Silenced Majority Portal

Franchise Owners Are Converting Back into Mom & Pop Businesses

My son was noticing conversions from run of the mill corporate fast food outlets back into family businesses, but using the original structures, and found Not Fooling Anybody, which documents examples.  I have eaten at a former Burger King in Everett, WA which is now a Thai Restaurant and has touring ceilings because they make use of the former children's indoor playground.  At the site, Mister Donuts becomes Master Donuts, an Arbys a Brazilian restaurant.  Taco Bells and Dairy Queens are some of the most common conversions.

  A former Taco Bell in Michigan is now Al Nour, a middle-eastern restaurant, and takes advantage of curved windows to evoke the right image.

This former Pizza Hut in Toronto is now a Chinese Restaurant.

 

This liquor store in Phoenix was once a KFC.

In North Carolina, yet another Pizza Hut becomes a Fish 'n Chips joint.

Jackson-Inspired Artwork & Flash Mob / Is Michael in Heaven? Did He Really Have 10,000 Books?

See Best, Worst and Weirdest Art Inspired by MJ here. Here is a composite:

 

July 8 Flashmob

Is Michael in Heaven goes into the Top Five MJ stories I found worth reading.

Michael Jackson was raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses and flirted with Scientology and Islam. Now many Christian groups wonder if the King of Pop is residing with the King of Kings.

Seattle PI Blog reports that Michael had 10,000 books. They reported that a judge who knew him said in an interview:

"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it."

"And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there."

Apparently MJ was a frequenter of several bookstores and a Johny Appleseed of reading, spreading books to all children.  He would bring in vanloads of kids and buy them whatever books they wanted.  He would often wear a surgical mask and have an assistant hold an umbrealla to shield him from the glare of florescent lighting.  They contrasted him with Kanye West who doesn't like to read and discussed the disconnect between pop and intellect in America.  

Pepper Spray Added to ATMs in South Africa

Read it at The Guardian - reminds me of a photo taken in France.  I have another one somewhere of a Diebold machine smashed during a riot.

Royale Mit Cheese, A Prototype Of The Future

UPDATE: Douglas Rushkoff, writing at The Daily Beast sees this move by Google and reaches the same conclusions that I did.

Oh, and DiAnne, insomnia?

Good Lord, you've got about a back up of like 20 drafts up in here.

This is a first draft and as such I'm leaving off any editorial comment on the long term implications in The Unites States and the world over of such electronic food ordering devices on Surplus Employee Issues, since I want to do a couple more takes of this, and being barred from such eateries for life is not the way to go about it.

One thing I will talk about is how I see the process of making the above video applies to yesterday's announcement by Google that they are planning to roll out a proprietary Operating System to go up against MSFT, because I believe that they also have Apple in their sights as well.

The raw footage of the above 8.5 minute file started out life yesterday as a 2.5 GIGABYTE 1080p HD video file in the .MOV format.

Because home bandwidth sucks here in Germany, (it would take a full day to U/L the original file to YouTube), fiddling with a variety of video compression schemes in Quicktime Pro I managed to shrink it down to a more reasonable 88 megabytes, without completely destroying the quality of it.

Took minutes instead of hours to upload, and then YouTube went ahead and cut that 88 meg file in half, actually a little bit more, and further compressed it down to a 40 meg file.

This means that the entire 8.5 minute clip is about 1.5% the size of the original.

40 megs of the original file wouldn't even be a full 10 seconds of film.

Remarkable.

What I think Google is going to do with their new Chrome OS, to have the General Public switch en masse is to offer a complete package to the consumer via their Netbooks.

Remember about 5 odd years ago when they first rolled out GMail with a base amount of 2 gigabytes of free storage with each account?

That was their response to their competitors in the the Web Based Email environment that were offering free email accounts with all of a 10 to 25 megabyte limit.

People made the switch to droves to GMail, and their competitors at Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL had their hands forced, and they too began offering accounts in the multi-gigabyte range.

