Monthly Archives: November 2023

The 2023 shareholder season heralded a new element of shareholder proposals: conspiracy theories. The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) and National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) each filed such proposals; both are self-described conservative watchdog organizations. NCPPRs primary focus is public policy research and education, while NLPC promotes ethics in government, advocating for limitations on big government.

NCPPR filed at least seven shareholder proposals containing conspiracy theories or conspiratorial language, demanding a congruency report" on relationships between companies and "globalist organizations -- a demand that could be interpreted as an antisemitic dog whistle. In the supporting statement of its shareholder proposals, NCPPR claims these companies work with globalist organizations, namely the World Economic Forum, who "openly advocates for transhumanism, abolishing private property, eating bugs, social credit systems, The Great Reset and a host of other blatantly Orwellian objectives."

NCPPR filed these proposals at Alphabet/Google, Pfizer, Bank of America, Boeing, Marriot, Merck and Johnson & Johnson. Three of these proposals (at Alphabet, Marriott and Merck) made it onto the proxy ballots, while three companies successfully petitioned the SEC to have the proposals excluded (Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Bank of America) and one was withdrawn by NCPPR (Boeing).

NLPC also filed a similar proposal with Johnson & Johnson, though the company successfully argued it should not be included on the proxy ballot.

"Globalist" is a term used by many on the right and the far right. It has been used by mainstream personalities and politicians to refer to people or entities that support multilateralism and cross-border cooperation, but in extremist contexts, "globalist" is used by white supremacists and other antisemites as an antisemitic dog whistle, wielding it as a codeword for Jews or as a pejorative term for people whose interests in international commerce or finance ostensibly make them disloyal to the country in which they live.

Primary conspiracy theories

Several prominent conspiracy theories surfaced repeatedly in these proposals. The first, the Great Reset, is a conspiracy theory that can be used to espouse antisemitism. It warns that "global elites" used the pandemic (or other newsworthy events) to advance their interests and push a globalist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity in favor of a global totalitarian regime. Adherents sometimes promote antisemitism as part of the conspiracy theory. Before it was adopted by conspiracy theorists, the phrase originally referred to an initiative introduced by the World Economic Forum.

The second primary conspiracy theory focuses on transhumanism, the idea that humans can transcend the physical limitations of our bodies -- perhaps even death itself. In its more conspiratorial form, proponents believe a "Satanist" or elite cabal of humans, on a mission to replace humans with machines/governments, are modifying bodies and DNA via secretly inserted chips. It can be and often is seen in conjunction with Great Replacement and Great Reset theory. This conspiracy theory has both antisemitic and anti-LGTBQ undertones, due to the associations proponents make with Satanist transhumanists alleged connections to George Soros and numerous references to the globalists behind the mov. Anti-LBGTQ authors such as Jennifer Bilek claim that transgender folks especially are the vanguard of this foundationally anti-humanity movement to transform the essence of what it means to be a person.

This kind of conspiratorial activism was also evident in the 2023 NCPPR shareholder proxy guide, in which the organization claims, We sometimes forget the UN is the institutional originator of climate nonsense and that the US government and by extension, the American taxpayer is the largest funder of the most prevalent globalist organization on Earth, whose very explicit purpose is to be the one-world government that globalists are trying to bring to fruition.

The NLPC also echoes this sentiment in a blog post attacking Brian Moynihan, Bank of America CEO and detailing their shareholder activism: Moynihan has been more than willing to place Bank of America in a globalist posture, subjugating shareholders interests under those of the World Economic Forum agenda of transhumanism, abolition of private property, consumption of bugs, social credit systems, and other Great Reset priorities. Paul Chesser, director of the Corporate Integrity Project for NLPC gave remarks at the Bank of America annual general meeting promoting fear of a one world government, a conspiracy theory with roots in the 1990s.

NCPPRs 2022 proxy voter guide is much more explicit, going so far as to detail the organizations understanding of these conspiracies, with subheadings about transhumanism and the Great Reset. Ethan Peck, a Free Enterprise Institute fellow (project of NCPPR), also commented while presenting a 2022 proposal that [Pfizer CEO Albert] Bourla is a globalist leech... And he is using shareholder money to finance his free trips to Davos where he advances the transhumanist agenda.

