By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Four weeks of protests against the pension reform in France have crippled supply to French refineries and refinery operations as workers join the nationwide industrial action, while prices for European crude grades are depressed due to low French demand.

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron pushed through with a controversial pension reform without a vote in Parliament under a parliamentary clause known as 49:3. The pension reform proposes to raise the retirement age in France by two years to 64.

The strikes in France against the reform began in February and escalated this month, with workers in many sectors, including refinery and port workers, joining the industrial action.

Macron’s move without a parliamentary vote sparked even more protests and street blockades in Paris and other cities in the country.

The strikes have disrupted power supply, refining operations, and fuel deliveries for four weeks. Now, most of France’s refineries are either shut down by strikes or working at heavily reduced capacity, also because of a lack of crude deliveries due to strikes among port workers, which prevent the discharging of crude cargoes.  

Apart from refining operations, the strikes have disrupted LNG imports into France as LNG import terminals have been shut down. France has four LNG receiving terminals, Dunkirk, Montoir, Fos Cavaou, and Fos Tonkin.  

The four weeks of strikes have crippled refined product supply in France, where 17% of fuel stations were missing at least one fuel product as of Monday, according to French petroleum association UFIP, cited by Reuters.

At the same time, gasoline refining margins in Europe have jumped to $23 per barrel, the highest since October.

But the lack of French crude demand is weighing down on the prices of the crude oil grades from the North Sea, the Caspian region, and West Africa, traders told Reuters.   

The United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency MI5 on Tuesday announced a heightened terror threat level for Northern Ireland, moving it from “substantial” to “severe”.

This means that according to the British government an attack is highly likely, according to UK media reports, with Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris informing the House of Commons that the decision was MI5’s alone and was independent of ministers based on the threat evidence before authorities.

He briefed members of parliament via written statement, which reads: “MI5 has increased the threat to Northern Ireland from Northern Ireland Related Terrorism from ‘SUBSTANTIAL’ (an attack is likely) to ‘SEVERE’ (an attack is highly likely).

“The public should remain vigilant, but not be alarmed, and continue to report any concerns they have to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).”

The last suspected terror-related violence in the region occurred on February 22 of this year with the murder of a senior police officer, Det Ch Insp John Caldwell, shot outside a soccer complex in Omagh, County Tyrone:

He was off duty and was putting footballs into the boot of his car after coaching young people when two gunmen approached him and shot him several times.

…Police said the primary focus of their investigation was on violent dissident republicans, including the New IRA.

The New IRA later claimed responsibility in a typed statement which appeared in Londonderry on Sunday 26 February.

While the UK government views Northern Ireland as largely peaceful compared to the height of violence in the 20th century, “a small number of people remain determined to cause harm to our communities through acts of politically motivated violence,” according to Secretary Heaton-Harris.

This week marked one month since the Detective Chief John Caldwell Inspector was gunned downhttps://t.co/AMlxoUacM7

— Belfast Live (@BelfastLive) March 24, 2023

He cited “increase in levels of activity relating to Northern Ireland Related Terrorism, which has targeted police officers.”

In November of last year, there was a bombing attempt, according to BBC:

An attempted murder investigation was launched after a police patrol vehicle was damaged in a bomb attack in Strabane, County Tyrone, on 17 November.

Police said a strong line of inquiry was that the New IRA was behind the attack. Four men who were arrested were later released.

Heaton-Harris’ briefing additionally said, “The political future of Northern Ireland rests with the democratic will of the people and not the violent actions of the few.” He added: “Together we will ensure there is no return to the violence of the past.”

The five official terror threat levels in the UK are as follows:

• Low – an attack is highly unlikely

• Moderate – an attack is possible, but not likely

• Substantial – an attack is likely – this is the UK’s national threat level

• Severe – an attack is highly likely

• Critical – an attack is highly likely in the near future

At the moment the threat level over the whole of the United Kingdom is “substantial”. 

Authored by Jeffrey Sachs via KoreaHerald.com,

The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.

The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35 percent according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding NATO and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahadeen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged. In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years, until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $2 trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 gross domestic product below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US Government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralyzing the banking system.

The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US Government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand NATO to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for NATO countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US Government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is undersecretary of state. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, who played the same role for Vice President Biden in 2014.

The US overlooked to two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in Western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. The second is that NATO enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into NATO.

The US repeatedly asserts that NATO is a defensive alliance. Yet NATO bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. NATO forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept NATO in Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of NATO; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement. The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over NATO enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

In March 2022, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognized that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

Israel’s Prime Minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

Since then, the war has escalated.

According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September. More recently, the US and allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-NATO country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line. Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

Above all, the Government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.

*  *  *

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, best­selling author, innovative educator and global leader in sustainable development.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

It’s no secret that globalist institutions are obsessed with Artificial Intelligence as some kind of technological prophecy.

They treat it as if it is almost supernatural in its potential and often argue that every meaningful industrial and social innovation in the near future will owe its existence to AI.