Today the two biggest issues facing end users who are doing photography and HD video is the exponential growth in file sizes that the new generation of high resolution cameras have come to market with, and the inability of the most common desktop configurations that people have to process those files efficiently.

This is not to mention the insanely high costs associated with the software, such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Sales of 1 TB external drives have been driven by this phenomena, but as any end user will tell you they are susceptible to failure.

With high speed bandwidth becoming ubiquitous what I see happening is that Google will offer with these Chrome OS netbooks of theirs terrabytes of storage in The Cloud, which, people fed up with losing years of work from HD crashes, will gladly embrace, privacy issues be damned.

Better Google's servers go down, and take the planet's data down with it, and have somebody to blame, rather than it all being on my shoulders, thank you.

Add to that Google doing all the high CPU back end processing on their equipment, using their apps, which are also in The Cloud, which means that no one ever has to ever update a piece of software, ever again, and all of a sudden Apple and Microsoft are looking at a real threat to their business model.

Especially if these Chrome OS Netbooks of theirs come out with a Price Point in the $300 to $500 range.

If they can pull that sort of thing off, and given their resources, the probably can, then who in their right mind would pay the thousands of dollars needed to do the same thing that Google's machine can?

It's called making the General Pubalick an Offer they can't possibly refuse.

This is not a new idea, in fact it's a return to the era of the 'Dumb Terminal' model that existed at the Dawn of the Computer Age, and again reared its head about 10 years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle broached the idea of 'Thin Client' 'Network Computer' about 10 years ago.

In other words. everything old is new again.

On a personal note, if I'm right about this; I'm feeling a little irked right now, since I made a not insignificant capital investment this year, and if I had waited a year and a half, I coulda had all that, and had plenty left over for my hookers and coke habit.

There's no Justice in this world, I tell ya.

Der Reviews Are In, Der Brünö Häs Länded

 

The New York Times is ambivalent.

Tin Foil Hat TIme: Leaked List of Bilderberg Attendees for 2009

The Bilderberg Group is an unofficial, annual, invitation-only conference of around 130 guests, most of whom are persons of influence (Kissinger, Geithner, Rockefeller, Wolfowitz etc.) Here is the leaked list of attendees for 2009.

Dutch Queen Beatrix

Queen Sofia of Spain

Prince Constantijn (Belgian Prince)

Prince Philippe Etienne Ntavinion, Belgium

Étienne, Viscount Davignon, Belgium (former vice-president of the European Commission)

Josef Ackermann (Swiss banker and CEO of Deutsche Bank)

Keith B. Alexander, United States (Lieutenant General, U.S. Army, Director of the National Security Agency)

Roger Altman, United States (investment banker, former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton)

Georgios A. Arapoglou, Greece (Governor of National Bank of Greece)

Ali Babaca , Turkey (Deputy Prime Minister responsible for economy)

Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Portugal (former Prime Minister of Portugal)

Nicholas Bavarez, France (economist and historian)

Franco Bernabè, Italy (Telecom Italia)

Xavier Bertrand, France (French politician connected to Nicolas Sarkozy)

Carl Bildt, Sweden (former Prime Minister of Sweden)

January Bgiorklount, Norway (?)

Christoph Blocher, Switzerland (industrialist, Vice President of the Swiss People’s Party)

Alexander Bompar, France (?)

Ana Patricia Botin, Spain, (President of Banco Banesto)

Henri de Castries, France (President of AXA, the French global insurance companies group)

Juan Luis Cebrián, Spain (journalist for Grupo PRISA; his father was a senior journalist in the fascist Franco regime)

W. Edmund Clark, Canada (CEO TD Bank Financial Group)

Kenneth Clarke, Great Britain (MP, Shadow Business Secretary)

Luc Cohen, Belgium (?)