At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that either organizations agents espouse overt antisemitism, or that these proposals were filed with antisemitic intentions. However, the conspiracies espoused fit neatly into a broadly conspiratorial world view, and in some cases may serve as on ramps to more overtly antisemitic concepts. These conspiracies were once the mainstay of the darker corners of blogs and message forums, and it is of note that they have moved into the mainstream discourse about cultural norms a development antisemites undoubtedly welcome.

Continued here:
Conspiracy Theories, Some with Antisemitic Roots, Crop Up in 2023 ... - ADL

Summary

Few works of fiction capture the true essence of gonzo as it was pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson quite like the Vertigo Comics series Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. The series follows a journalist named Spider Jerusalem who is a pretty clear Hunter S. Thompson analogue. Jerusalem lives in The City where he writes a column for the newspaper The Word thats titled I Hate It Here. The column focuses on his perception of modern day life as it exists in this futuristic, transhumanist, cyberpunk landscape.

Along with being a gonzo journalist with a point of view that captivates readers, Spider Jerusalem is similar to Hunter S. Thompson in one other way: drug consumption. In this future world, there is no shortage of increasingly weird drugs Spider can get his hands on, and the futuristic healthcare ensures that he likely wont die of any sort of drug overdose, meaning he and those around him can really push their bodies and minds to the limit. While there are certainly far more than just two handfuls of drugs to choose from, here are just 10 of the wildest fictional drugs from Transmetropolitan!

Transmetropolitan was more than just a 60 issue comic series, but also had two graphic novels that allowed fans to read Spider Jerusalems columns just as someone would in-world (with the accompaniment of Darick Robertsons outstanding artwork, of course). Those graphic novels were titled I Hate It Here and Filth of the City, respectively, and they - along with some other Transmetropolitan specials - were collected in Tales of Human Waste. Within this epic of journalistic depravity, Spider Jerusalem recounts a time when he accidentally took Alter Gum, thinking it was just regular gum that could help him cut down on his smoking.

Apparently, no one told Spider that Alter Gum was a serious drug that gave users temporary dissociative identity disorder, and he found that out by losing his mind, running around The City completely naked while wielding a sword.

Dead Celebrities isn't a drug that Spider Jerusalem indulges in himself (at least, not in this issue), but is one he sees other people doing on television during a quiet winter night inside his apartment. Apparently, every winter, a new group of teenagers digs up the corpses of long-dead celebrities, tear off and chop up pieces of their bodies, and ingest them.

Evidently, there are rich deposits of old drugs and crystallized adrenaline in these corpses, and they have the capacity to give people a high thats worth desecrating the body of a famous person.

Another As-Seen-On-TV drug, Disconekt, isnt taken by Spider on-panel, but is rather being advertised on television. The TV spot reveals that Disconekt is a prescription drug thats meant to numb the senses and make life in The City more tolerable for the millions of miserable citizens barely making it through the day. Not only that, but its advertised as a way to calm the collective anger of those citizens, and will keep peoples heads from bursting with rage.

Transmetropolitan is borderline totalitarian, and Disconekt is less of a recreational drug derived from the advanced technology of the era, and more of a way to control the masses by the current political party in power (championed by the President who Jerusalem nicknamed the Smiler, and who is a main antagonist throughout the series).

Freak Green - also seen during a television news report - is given to children by their parents to make them tougher and more equipped to survive in the cruel world in which this series takes place. In an interview, a mother of a child addicted to Freak Green boasts that her son fights the puppy for his morning fix and that it has given him impressive grip strength.

Not only is this drug apparently meant to strengthen children at a young age (as the child in the news report looked not even six months old), but Freak Green also turns their skin green.

While visiting an area of The City known as the Reservations where humans choose to live in different time periods throughout history in order to preserve the culture of past civilizations, Spider Jerusalem is invited to also experience a portion of the Reservations called the Farsight Community. This wasnt a living monument to the past, but rather a corner of a potential future, one of advanced cybernetic enhancements (more so than the average amount found in The City), and where drugs that were banned in The City can be experienced freely - including and especially Infopollen.

Jerusalem was sprayed in the face with Infopollen the moment he walked into the Farsight Community, and he experienced trippy visions of an abstract future, an experience he described as being akin to washing down a bucket of peyote with a vatful of absinthe.

In the very first issue of the series, when Spider Jerusalem goes back into The City to start writing for The Word once again, hes more than a little rusty after living in the mountains for five years in complete solitude. So, in an effort to hit the ground running, he approaches a local drug pusher and tells him he needs the best Intelligence Enhancers on the market.