The World Economic Forum cites AI as the singular key to the rise of what they call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” 

In their view, there can be no human progress without the influence of AI algorithms, making human input almost obsolete.

This delusion is often promoted by globalist propagandists.  For example, take a look at the summarized vision of WEF member Yuval Harari, who actually believes that AI has creative ability that will replace human imagination and innovation.  Not only that, but Harari has consistently argued in the past that AI will run the world much better than human beings ever could.

Harari’s examples of AI creativity might sound like extreme naivety to many of us, but he knows exactly what he is doing in misrepresenting the capabilities of algorithms.  Games like chess and Go are games of patterns restricted by rules, there only so many permutations of these patterns in any given scenario and AI is simply faster at spotting them than most humans because that is what it is designed to do by software creators.  This is no different that solving a mathematical equation; just because a calculator is faster than you does not mean it is “creative.”

There is a big difference between cognitive automation and cognitive autonomy.  AI is purely automation; it will play the games it is programmed to play and will learn to play them well, but it will never have an epiphany one day and create a new and unique game from scratch unless it is coded to do so.  AI will never have fun playing this new game it made, or feel the joy of sharing that game with others, so why would it bother?  It will never seek to contribute to the world any more than it is pre-programmed to do.

The manner in which globalists hype AI is very tactical, however.  When Harari claims that many people will become part of the “useless class” once AI takes over the economy, he is hinting at another globalist ideology based on elitism – Transhumanism.  The goal of transhumanism is to one day merge human bodies and human minds with technology and AI, and only a limited group of people will have the resources to accomplish this (the globalists).

Are you afraid of becoming part of the “useless class”?  Well, if you scrape and beg and serve every whim of the elitist establishment then maybe you will be lucky enough to get implants which allow you to interface with AI, and then your future employment and “usefulness” will be secured.  Doesn’t that sound nice?

But, like all the visions of narcissists there are delusions of godhood and then there is reality.  I continue to have serious doubts that AI will ever be legitimately autonomous or legitimately beneficial to humanity in any way beyond having the ability to calculate quickly within mathematical rules. Speedy data analysis can be useful in many areas of science, but it’s not really proof of autonomous intelligence, and algorithms can be predictive but not any more predictive than human beings looking at the same statistical data. There is nothing about AI that is impressive when one considers what little it actually accomplishes.

AI is a toy, a parlor trick, not a living entity with independent observations and conclusions. And, it’s certainly not a god-like being capable of showering us with scientific ambrosia or building a perfect civilization.  I predict that a society dependent on AI will actually stagnate and remain trapped in stasis, never really inventing anything of much value and never progressing.  It will only ever be concerned with homogenization – The merging of people with the algorithm.  That is where ALL the society’s energies will go.

As a point of reference to why AI is overrated, all we have to do is look at the behavior of AI programs like ChatGPT; the algorithm has been discovered on numerous occasions to contain extreme political biases always leaning to the far-left, including biases based in beliefs not backed in any way by scientific evidence. Interestingly, ChatGPT will even at times display a seemingly hostile response to conservative concepts or inconvenient facts. The bot will then DENY it is giving personal opinions even when its responses are consistently pro-leftist.

How is political bias possible for a piece of software unless it was programmed to display that bias? There is no objectivity to be found in AI, nor any creativity, it will simply regurgitate the personal opinions or biases of the people that created it and that engineered how it processes data.

Unlike a typical human teenager that seeks to adopt the opposing social or political beliefs of their parents in order set themselves apart, AI will never metaphorically dye its hair blue, pierce its nose and proclaim itself vegan – It will always do what its creators want it to do.  Another example of this dynamic is AI art, which essentially steals the stylistic properties of numerous human artists entered into its database and copies them. While imitation might be considered the highest form of flattery, it’s not the same as creativity.

This might not sound like much of a problem when it comes to a simple chatbot or the making of cartoons. But, it’s a massive problem when we start talking about AI influencing social and governmental policies.

The globalists argue that AI will be everywhere – In business, in schools, in corporate operations, in scientific enterprises, and even within government. It MUST run everything. Why? They don’t really say why other than to make vague promises of incredible advancements and previously unimaginable benefits. To date, there have been no profound innovations produced by AI, but I suppose pro-AI propagandists will say that the golden age is “right around the corner.”

The uses for AI are truly limited to helping humans with simple tasks, but there is still a cost.  A self driving car might be great for a person that is physically handicapped, but it can also be a crutch that convinces a population to never learn to drive themselves. By extension, AI is in a lot of ways the ULTIMATE crutch which leads to ultimate tyranny. If people are convinced to hand over normal human processes and decision making opportunities to automation, then they have handed over their freedoms in exchange for convenience.

More importantly, if algorithms are allowed to dictate a large portion of choices and conclusions, people will no longer feel a sense of accountability for their actions. Regardless of the consequences, all they have to do for the rest of their lives is tell themselves they were only following the suggestions (or orders) of AI. The AI becomes a form of external collectivized conscience; an artificial moral compass for the hive mind.