George David, United States (Chairman and former CEO of United Technologies Corporation, board member of Citigroup)

Richard Dearlove, Great Britain (former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service)

Mario Draghi, Italy (economist, governor of the Bank of Italy)

Eldrup Anders, Denmark (CEO Dong Energy)

John Elkann, Italy (Italian industrialist, grandson of the late Gianni Agnelli, and heir to the automaker Fiat)

Thomas Enders, Germany (CEO Airbus)

Jose Entrekanales, Spain (?)

Isintro phenomena casket, Spain (?)

Niall Ferguson, United States (Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School)

Timothy Geithner, United States (Secretary of the Treasury)

Ntermot convergence, Ireland (AIV Group) (?)

Donald Graham, United States (CEO and chairman of the board of The Washington Post Company)

Victor Chalmperstant, Netherlands (Leiden University)

Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Netherlands (Dutch politician, minister of Justice in the fourth Balkenende cabinet, member of the Christian Democratic Appeal)

Richard Holbrooke, United States (Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan)

Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, Netherlands (Dutch politician and the current NATO Secretary General)

James Jones, United States (National Security Advisor to the White House)

Vernon Jordan, United States (lawyer, close adviser to President Bill Clinton)

Robert Keigkan, United States (? - possibly Robert Kagan, neocon historian)

Girki Katainen, Finland (?)

John Kerr (aka Baron Kerr of Kinlochard), Britain (Deputy Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell and an independent member of the House of Lords)

Mustafa Vehbi Koç, Turkey (President of industrial conglomerate Koç Holding)

Roland GT, Germany (?)

Sami Cohen, Turkey (Journalist) (?)

Henry Kissinger, United States

Marie Jose Kravis, United States (Hudson Institute)

Neelie Kroes, Netherlands (European Commissioner for Competition)

Odysseas Kyriakopoulos, Greece (Group S & B) (?)

Manuela Ferreira Leite, Portugal (Portuguese economist and politician)

Bernardino Leon Gross, Spain (Secretary General of the Presidency)

Jessica Matthews, United States (President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)

Philippe Maystadt (President of the European Investment Bank)

Frank McKenna, Canada (Deputy Chairman of the Toronto-Dominion Bank)

John Micklethwait, Great Britain (Editor-in-chief of The Economist)

Thierry de Montbrial, France (founded the Department of Economics of the École Polytechniqueand heads the Institut français des relations internationales)

Mario Monti, Italy (Italian economist and politician, President of the Bocconi University of Milan)

Miguel Angel Moratinos, Spain (Minister of Foreign Affairs)

Craig Mundie, United States (chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft)

Egil Myklebust, Norway (Chairman of the board of SAS Group, Scandinavian Airlines System)

Mathias Nass, Germany (Editor of the newspaper Die Zeit)

Denis Olivennes, France (director general of Nouvel Observateur)

Frederic Oudea, France (CEO of Société Générale bank)

Cem Özdemir, Germany (co-leader of the Green Party and Member of the European Parliament)

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Italy (Italian banker, economist, and former Minister of Economy and Finance)

Dimitrios Th.Papalexopoulo, Greece (Managing Director of Titan Cement Company SA)

Richard Perle, United States (American Enterprise Institute)

David Petraeus, United States (Commander, U.S. Central Command)

Manuel Pinho, Portugal (Minister of Economy and Innovation)

J. Robert S. Prichard, Canada (CEO of Torstar Corporation and president emeritus of the University of Toronto)

Romano Prodi, Italy (former Italian Prime Minister and former President of the European Commission)

Heather M. Reisman, Canada (co-founder of Indigo Books & Music Inc.).

Eivint Reitan, Norway (economist, corporate officer and politician for the Centre Party)

Michael Rintzier, Czech Republic (?)

David Rockefeller, United States

Dennis Ross, United States (special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton)

Barnett R. Rubin, United States (Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Center for International Cooperation)

Alberto Rouith-Gkalarthon, Spain (?)