It seems Intelligence Enhancers is more of a narcotic classification than the actual name of a specific drug, though the effects of it speak for itself.

When Spider Jerusalem went to a Religions Convention to cover the vast number of new religions that have been popping-up recently, he saw people doing some decidedly odd practices in the name of their religious beliefs. However, one of the weirdest sights had to be the person who was using Liquid Holy Thoughts in an effort to wash away any impure thoughts by way of mind-altering fluid.

If the idea of what this drug does to the human mind isnt horrific enough, the application of said drug certainly is, as its a tube of green liquid thats pumped directly into the brain through a surgically-made hole in the forehead.

During a column thats dedicated to the citizens of The City themselves, Spider Jerusalem takes a deep dive into the lives of the New Scum (a phrase coined by the Smiler to illustrate his disdain for the people hes supposed to represent). One such person is someone who is on his way to becoming addicted to a drug called Mechanics. This drug temporarily merges ones mind with their personal AI, and during the duration of the drugs effects, the AI makes changes to the persons DNA. Once the high wears off, a formerly regular human now has a piece of their flesh replaced with techno-organic matter.

With each dose, a person literally loses a little bit of their own humanity at a time, slowly becoming a drug-addicted robot that only lives for the promise of the next fix.

The only drug in Transmetropolitan to make Spider Jerusalem want to swear off all narcotics completely. RPG Drugs are as they sound: they transport users to a fantasy world where they literally roleplay as a fictional character. When Spider took it, he became a parody of Superman, complete with the life the original Superman led as his alter ego, Clark Kent.

Spider hated being a mild-mannered journalist and goody-two-shoes superhero so much that he wanted to give up taking drugs completely - thats how off-put he was by his RPG-induced hallucination.

Transmetropolitan #52 opens with a woman who the Smiler is trying to have murdered due to the fact that she used to be a sex worker who serviced him, and hes trying to eliminate any and all skeletons in his closet. These days, shes a drug dealer who sells Space and Space Dust (which is a heightened version of Space seemingly the same way crack is to cocaine). The drug is primarily smoked, giving the user a euphoric high that slows down their perception of time, and is also one of the primary social drugs of the era.

However, thats not Spider Jerusalems take on the drug, as his description of the slowed-down time effect is hellish and void. Spider describes it as something that traps you in an airport waiting lounge of the mind and doesnt let you go for approximately two hundred years. It seems this particular drug was too much for even Spider Jerusalem, meaning an average person within Vertigo Comics Transmetropolitan would be wise to avoid it.

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10 of The Wildest Fictional Drugs from Transmetropolitan - Screen Rant

Open AIs new boss is the same as the old boss. But the companyand the artificial intelligence industrymay have been profoundly changed by the past five days of high-stakes soap opera. Sam Altman, OpenAIs CEO, cofounder, and figurehead, was removed by the board of directors on Friday. By Tuesday night, after a mass protest by the majority of the startups staff, Altman was on his way back, and most of the existing board was gone. But that board, mostly independent of OpenAIs operations, bound to a for the good of humanity mission statement, was critical to the companys uniqueness.

As Altman toured the world in 2023, warning the media and governments about the existential dangers of the technology that he himself was building, he portrayed OpenAIs unusual for-profit-within-a-nonprofit structure as a firebreak against the irresponsible development of powerful AI. Whatever Altman did with Microsofts billions, the board could keep him and other company leaders in check. If he started acting dangerously or against the interests of humanity, in the boards view, the group could eject him. The board can fire me, I think thats important, Altman told Bloomberg in June.

It turns out that they couldnt fire him, and that was bad, says Toby Ord, senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University, and a prominent voice among people who warn AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

The chaotic leadership reset at OpenAI ended with the board being reshuffled to consist of establishment figures in tech and former US secretary of the treasury Larry Summers. Two directors associated with the effective altruism movement, the only women, were removed from the board. It has crystallized existing divides over how the future of AI should be governed. The outcome is seen very differently by doomers who worry that AI is going to destroy humanity; transhumanists who think the tech will hasten a utopian future; those who believe in freewheeling market capitalism; and advocates of tight regulation to contain tech giants that cannot be trusted to balance the potential harms of powerfully disruptive technology with a desire to make money.

To some extent, this was a collision course that had been set for a long time, says Ord, who is also credited with cofounding the effective altruism movement, parts of which have become obsessed with the doomier end of the AI risk spectrum. If its the case that the nonprofit governance board of OpenAI was fundamentally powerless to actually affect its behavior, then I think that exposing that it was powerless was probably a good thing.