But who will really be controlling that moral compass and bottle-necking the decisions of millions of people? Will it be the AI, or the elites behind the curtain that manipulate the algorithm?

For many people this probably sounds like science fiction. Yes, there have been many fictional imaginings of what the world would be like in the shadow of AI – I would highly recommend the French New Wave film ‘Alphaville’ as one of the most accurate predictions on the horrors of AI and technocracy. However, what I am warning about here is not some far off theoretical future, it is already here. Take a look at this disturbing video on AI from the World Government Summit:

These are the blatant goals of globalists in plain view, with a sugar coating to make them more palatable. I wrote about the motivations of the elites and their worshipful reverence for AI in my article ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Secular Look At The Digital Antichrist’. That piece was focused on the philosophical drives that make globalists desire AI.

In this article I want to stress the issue of AI governance and how it might be made to appeal to the masses. In order to achieve the dystopian future the globalists want, they still have to convince a large percentage of the population to applaud it and embrace it.

The comfort of having a system that makes difficult decisions for us is an obvious factor, as mentioned above. But, AI governance is not just about removing choice, it’s also about removing the information we might need to be educated enough to make choices. We saw this recently with the covid pandemic restrictions and the collusion between governments, corporate media and social media. Algorithms were widely used by web media conglomerates from Facebook to YouTube to disrupt the flow of information that might run contrary to the official narrative.

In some cases the censorship targeted people merely asking pertinent questions or fielding alternative theories. In other cases, the censorship outright targeted provably factual data that was contrary to government policies. A multitude of government claims on covid origins, masking, lockdowns and vaccines have been proven false over the past few years, and yet millions of people still blindly believe the original narrative because they were bombarded with it nonstop by the algorithms. They were never exposed to the conflicting information, so they were never able to come to their own conclusions.

Luckily, unlike bots, human intelligence is filled with anomalies – People who act on intuition and skepticism in order to question preconceived or fabricated assertions. The lack of contrary information immediately causes suspicion for many, and this is what authoritarian governments often refuse to grasp.

The great promise globalists hold up in the name of AI is the idea of a purely objective state; a social and governmental system without biases and without emotional content. It’s the notion that society can be run by machine thinking in order to “save human beings from themselves” and their own frailties. It is a false promise, because there will never be such a thing as objective AI, nor any AI that understand the complexities of human psychological development.

Furthermore, the globalist dream of AI is driven not by adventure, but by fear. It’s about the fear of responsibility, the fear of merit, the fear of inferiority, the fear of struggle and the fear of freedom. The greatest accomplishments of mankind are admirable because they are achieved with emotional content, not in spite of it. It is that content that inspires us to delve into the unknown and overcome our fears. AI governance and an AI integrated society would be nothing more than a desperate action to deny the necessity of struggle and the will to overcome.

Globalists are more than happy to offer a way out of the struggle, and they will do it with AI as the face of their benevolence. All you will have to do is trade your freedoms and perhaps your soul in exchange for never having to face the sheer terror of your own quiet thoughts. Some people, sadly, believe this is a fair trade.

The elites will present AI as the great adjudicator, the pure and logical intercessor of the correct path; not just for nations and for populations at large but for each individual life. With the algorithm falsely accepted as infallible and purely unbiased, the elites can then rule the world through their faceless creation without any oversight – For they can then claim that it’s not them making decisions, it’s the AI.  How does one question or even punish an AI for being wrong, or causing disaster? And, if the AI happens to make all its decisions in favor of the globalist agenda, well, that will be treated as merely coincidental.

*  *  *

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The US House of Representatives on Monday passed a bill to punish China for its forced organ harvesting from prisoners, which would sanction anyone involved in the act and require annual government reporting on such activities taking place in foreign countries.

H.R. 1154, dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, was supported by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) along with more than a dozen other lawmakers leading the bill’s companion legislation introduced in the Senate.

“There is growing evidence that the Chinese Communist Party has and continues to harvest organs from persecuted religious groups, prisoners of conscience, and inmates,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, who introduced the bill in the Senate. “This bill will identify and punish CCP members involved in forced organ harvesting. It’s past time to hold Beijing accountable for these heinous acts.”

“It’s got real teeth. We’re not kidding,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) told the Epoch Times. “This is an atrocity, this is a crime against humanity, and it’s a war crime, because this is a war on innocent people in China, and [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping is directly responsible, but those who willingly engage in this will be held responsible.”

On the House floor, Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), highlighted the annual reporting requirement in the bill, which she said would ensure that the United States makes “an informed assessment regarding the magnitude and prevalence of this problem.”

“Given the ongoing genocide, we cannot take Beijing at its word about what it is and is not doing,” she said. “We need to investigate and we need to verify.

“We should never look away from injustice and repression wherever it takes place.” -Epoch Times

Interestingly, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) did not vote for the bill because it amounts to US overreach, the lawmakers said.

