Two Items of Portent
I have two items to bring to your attention. Neither of these stories are related at all. But both portend serious changes that aren’t just imminent, but may have already happened, and not to the betterment of the world.
The first story involves the use of facial recognition technology to identify a woman who works for a firm, and then the targeted denial of this lady from entering a concert that she paid money to acquire a ticket for.
So the New Jersey mom went to New York City to help with her daughter’s Girl Scout activities. She booked a show at Radio City Music Hall but as soon as she got into the building, security detained her and then denied her further entrance. Her offense? She works for a law firm that they are embroiled in litigation with, and thus she is forever unclean from enjoying any show at this venue.
Madison Square Garden Entertainment, or ESG, manages the venue and apparently has formulated a blacklist against any attorney who works for Davis, Saperstein & Salomon, P.C. This lady, Kelly Conlon, doesn’t even practice in New York and is not personally involved in any litigation against ESG, yet they blacklisted her anyway.
ESG is a billion-dollar company with a lot of clout in the entertainment world, particularly in New York City. They also seem to be remarkably thin-skinned.
Just think about the implications of this. If you work for a company that some powerful corporation or entity doesn’t like or disagrees with, you can be frozen out of participation as a consumer or customer simply via guilt by association.
One particularly egregious aspect of this story is that when they detained Ms. Conlon, they separated her from her daughter. That’s utterly outrageous.
My second item is far more serious. It appears that the United Kingdom is in serious talks to give up Chagos Archipelago sovereignty to Mauritius after over two hundred years of governing the island chain. Why is this bad? Well, there’s a particular island called Diego Garcia. It happens to host an extraordinarily strategic U.S. Naval base. Losing access to this base would be utterly catastrophic and would seriously degrade our ability to project force in the Pacific.
I’ve been to Diego Garcia twice. It’s an extremely significant part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK and Mauritius both claim that if the hand over happens, the US Naval base will be “unaffected.” I personally find that hard to believe.
Guess who Mauritius has been warming up to in recent years? China.