Governance Gap

The reason that OpenAIs board decided to move against Altman remains a mystery. Its announcement that Altman was out of the CEO seat said he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. An internal OpenAI memo later clarified that Altmans ejection was not made in response to malfeasance. Emmett Shear, the second of two interim CEOs to run the company between Friday night and Wednesday morning, wrote after accepting the role that hed asked why Altman was removed. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, he wrote. Their reasoning was completely different from that. He pledged to launch an investigation into the reasons for Altmans dismissal.

The vacuum has left space for rumors, including that Altman was devoting too much time to side projects or was too deferential to Microsoft. It has also nurtured conspiracy theories, like the idea that OpenAI had created artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the board had flipped the kill switch on the advice of chief scientist, cofounder, and board member Ilya Sutskever.

What I know with certainty is we don't have AGI, says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI, and innovation, at Imperial College Business School in London. I know with certainty there was a colossal failure of governance.

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Sam Altman's Second Coming Sparks New Fears of the AI Apocalypse - WIRED

Since the dawn of the modern age, the conquest of disease and death has been a central dimension of progressive optimism. Modern thought has long dreamed of a day when the human lifespan would know no upper limitwhen, as Condorcet put it, nature has fixed no limits to our hopes. Declining infant mortality, increasing life expectancy, and a growing arsenal of cures for once deadly illnesses have encouraged these hopes. To be sure, the dream of life extension sometimes mutates into a hubristic denial that death and dying are a part of life, as with the transhumanist fantasies that captivate many of Silicon Valleys techno-optimists. Nonetheless, as the philosopher Martin Hgglund has argued, the conviction that no life can ever be complete is closely linked to the broader modern conception of progress.

Recently, however, a retreat from this core conviction has been underway across the West, especially among self-declared progressives. This is one way to understand the jubilation with which many on the Western left responded to Hamass Oct. 7 attack on Israel. It takes a profound pessimism about the world to see mass slaughtercarried out by a group animated by overtly anti-modern politicsas an exhilarating act, as apparently did many of those who took to the streets to express solidarity with the attackers and turned the paragliders Hamas fighters used to descend murderously on a music festival into a positive symbol. How did we arrive at this point?

As progressive optimism declined, so did the notion that politics could reach for something beyond itself. In its place has been substituted a progressive nihilism. In the late 20th century, the vanishing of a utopian horizon left only a politics of subversion, in which disruption became an end in itself. Think of the carnivals against capitalism of the late 1990s and early aughts.

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The New Progressive Nihilism - Compact Mag

THE LESSON OF The God Desire: On Being a Reluctant Atheist (2023), its author concludes, is bleak. Despite, or (as he holds) because of, this desire, there is no God and hence no comfort and hope in the face of death. But as we know from, say, Jonathan Swift or Isaac Bashevis Singer, the bleakness of its lesson does not exclude the books enjoyability. Much of the enjoyment of this book comes from the one thing that David Baddiel thinks he can offer to lighten his messagelaughter. For example, he quotes a line from Maurice MaeterlinckThe living are just the dead on holidaythat, he says, sends bad shivers down his spine, but it is also very funny.

The humor in this short and serious book will not surprise readers who know its author as a successful British performer and writer of comedy. Its seriousness will not surprise those familiar with his well-received book on antisemitism, Jews Dont Count (2021), and a play, Gods Dice (2019), that, like Michael Frayns Copenhagen (1998), finds drama in the history of quantum physics. Baddiel also writes novels and books for children and is a keen observer and analyst of the game of soccer.

Baddiels life is clearly one of considerable achievement, but it is compromised, he explains, by his fear of death and a related, unsatisfied desire for God to exist. He loves God in the way he does Santa Claus: in neither case, sadly, is the object of his love real. He finds himself, therefore, a reluctant but also fundamentalist atheist. This means, first, that he knows, rather than merely believes, that there is no God. It means, too, that he rejects various ersatz Gods to which people have turned for spiritual solacenature, wonder, love. None of these, he insists, do anything to allay our fear of death.

This fundamentalist atheism might seem to align Baddiel with the newor, less politely, undergraduateatheism of such figures as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He dislikes, however, their dismissal of great religious traditions as mere fairy stories. The tradition in which he was brought up, Judaism, is a repository of rituals, acts, and customs that have enabled a people to survive persecution and worse. Moreover, the New Atheists are guilty of a macho pretense that people require no spiritual solace when confronted with anxiety about the prospect of death.