“The bill gives the President unilateral broad authority to sanction individuals and politicians without any adjudication or due process,” Massie told the Washington Examiner. “Furthermore, according to language in this bill, anyone who receives or offers compensation for an organ donation could be defined as an organ trafficker eligible for punitive actions from the US President.”

Greene called it a “flawed bill” that allows the US government inappropriate control over global affairs.

“American politicians are elected by American citizens to protect American interests,” Greene told the Examiner. “This bill, by promoting ‘the establishment of voluntary organ donation systems … in bilateral diplomatic meetings and in international forums,’ calls for non-American politicians, not elected by American citizens, to protect non-American interests. This is nothing more than another piece of legislation from the swamp that fails to put America First.”

Under the bill, the president would be required to provide Congress with a list of suspects who have participated in forced organ harvesting or human trafficking with the intent of organ harvesting. For each suspect on the list, the president must impose property- and visa-blocking sanctions, according to the legislation.

An identical version of the legislation has been introduced in the Senate, although it’s not clear when it may be brought up for a vote. -Washington Examiner

According to a study in the American Journal of Transplantation, Chinese transplant surgeons have been removing organs before donors are declared brain-dead.

Authored by Alex Murrell,

Introduction:

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art.

Over 11 days the researchers at Marttila & Kiley Inc. asked 1,001 US citizens a series of survey questions.

What’s your favourite colour? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would you rather figures that are nude or clothed? Should they be at leisure or working? Indoors or outside? In what kind of landscape? 

Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. The pair repeated this process in a number of countries including Russia, China, France and Kenya.

Each piece in the series, titled “People’s Choice”, was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture.

But it didn’t quite go to plan.

Describing the work in his book Playing to the Gallery, the artist Grayson Perry said:

“In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.”

Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same.

Komar and Melamid, People’s Choice

After completing the work, Komar quipped:

“We have been travelling to different countries, engaging in dull negotiations with representatives of polling companies, raising money for further polls, receiving more or less the same results, and painting more or less the same blue landscapes. Looking for freedom, we found slavery.” 

This, however, was the point. The art was not the paintings themselves, but the comment they made. We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.

30 years after People’s Choice, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Let’s dive in.

Interiors all look the same

In 2011, Laurel Schwulst was planning to redecorate her New York apartment when she began searching the internet for interior design inspiration.

Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her chair.

Schwulst began sharing images to her Tumblr, “Modern Life Space“. The blog became an ever-expanding gallery of interior design inspiration. But something wasn’t right.

Laurel Schwulst:

“The Airbnb experience is supposed to be about real people and authenticity. But so many of them were similar, whether in Brooklyn, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, or Santiago.”

Schwulst had identified an AirBnB design aesthetic that had organically emerged and was quickly spreading through the platform’s properties. White walls. Raw wood. Nespresso machines. Eames chairs. Bare brick. Open shelving. Edison bulbs. The style combines the rough-hewn rawness of industrialism with the elegant minimalism of mid-century design.

International Airbnb Style

But Schwulst wasn’t the only one to identify the trend. Aaron Taylor Harvey, the Executive Creative Director of Environments at Airbnb had spotted something similar:

“You can feel a kind of trend in certain listings. There’s an International Airbnb Style that’s starting to happen. I think that some of it is really a wonderful thing that gives people a sense of comfort and immediate belonging when they travel, and some of it is a little generic. It can go either way.”

This “Modern Life Space” or “International AirBnB Style” goes by a number of other names. It’s known as the Brooklyn Look, or according to the journalist Kyle Chayka, AirSpace:

“I called this style “AirSpace”. It’s marked by an easily recognisable mix of symbols – like reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting – that’s meant to provide familiar, comforting surroundings for a wealthy, mobile elite, who want to feel like they’re visiting somewhere “authentic” while they travel, but who actually just crave more of the same: more rustic interiors and sans-serif logos and splashes of cliche accent colours on rugs and walls.”

Perhaps this seems inevitable. Isn’t it obvious that a global group of hosts all trying to present their properties to a global group of travellers would converge on a single, optimal, appealing yet inoffensive style?

AirSpace, however, isn’t just limited to residential interiors. The same tired tropes have spread beyond the spaces where we live, and taken over the spaces where we work, eat, drink and relax.

In an in-depth investigation for The Guardian, Chayka documents how the AirSpace style of interior decor has become the dominant design style of coffee shops:

“Go to Shoreditch Grind, near a roundabout in the middle of London’s hipster district. It’s a coffee shop with rough-hewn wooden tables, plentiful sunlight from wide windows, and austere pendant lighting. Then head to Takk in Manchester. It’s a coffee shop with a big glass storefront, reclaimed wood furniture, and hanging Edison bulbs. Compare the two: You might not even know you’re in different spaces. It’s no accident that these places look similar. Though they’re not part of a chain and don’t have their interior design directed by a single corporate overlord, these coffee shops have a way of mimicking the same tired style, a hipster reduction obsessed with a superficial sense of history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied the neighbourhoods they take over.”