Susan Sampantzi Ntintzer, Turkey (?) Guler Sabanci, President of Sabanci Holdings (?)

Indira Samarasekera, Canada (President of University of Alberta, Board of Directors Scotiabank)

Rountol Solten, Austria (?)

Jürgen E. Schrempp, Germany (CEO DaimlerChrysler)

Pedro Solbes Mira, Spain (economist, Socialist, Second Vice President and Minister of Economy and Finance)

Sampatzi Saraz, Turkey (banker) (?) possibly Süreyya Serdengeçti (former Governor of the Central Bank of Turkey) http://arsiv.zaman.com.tr/2002/05/29/ekonomi/h6.htm

Sanata Seketa, Canada (University of Canada) (?)

Lawrence Summers, United States (economist, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council)

Peter Sutherland, Ireland (Chairman, BP and Chairman of Goldman Sachs International)

Martin Taylor, United Kingdom (former chief executive of Barclays Bank, currently Chairman of Syngenta AG)

Peter Thiel, United States (Clarium Capital Management LCC, PayPal co-founder, Board of Directors, Facebook)

Agan Ourgkout, Turkey (?)

Matti Taneli Vanhanen, Finland, (Prime Minister)

Daniel L. Vasella, Switzerland (Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at Novartis AG)

Jeroen van der Veer, Netherlands (CEO of Royal Dutch Shell)

Guy Verhofstadt, Belgium (former Prime Minister)

Paul Volcker, U.S. (former Federal Reserve director, Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board)

Jacob Wallenberg, Sweden (chairman of Investor AB and former chairman of Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken)

Marcus Wallenberg, Sweden (CEO of Investor AB, former chairman of Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken)

Nout Wellink, Netherlands (Chairman of De Nederlandsche Bank, Board of Directors, the Bank of International Settlements)

Hans Wijers, Netherlands (CEO of the multinational corporation AkzoNobel)

Martin Wolf, Great Britain (associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times)

James Wolfensohn, United States (former president of the World Bank)

Paul Wolfowitz, United States (for U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, currently AEI scholar)

Fareed Zakaria, United States (journalist, author, and CNN host)

Robert Zoellick, United States (former managing director of Goldman Sachs, President the World Bank)

Dora Bakoyannis, Greece (Minister of Foreign Affairs)

Anna Diamantopoulou, Greece (Member of Parliament for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement)

Yannis Papathanasiou, Greece (Minister of Finance)

George Alogoskoufis, Greece (former Minister)

George A. David, Greece (businessman, president of Coca-Cola)

RIP Robert McNamara - What Makes It Immoral To Lose & Not To Win?

Proportionality. "LeMay said if we lost the war we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right."

Ruth Madoff Had to Leave Her Fur Behind

she had to leave her fur behind

Feds seize Madoff penthouse, wife leaves

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal marshals seized disgraced financier Bernard Madoff's $7 million Manhattan penthouse on Thursday and forced his wife to move out and leave her possessions behind, including a fur coat she had asked to take with her, an official told The Associated Press.

Ruth Madoff walked out of the apartment carrying just a straw bag after she was told she couldn't take her coat, the official said.

Andy Borowitz - Madoff's Soul Turns Up on Craigslist

New York Subway Stations Named for Banks

The MTA officially has sold naming rights to one of its busiest subway stations in Brooklyn.   It's a London-based bank and the deal was for $4 million. All of the subway stations at the Brooklyn hub will have Barclays Center added to their names.  

One person interviewed in the article said:

"To rename the 59th and Lex stop the McDonald’s stop — it ain’t going to work. I don’t think it will stick.” 

There is all kinds of creepy stuff in this article: New York Subway Stations Named for Banks

Calvin Klein Threesome Billboard

I saw it in a magazine and raised one eyebrow, but I think the Guess ads with Brazilians are sexier. Some like it, some don't and Calvin Klein has been a little controversial at times ever since the first Brooks Shields jeans ads.