God, asserts Baddiel, is all about death. It is the horror of oblivion and nothingness that has been the main driver of religious belief. God has served other functionsfor instance, to provide meaning and narrative structure to peoples livesbut Baddiel would agree with Tolstoy, in his Confession (1882), that these are spin-offs from the main role. Whatever meaning I am tempted to assign to my life leaches out with my death. There is, for Baddiel, nothing self-obsessed in this lust to survive after death. He endorses John Updikes suggestion that it is because of our love and praise of the world that we cant bear to think of [the] shutting of our window onto it.

Many historians of religion will challenge the claim that God is all about death, emphasizing instead a felt need for a God who maintains order and harmony, say, or who sanctions the moral law. But Baddiel might be willing to soften his claim and simply point out that many people, himself included, desire the existence of a God who guarantees survival after death, and that its for them that his book is written. Moreover, his argument for atheism doesnt turn on any particular form of the God desire but on its strength. It is not like traditional arguments against the existence of God, such as that deriving from the problem of evil. Indeed, Baddiel wants to bat away nearly all familiar arguments on the subject, pro or con. Even when one is unable to detect flaws in their reasoning, he indicates, these arguments have no power to persuade.

Baddiels own argumentwith its Nietzschean and Freudian tracesis that the very intensity of the God desire shows belief in the divine to be delusional. To the obvious objection that, in general, strongly wishing for something does not exclude its existence, Baddiel replies that it does so in cases where the something is invisible. When, that is, something cannot be, in concrete terms, experienced, an intense desire for it shows it to be a fantasy. There is surely some confusion here. Visible or invisible, a things existence or nonexistence cannot be settled by what people wish to be real. Wishes cannot dictate what is out there.

That said, Baddiel is driving at two important points. The first is the fact that when you desperately want a belief to be true, you should be especially careful in your judgment. Perhaps youve paid insufficient attention to reasons against the belief, or have surrounded yourself only with people who reinforce it. Second, as Baddiel notes, projection of features onto the world in accordance with our desires is a familiar phenomenon. The lover, desperate for the beloved to return his love, reads into simple gestures and words emotions that may not be there. For Baddiel, the believers alleged experience of Gods love is similarlyand economicallyexplained in terms of a wish-fulfilling projection onto reality. But while these considerations should be taken seriously, they do not warrant the claim, by fundamentalist atheists, to know that God is a delusion. Moreover, this is a claim to which religious believers have a reply. The experience of Gods love during prayer, meditation, or moments of personal crisis, they insist, is a palpable, concrete one, quite different in kind from the young lovers wishful projection of love reciprocated.

William James long ago noted that an impasse is soon reached between competing interpretations of putative religious experience. For those who have it, its veridicality cannot be in doubt, while for those, like Dawkins, who are religiously tone-deaf, testimonies to religious experience are ones whose truth they are no more obliged to recognize than that of reports of encounters with gremlins or angels. Baddiels claim to know that God does not exist may be unwarranted, but nonetheless, like others to whom religious experience is foreign, he has no reason to believe in God and to look to God, therefore, for comfort and hope in the face of death.

But might he look elsewhere for this? He doesnt consider any nontheistic proposals for a sort of survival of personhood after death, such as the Buddhist teaching of rebirth. Nor does he discuss transhumanist scenarios in which, say, electronic copies of ones brain are supposed to ensure a sort of survival. What would worry Baddiel, Im sure, about such speculations is that they at best promise only a sort of survival. The coming into existence after my death of somebody or something that has some kind of continuity with myself is small comfort. Despair at the shutting of my particular window onto the world is hardly alleviated by the prospect of a related, but nevertheless different, window opening.

So, are Baddiel and fellow atheists who share his anxieties left with nothing except some laughter to lighten their lives? Perhaps the following thought might give a little more light. Baddiels claim that [d]eath is shit simply because of the prospect of oblivion strikes me as too simple. In my own case, certainly, I find anxiety about my death to be a mlange of largely inchoate fears and feelings. They include, in addition to the image of the closing window, a concern about dying well, a nagging fear of having significantly wasted my life, a sympathy for those who might miss me, a hope that my death might benefit some people or creatures, and an unpleasant sense of objects that matter to me falling into the hands of people to whom they mean nothing.