And this isn’t just a trend that we can see in British coffee culture. The same trend has been identified in cities from Bangkok to Beijing and from Seoul to San Francisco.

AirSpace

According to The Verge:

“The coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.”

Once this interior design style became dominant in the world’s coffee shops, it began to spread throughout the wider hospitality sector.

Anne Quito, for example, writes about how the hipster makeover has made its way to restaurants in Quartz:

“Established restaurants are getting the hipster makeover. Traditional restaurants like Dickey’s Barbecue in Dallas, eateries in Toronto’s Chinatown and even the 47-year-old roadside diner chain Cracker Barrel—in the guise of its new biscuit joint Holler & Dash—are embracing chalkboard menus and reclaimed wood look to attract the affluent, design-savvy millennial.”

So, the interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants have begun to converge upon a single style. But when we move outside, the story doesn’t get much better.

Architecture all looks the same

The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to describe built environments that are defined by their transience and anonymity. Non-places, such as airports, service stations and hotels, tend towards utilitarian sterility. They prioritise function and efficiency over a softer sense of human expression and social connection.

In 1995, the Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard University, Rem Koolhaas, published an essay titled The Generic City:

“Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport— ‘all the same’? Is it possible to theorise this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring? Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? What if this seemingly accidental, and usually regretted, homogenization was an intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity?”

That opening question takes Augé’s idea of the sterile non-place and applies it to the city as a whole. Koolhaas, in effect, is arguing that soulless is becoming the default design direction of all urban architecture.

The generic city

Almost 30 years after the publication of The Generic City I think it’s clear Koolhaas’ fears were well founded. Architecture’s march towards blank homogeneity is perhaps most obvious in the quick build, low-cost apartment blocks that have rapidly spread across the United States.

Justin Fox writing for Bloomberg:

“Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises. (…) These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.”

This architectural style, characterised by boxy forms and unconvincing cladding, goes by names such as Fast-Casual Architecture and McUrbanism. But perhaps most commonly, these buildings are known as five-over-ones.

When Justin Fox drove across the US, he realised that they were not specific to one city or state. They were everywhere. And they were proliferating: 

“In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises.”

But why is this the case? Why are the majority of large American buildings succumbing to the same style?

Coby Lefkowitz offers four reasons in his essay, “Why Everywhere Looks the Same”. First, unlike in the early 20th century, developers are increasingly constrained by building codes. Second, rapidly rising land costs cause developers to pack as many properties as possible into every site. Third, the rising barriers to entry have caused the industry to consolidate. And fourth, developers seek to reduce their costs by reusing the same plans across multiple sites:

“It would be disappointing enough to fail in gracing a land as physically beautiful as the US with the built companions it deserves. But it’s downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of living in interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places, given the thousands of precedents for inspiration worldwide, and many hundreds within our borders. Instead, we’ve copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh. We’ve all seen them. Covered with fiber cement, stucco, and bricks or brick-like material. They’ve shown up all over the country, indifferent to their surroundings. Spreading like a non-native species.”

America’s five-over-one architecture

Cities once felt rooted in time and place. The Victorian grandeur of London. The Art Deco glamour of New York. The neon modernity of Tokyo. But with anodyne architecture spreading across the United States, cities are beginning to lose their contextual identities. They are all starting to look the same:

“Institutional developers march forward, ignorant of what makes Portland, Maine different from Portland, Oregon, or Philadelphia from Kansas City. Unique local traditions? Completely different climates? Hah! Joke’s on us. A box fits just as well in any of these places.”

And it isn’t just the design of our residential buildings but our professional ones as well.

In an article for Grist, Heather Smith describes the homogeneity of the office parks she’d pass on the way to her mother’s place of work and how present day Silicon Valley feels so similar.

“All the offices and factories along the way to my mom’s office were smaller versions of the same thing — set back from the road, behind deep rectangles of rolling green lawn, no sidewalks. Sometimes clusters of begonias added accent marks, or regimented little bushes pruned into spheres or squares.”

Smith continues:

“I thought about this recently when I went driving through Silicon Valley, because I was surprised at how similar it was to the neighborhoods that I had grown up in. Not that it was an exact replica (…). But the architecture was the same — the same low-slung buildings, set back from the street by parking lots, each complex its own self-contained bubble, separated from the road by a row of trees.”

So, the places where we live and work have begun to converge upon a single style, but we’re also seeing the same trend occur in the way we travel between them.

Cars all looks the same

In 2015, the ex-Chairman of BBH London, Jim Carroll recalled his realisation 32 years earlier that aerodynamic tests had begun to make all cars look alike:

“Some of you will recall the day in 1983 when we woke up and noticed that the cars all looked the same. There was a simple explanation. They’d all been through the same wind tunnel. We nodded assent at the evident improvement in fuel efficiency, but we could not escape a weary sigh of disappointment. Modern life is rubbish.”

