI’s and can run detailed analyses to get the latest reports. These reports not only speeds up the decision-making process but also helps you make more accurate decisions.
Cost-Effective
In the past few years, the way small and big industries used to manage their businesses has changed dramatically. Because of the constantly evolving market, a flexible ERP solution has become vital for businesses. You need a system that allows you to modify, add, delete, and mold certain things within your company whenever necessary. When you choose Microsoft Dynamics AX, you get access to plenty of great products that can prove valuable for your business. This can reduce the company’s cost of operations dramatically and can help you improve your ROI significantly. In the long run, it can help you save a lot of money.
Improve Productivity and Team Collaboration
Another great benefit of using Microsoft Dynamics AX is that it improves team collaboration within your company and makes everyone more productive. Unlike other complicated ERP software out there, Microsoft Dynamics AX won’t take much of your employees’ time. The software has an interface similar to Microsoft Word, and your organization will get the hang of it very quickly. It also helps you automate a lot of processes, which gives your employees more time to focus on important things. A centralized data system will also allow you to improve transparency and make it easier for your employees to share critical information.
Improves Sales
Microsoft Dynamics AX gives you a whole new way of approaching your customers. You will have access to raw data and real-time insights, which will help you market your business smartly. It will also allow you to identify the right people so you can only target the chunk of the population that is interested. With enhanced logistics, smooth workflows, and timely delivery, you can quickly recognize opportunities and capitalize on them. All these details also help you understand your target audience, which allows you to offer them much better services.
Security
All the data you will feed to Microsoft Dynamics AX will always be secure. The software has advanced security features and a cloud-based infrastructure that is impenetrable. No one from the outside will be able to take a peek into your company’s data as long as the software protects it. Microsoft Dynamics AX also allows you to customize the security settings so you can manage your privacy manually. It also helps create different access levels for different teams.
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