None of these are happy thoughts, but unlike the blank horror of oblivion, they are ones that, however modestly, a person can do something about. I can leave money to a good charity and bequeath my paintings to someone who will care for them. I can try to cultivate a certain calm and dignity that will serve me, and those around me, during the final days. I might even try to finish writing the big book that Ive been too lazy or lacking in confidence to complete.

I would like to think that David Baddiel might find in these and other strategies not a reconciliation with death but rather an accommodation with it that goes a bit beyond the laughter that, at present, is all I got.

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Is Laughter All Weve Got? On David Baddiels The God Desire - lareviewofbooks

According to a November study by the management consultancy Bain and the Italian luxury association Altagamma, the global luxury market is projected to reach $1.6 trillion in 2023 sales, marking an 8-10% increase from 2022. Growth is set to outpace that of the last few years, with sales surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

There is a question mark regarding the profitability of brands, both this year and next year, said Federica Levato, senior partner and EMEA leader of fashion and luxury at Bain, and co-author of the annual Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study. Theres increased attention being placed on scenario-based budgeting for next year. So far, brands have been very good at absorbing the delta costs of economic impacts in their prices and gross margins. But with the consolidating growth rates, the cost base is increasing.

The report, which came out on November 14, is based on macroeconomic data like GDP and the consumer confidence index, as well as Bains and Altagammas latest luxury industry forecasts. It also factors luxury industry players trading performance, annual reports, quarterly results and analyst reports, as well as findings from 100 expert interviews.

The European luxury market is expected to grow 7% to $111 billion in 2023, as a rebound in tourism offsets weakening in local consumer spending, the report found. Local tourist spending has surpassed pre-pandemic levels, driven by the sales of full-price products. In the U.K., the luxury market faces setbacks due to the removal of tax-free shopping in 2020, as well as a lack of tourism. According to a study from March by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, visits to British attractions in 2022 increased 69% compared to 2021, but the attractions saw 37.8 million fewer visits compared to 2019. For 2024, the report predicts GDP growth of 1.4% in the U.K.

The U.S. luxury market continues to slow down due to a number of macroeconomic factors, including inflation, student loan repayments, a weaker luxury ecosystem in the U.S., a declining consumer demand for department stores and a lack of post-lockdown savings. GDP growth is forecasted to grow 1.5% in 2024. The U.S. has gained traction as a luxury market, going from $88 billion in sales in 2019 to $110 billion this year. As a result, many brands are focusing on their top-spending customers.

Brands are focusing on top-customer strategies and developing dedicated value propositions, products and experiences for that audience, said Levato. Meanwhile, the entry-level or core customer can feel a bit left behind. [Retailers] dont have a dedicated customer experience for that customer.

And while Gen Z isnt driving significant sales, the demo is bringing influence. In an economic downturn, Gen Z doesnt have big purchasing power, but millennials and Gen X do, said Levato. But Gen Z is by far the generation that is influencing the other generations the most, in terms of tastes, value systems and cultural change. Brands who engage in that dialogue will win out.

Top-selling luxury categories are shifting, from small leather goods to others. Jewelry is set to reach $32.7 billion in market value in 2023. A big driver is the fine jewelry category, which is proving to be an investment proposition for high-net-worth customers, along with ready-to-wear investment pieces. For its part, Tiffany & Co. re-opened its flagship on NYCs Fifth Avenue in May after a reported $70 million renovation. The goal was to attract more high-net-worth customers and reintroduce customers to Tiffany & Co.s retail proposition, according to the company.

The premium beauty market is also seeing growth, which is being driven by the lipstick effect among aspirational customers in the Americas and Europe. Prada, for one, re-launched its beauty collection in July to focus on design-led palettes and logoed lip products.

Overall, brands are focusing on their own channels to reach customers, as multi-brand retailers struggle to define their value proposition and customers increasingly seek out branded physical experiences. Multi-brand retailer Showfields, for one, filed for bankruptcy in October after closing its Manhattan store. As time goes on, DTC is becoming less about e-commerce and more about a combination of physical and digital touchpoints.

We talk about trans-human retail a mixture of physical retail enabled by technologies and digital touchpoints that enhance the customer experience as a whole, said Levato. Finding a new and relevant role for the multi-brand channel needs to start from the brands themselves, because its also helpful for the brand to enhance the value proposition there for the customer.

According to the report, online and mono-brand channels are expected to account for two-thirds of the entire luxury market by 2030. The brands that are poised to win in the long term are leading on sustainability and embracing technology, said Levato.