In Carroll’s opinion, because all vehicles underwent the same wind tunnel tests, manufacturers were independently converging on the same optimal set of forms, proportions and dimensions. And as a result, homogeneity in car design was increasing.

What Carroll didn’t realise was that things were about to get a lot worse.

Sat at a red light, Drew Magary took the opportunity to scope out some new car ideas. Suddenly he saw an SUV that looked attractive. But he couldn’t quite see the badge. Another car was blocking his line of sight:

“Maybe it’s a Bimmer,” I said to the dog. “It kinda looks like one.” It wasn’t. It was a Hyundai Santa Fe, which kinda resembles the Acura RDX, which kinda resembles the Volvo XC60, which kinda resembles the BMW X3. (…) These four models are all 75 inches wide, 66 inches high (save for the Volvo, which is 65), and they only differ in length by a maximum of three inches. They all have rear quarter windows smaller than a porthole on a submarine. They all have chrome accents to increase the glam factor by, like, five percent. And they all abhor right angles, (…). They’re spiritual clones, and they’re not exceptions in being so.”

The wind tunnel effect (original image source unknown)

But why do so many modern cars look the same?

Jim Carroll’s wind-tunnel theory is certainly one reason. Another is that the automotive giants increasingly share vehicle “platforms” between the many brands that they operate. And Ian Callum, who led design at Jaguar-Land Rover for two decades, provides a third theory.

“There was a time when you could identify the country the car came from. But today, basically every company makes cars for basically every country (…). Cars are now designed for the broadest possible audience, across the broadest number of countries, to be manufactured in the most efficient possible way.”

Callum continues:

“Before the typical car designer can even begin sketching out a model, they’re given specs from the packaging department (…). The measurements might vary within millimetres. These strict dimensions are agonisingly chosen to please the needs of the wind tunnel, to adhere to government safety regulations, to properly accommodate the average American family’s collective weight of 78,000 lbs., and to allow for enough cargo space for all their crap.”

These three theories explain why the three-dimensional design of cars has been converging over time. But they don’t explain why the colour of cars has converged as well.

According to data shared by Jökull Solberg, around 40% of cars sold in 1996 were monochromatic (black, white, silver or grey). 20 years later that figure had increased to 80%.

There are many suggestions for why this might be. Perhaps these colours come as standard and everything else is an optional upgrade. Perhaps brighter colours fade more quickly. Maybe people buy less vibrant colours when times are more turbulent. Maybe the resale market for monochromatic cars is more buoyant. Or maybe the paired-back design of smartphones informed stylistic trends in the auto industry. 

Regardless, the result is the same. Where once carparks were a kaleidoscope of reds, blues and greens, today they capture a sea of desaturation.

And what’s more? The visual identities of car brands seem to be following suit. In September 2020, Vauxhall released a modernised, minimal marque. According to Henry Wong at Design Week:

“Vauxhall unveiled its new logo last week, a “confidently British” look, which reworks the griffin icon and introduces a blue-and-red colour scheme. Most prominent is its new flat styling — a simplified version of the logo’s previous 3D look. Vauxhall calls the redesign the “progressive face of the brand”.”

The “blanding” of automotive brand identities

Vauxhall had ditched a logo that looked like a chrome sculpted bonnet badge and replaced it with a flatter, thinner, altogether simpler execution. But they weren’t the only one. As Wong says, at least five other major manufacturers had charted a similar course:

“It’s a familiar story within car branding of late. Audi first unveiled a minimalist-inspired rebrand in 2018, but it’s been followed by a host of other marques in the past year. Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota, Nissan have all revealed new branding and each with a flat logo.”

So, the cars we drive, their colours and their logos have begun to converge upon a single style, but we’re also seeing the same trend occur in the way we look ourselves.

People all look the same

In December 2019 the journalist Jia Tolentino set about investigating a troubling trend. Many celebrities and influencers had started to resemble each other. 

“This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella.”

The look that Tolentino is describing is the result of (at least) three conspiring trends. The growing market for injectable treatments is driving a trend for physical enhancements. The rise of apps such as FaceTune is driving a trend for digital enhancements. And make-up techniques such as “strobing” and “contouring” are driving a trend for cosmetic enhancements. Over the last decade, these trends have developed in parallel, each feeding and fueling the other.

Starting at the top, Tolentino discusses the rising accessibility of beauty treatments such as Botox and fillers:

“Twenty years ago, plastic surgery was a fairly dramatic intervention: expensive, invasive, permanent, and, often, risky. But, in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox for use in preventing wrinkles; a few years later, it approved hyaluronic-acid fillers, such as Juvéderm and Restylane, which at first filled in fine lines and wrinkles and now can be used to restructure jawlines, noses, and cheeks. These procedures last for six months to a year and aren’t nearly as expensive as surgery. (…) You can go get Botox and then head right back to the office.”

But the cost of achieving this look, which has become known as “Instagram Face”, is even lower than one may imagine. Whilst the average price per syringe of filler is $683, social sharers can now use apps to achieve similar results.

