Wonderful
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
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Louis Armstrong was one of the truly great musicians, and What a Wonderful World is one of the truly great songs.
To get just a hint of his influence, have a look at his discography. Section 1 consists of releases on 78 and 45 rpm, released between 1923 (before either of my parents were born) and 1970 (when I was a toddler), while section 2 consists of LPs and EPs, released between 1944 and 1971. Absolutely unbelievable, and if you think you’ve never heard any of Louis Armstrong’s music... well, you’re probably wrong.
Consider the fact that What a Wonderful World was first recorded in 1967, and Louis Armstrong died over fifty years ago, in 1971. Now consider the fact that the song has over 800 million streams on Spotify, and you won’t even scratch the surface of his influence.
I’ll think about that for a moment, before thinking about someone far less wonderful.
Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian (though it really hurts me to admit that) businessman and television personality, probably best known for his role on Dragons’ Den, where he adopted the name “Mr. Wonderful”, after a sarcastic comment from Barbara Corcoran. Interestingly, though, he later said:
“There's a reason people call me Mr. Wonderful. Because I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts but it's still the truth. I look at it this way. I prefer deals where I have control, 51%. And I give the entrepreneur anything they want in terms of setting the metrics. And what matters is, 'Tell me what you're going to do in the next year, year and a half. Put some milestones out there. If you reach them you stay running the business. If you don't, I whack you and I put somebody else in place because they still own their stock and I want to get my money back.'”
I find it rather strange that he appears to think that the latter makes him sound tougher, where I think it makes him sound like an even bigger jerk, but sure. Whatever.
I found his career summary quite confusing, and more than a little concerning. All I can say is that I would not want to participate in any business associated with O’Leary.
And then there’s his political activities. In the pre-COVID years, after teasing that he might run for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, he officially entered the race on 18-Jan-2017. And, though he was apparently a front-runner in most of the polls, he dropped out of the race on 26-Apr-2017.
His stated reason for resigning was that, while he thought he could win the Conservative leadership, he did not think he could beat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, due to his lack of support in Quebec. It seems odd that he would not have considered Quebec beforehand, though, since pretty much everyone familiar with Canadian politics understands the importance of Quebec, but O’Leary apparently didn’t even speak French at the time. In any case, he endorsed Maxime Bernier, and dropped out.
The oddest thing for me is that the website for his leadership run still appears to be up, but I found no evidence that it has been updated since 2017 – in fact, the only date references I could see were on the “news” links, which all appeared to be from 2017. I’m not sure what to make of this, but it seems unprofessional – to me, at least – to leave something like this untouched for so long.
But why would I suddenly be so curious about O’Leary in the first place?
Who would have thought he would be such a prominent figure in a story about building a new data centre in Utah?
It wasn’t exactly on my bingo card, but the part I found most interesting is how he responded to criticism about the project. For background, the Stratos Project is described as a “major energy and technology infrastructure initiative” supported under an agreement between the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) and Box Elder County, in Utah. The original design appears to have covered 40,000 acres, and was described as expected to create thousands of construction jobs and roughly 2,000 permanent positions, along with revenue for Box Elder County.
As one might easily predict, concerns have been raised around factors such as the environmental impact of such a project, the legislative process by which the project was approved, suggested possible conflicts of interest within the state government, and so on. As one might also have predicted, people started organizing resistance to the project, which included the engagement of a public relations firm known as Elevate Communications.
As a Democrat-leaning public relations firm in Utah, they can hardly be described as a media juggernaut, but that didn’t stop O’Leary from responding.
I learned about this through The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, in a segment titled Shark Tank Jackass HUMILIATED, which showed O’Leary (on Fox News) essentially accusing Gabi Finlayson (of Elevate Communications) of being a Chinese “cell” in Utah, and then showed a response from Ms Finlayson and Jackie Morgan (also from Elevate Communications) that they are not associated with the Chinese government.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one. It’s China.”
The problem, however (from O’Leary’s perspective), is that the response from Ms Finlayson and Ms Morgan demonstrates the absurdity of O’Leary’s wild accusations in such a way that he (in my opinion) appears to be a complete idiot. Watch the segment – it’s both hilariously funny, and also an excellent example of how to respond to this sort of attempted smear.
I was planning to end this post with a comment on a follow-up segment, Billionaire Baby Man Throws Massive Tantrum (incidentally, O’Leary is NOT a billionaire), which is a discussion between Ms Finlayson and Sam Seder, and then comment on more recent news, such as the appointment of a new executive director of MIDA, and the likely losses in the primary elections of Box Elder County Commissioners Lee Perry and Boyd Bingham.
But then I discovered that there’s more to the story!
Fox news issued a retraction / apology regarding the story, issued on four shows on Fox News and Fox Business. In one of them, host Johnny Joey Jones said:
“Kevin O’Leary appeared as a guest on the show on May 24 and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah. He made certain claims relating to the opponents of his project. Mr. O’Leary has now corrected the record and explained he has ‘no evidence’ that the Alliance for a Better Utah, Josh Kantor or Taylor Knuth are funded by China or the Chinese communist party. Fox News Media is likewise aware of no evidence that they are funded by, or acting in the direction of, or in coordination with Chinese interests in opposing Mr. O’Leary’s project. Fox News Media also apologizes for the error.”
I would note here that the apology, which sounds as if it were dictated by a team of lawyers protecting Fox News, does not appear to include Ms Finlayson or Elevate Communications, but O’Leary’s social media post does:
“Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Kantor are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party”
Now that’s wonderful!
Cheers!
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