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Luxury industry set to reach $1.6 trillion in sales this year - Glossy

During a recent appearance on the "Conversations That Matter" podcast, John Cooper, the frontman and bassist for the Grammy-nominated Christian rock band SKILLET, weighed in on "queer theory", a field of study that challenges existing traditional ideas about identity, sexuality, and gender particularly that of heteronormativity, or the belief that heterosexuality is the natural, moral, or "normal" expression of sexuality. The 48-year-old musician, who is promoting his recently released second book, "Wimpy, Weak And Woke", said in part: "I believe that queer theory is literally the end of all things. There will be no meaningful conversations even able to have in the world if queer theory actually becomes as ubiquitous as it seems like it is already becoming. There will be no distinctions between anything. If you embrace queer theory, and you embrace the idea that men can be women and women can be men, or you can be both, or neither, blah, blah, blah, then you will end up having to accept that there really is no difference between mankind and beast. It just follows. And in fact, the queer theorists would probably be, like, 'Yeah, that's right.'"

He continued: "Sexuality, to me, that's the key. If the church does not stand our ground on sexuality, we lose everything. We absolutely lose everything.

"This is just so upsetting to me. A lot of Christians just do not believe that it's as bad as it is They just refuse to believe it. And they keep saying, 'Guys, there's nothing new under the sun. It's always been this bad. You're making it seem like it's worse.' That's just not true. It hasn't always been this bad.

"Transgenderism is the most civilizational-shifting thing that has happened in I don't even know how long. You're talking about something that could change the trajectory of human nature forever. And, of course, if anybody's done the reading, I'm not gonna get into this, and I don't write about this in the book, but if anybody knows what transhumanism is, we're one step away from transhumanism, which we won't even get into," he added, referencing the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints. "And transgenderism sort of makes that possible. It's a sort of Gnosticism that really will bring us into a man-and-machine kind of thing coming in together. It's absolutely horrifying."

Cooper previously warned against transgender ideology earlier this year in an interview with The Daily Signal.

"We don't even believe in objective reality now," he lamented, referring to American society. "We are saying you can be a Christian as you want to, as long as you privatize it. You can be a Christian at your home. Just don't go around telling people. But in the public sphere, [where] we used to be able to talk about religion and objective reality In the public sphere, we are going to make peoples personal subjective feelings be public truth.

"So if you say, 'I'm a boy, but I know I'm actually a girl, and I believe it in my heart,' the public has to say your inner feelings are true," he added. "But if somebody says, 'No. I can see objective reality. You are a boy,' that's not publicly true, though it can be a privately held belief if you want.

"That's the way to end all things," Cooper said. "That is the destruction of objective reality."

In various interviews over the years, Cooper has said that he "always had faith in God" and that his mother was a "Jesus fanatic." He also claimed that he was willing to put his career on the line to take a stand for Christ.

In 2021, Cooper was asked by the "Undaunted.Life: A Man's Podcast" what he would say to someone who says that Satan works through rock music, and thus Christians shouldn't play rock music. He responded: "I would say Satan can work through just about anything. I would say that music is created not by the Devil; [it is] created by the Lord. All things were created by God. So instead of thinking that the Devil owns a genre of music, I would say capture that music and bring it back into subjection under the lordship of Christ."

As for what he would say to someone who says it is sinful for Christians to have tattoos, Cooper said: "I understand why Christians think that, because of the Old Testament. I would say it probably takes a little bit of a longer explanation of Old Testament law and what it meant. But a short version would be there are some things in the Old Testament that were a picture of something in the New Testament. There are some things that are not pictures, like murder we don't murder, we don't steal, so and so forth. Dietary restrictions, things like that, were a picture of something.

"Here's what God wanted: God wants to make his people set apart and holy unto his name," he continued. "And I don't think that God does that any longer from the way that we look; he does that now because of Christ's work on the cross, his resurrection, and he sanctifies us, which sets us apart from the sinner and the pagan."

SKILLET's latest album, "Dominion", was released in January 2022 via Atlantic.

"Wimpy, Weak And Woke" was released on November 14.

John's debut book, "Awake & Alive To Truth", has had over 10 printings and won the Book Impact Award at the 2021 K-Love Fan Awards. His podcast, "Cooper Stuff", continues to grow rapidly as well with over four million downloads and more than two million YouTube views.

John Cooper press photo courtesy of The Media Collective

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