Instagram Face

Rebecca Jennings writing for Vox:

“Instagram Face is so ubiquitous that there are now special filters that give you the look digitally if you can’t afford the real thing. (…) Almost no one is born with Instagram Face — by virtue of it being associated with a digital platform, the look is always mediated and performed — and even those who have it naturally still use tools like FaceTune to enhance their already algorithmically perfect features.”

Finally, these physical and digital enhancements are complemented by a third, altogether less dystopian, trend: cosmetic enhancements. Here make-up, and an almost endless supply of YouTube tutorials, are used to alter the perceived bone structure of a face.

Julia Brucculieri for the Huffington Post:

“Social media influencers these days are starting to look like beauty clones. You know the look: a full pout, perfectly arched eyebrows, maybe some expertly applied eyeliner, topped off with a healthy dose of highlighter and cheek contouring. With a few makeup brushes, a contour palette and some matte lip color, you can be well on your way to looking like everyone else.”

So where did all of this begin?

According to the make-up artist Colby Smith, Kim Kardashian is patient-zero of Instagram face. Ultimately, he says, every social media star’s goal is to look like her.

And Smith isn’t the only one to hold this opinion. Writing for The Cut, Kathleen Hou offers a similarly provocative opinion.

“Instagram’s beauty posters tend to look like they’re all the same woman, and that woman is Kim Kardashian. Thanks to hundreds of “Get the Look” tutorials, it’s never been easier to strobe and contour yourself into a facsimile of the star. So, no wonder there’s a cloning effect.”

This may seem like an exaggeration. There is, however, a truth at the centre of the assertion.

When The New Yorker interviewed Beverley Hills based plastic surgeon Jason Diamond, he claimed around a third of all his patients aspire to become a Kardashian doppelgänger:

“I’d say that thirty percent of people come in bringing a photo of Kim, or someone like Kim—there’s a handful of people, but she’s at the very top of the list, and understandably so.”

And we haven’t only started to look alike from the neck up. Dame Vivienne Westwood, the late fashion designer best known for bringing the counter-cultural punk scene onto the catwalk, comments on the way clothing has started to conform:

“Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70. We are so conformist, nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff, we have been trained to be consumers and we are all consuming far too much. I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? But I’m talking about all this disposable crap.”

So, the way we look and the way we dress has begun to converge upon a single style. But when we look at the content we consume, the story doesn’t get much better.

Media all looks the same

In the early 2010s, French blogger Christophe Courtois began curating movie posters that conformed to strikingly similar formulas.

Rom-coms often used a guy and a girl standing back-to-back against a white background. Horror films featured a close up of an eye. Action films opting for a lone character, dressed in black with their back to the camera.

Courtois’ series perfectly illustrates how, in the 21st Century, every genre of film sticks to a relatively narrow set of clichés, codes and conventions that promoters slavishly abide by.

Christophe Courtois’ cinematic clichés

In Hadley Freeman’s book Life Moves Pretty Fast, Oscar winning director Steven Soderbergh argues that this is the natural result of testing:

“If you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. (…) I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive, and score poorly, actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument.”

But is the homogenisation of Hollywood a new phenomenon?

To find out Adam Mastroianni analysed the top 20 grossing films in every year since 1977 and coded whether each was part of a “multiplicity” (i.e. a sequel, prequel, franchise, spin-off, reboot etc.).

What he found was surprising: 

“Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.”

Mastroianni continues:

“In 2021, only one of the ten top-grossing films (the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy) was an original. There were only two originals in 2020’s top 10, and none at all in 2019.”

A further finding for the research was that the revenue generated by the top 20 movies was, until 2015, around 40% of that generated by the top 200. Since then however that 40% figure has begun to climb even higher, crossing the 60% threshold in 2021.

In short, the top 20 films are becoming both bigger and more alike.

But this isn’t just happening in film. In every corner of pop culture, a smaller number of “blockbusters” is claiming a larger share of the market. What were once creative powerhouses have become factories of the familiar.

Take books.

“It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each. (…) In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.”

You can see this creative convergence for yourself when you next visit a bookstore. In fiction you’ll see many popular books following a “girl with…” naming convention. Of course, there’s Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, but we’ve also seen Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl on the Train”, M. R. Carey’s “The Girl With all the Gifts” and A. J. Grayson’s “The Girl in the Water”.

In non-fiction, if you visit the self-help category, you’ll notice that every book title seems to include a swear word. We have Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck”, Sarah Knight’s “The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck” and Alexis Rockley’s “Find your Fuck Yeah.”

Sweary self-help books

Video games are no different.

In the late 1990s, 75% or less of the best-selling video games were franchise instalments. Since 2005, it’s been closer to 100%.

I’ll quote Keith Stuart, writing for The Guardian, at length:

“The absence of the E3 expo in Los Angeles for the past two years has left a gigantic vacuum in the video game calendar. Last week, the industry did its best to fill that gaping content maw with three online events – the Summer Game fest, the Xbox and Bethesda showcase and the PC gaming show. They were underwhelming for many seasoned players. Major reveals included a remake of The Last of Us, a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI and news about the reimagining of the classic role-player System Shock.”

So, our movies, books and video games have all begun to look the same. But it’s not just the content we consume. When we look at the content brands produce the story doesn’t get much better.

Brands all look the same

In 1982 the American fashion photographer Irving Penn shot an ad for Clinique that became known as “the shelfie”. The advert is simply a photograph of the inside of a medicine cabinet. A bright white background. Glass shelves. Bottles of pills. And a few well branded Clinique products.

Since this iconic 80s ad, many other brands have created their own shelfies, including Selfridges, e. l. f. and Billie. But this isn’t the only tried and tested trope.

Here’s AIGA Eye on Design:

“There are many more oft-mimicked setups like the shelfie currently bouncing around the zeitgeist; one omnipresent shot includes objects placed on a mirror reflecting the sky, giving the illusion of a product floating in midair. Another example uses a dense pattern of water droplets to refract a single item into a series of psychedelic miniatures, while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram feeds of a major beverage syndicate and an indie skincare brand alike.”

Shelfies

In an article for The Cut, titled The Tyranny of Terrazzo, Molly Fischer pushes this thought one step further.

Whilst there is the shelfie trope and the mirror trope and the water droplet trope, these layouts all seem to share a surprisingly consistent style of art direction. They might be compositionally different, but they are conceptually alike:

“And then there are advertisements, making up a visual world of their own. The products on view (cookware, supplements, stretchy clothes) occupy blank pastel landscapes manipulated by a diversity of hands. These aren’t ads that bellow or hector; they whisper, in restrained sans-serif fonts, or chastely flirt, in letters with curves and bounce. They’re ads, sure, but they’re so well designed. In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same.” 

Whilst Clinique’s original Shelfie hails from the 80s, it wasn’t until the 2010s that it became a more widely adopted style. And the majority of companies who did so were digital-first, DTC brands.

Elizabeth Goodspeed argues this is because these brands are more likely to draw inspiration from the same vast online sources. The result, she says, is a “moodboard effect”: 

“This kind of visual homogeneity is a common occurrence in the art direction world, where ubiquitous styles operate less like trends and more like memes; remixed and diluted until they become a single visual mass. In today’s extremely-online world, the vast availability of reference imagery has, perhaps counterintuitively, led to narrower thinking and shallower visual ideation. It’s a product of what I like to call the “moodboard effect.”

So, designers use the same online platforms, draw inspiration from the same sorts of imagery and, in turn, create broadly the same types of adverts.

But it isn’t just advertising that is causing brands to all look the same. Their visual identities are converging as well.

In December 2018, Thierry Brunfaut and Tom Greenwood published an article in Fast Company where they coined a new word: Blanding.

“The worst branding trend (…) is the one you probably never noticed. I call it blanding. The main offenders are in tech, where a new army of clones wears a uniform of brand camouflage. The formula is sort of a brand paint-by-numbers. Start with a made-up-word name. Put it in a sans-serif typeface. Make it clean and readable, with just the right amount of white space. Use a direct tone of voice. Nope, no need for a logo. Maybe throw in some cheerful illustrations. Just don’t forget the vibrant colors. Bonus points for purple and turquoise. Blah blah blah.”

Companies like AirBnB, Spotify and eBay have all dropped colourful logos with expressive typography for a straighter, stricter, altogether more muted, alternative.

The homogeneity of modern brands

Ben Schott writing for Bloomberg:

“Visually, blands are simple, neutral and flat. The palette is plain and pastel (with the occasional vibrant splash); the mood is upbeat and happy, or pensive and cool, but never truly real; the dress-code is smart-casual. Bland people are stock-photo attractive (or quirkily jolie laide). (…) Complex products and technical processes are illustrated by cute cartoons or Noun Project icons. Bland logos are confident but cute, utilizing an array of tweaks and twists to provoke the all-important “smile in the mind”.”

While the tech sector has led the way on blanding, we see the trend towards flatter, more lifeless, identities playing out in categories from the high-end world of fashion to the more mass world of personal care.

In a November 2021 article, title Distinction Rebellion, Contagious claimed that more and more brands seem content to drift along in a sea of sameness:

“Look up any new corporate brand identity unveiled over the past decade and you will almost certainly find yourself staring at a flattened and simplified version of the company’s old logo. The aesthetic has become so ubiquitous that it’s acquired its own name – blanding.”

So, advertising and brand identities are becoming more and more alike. But so too are the taglines brands employ.

Shai Idelson, Strategy Director at ad agency BBH, collected a list of 27 brands whose taglines follow the “Find Your X” sentence structure. These include Lucozade’s “Find Your Flow”, Rightmove’s “Find Your Happy” and Volvic’s “Find Your Volcano”.

Idelson says:

“I love end-lines. The delicate art of capturing a meaningful thought about a brand or a product in as few words as possible. A great end-line will touch my heart and stay in my memory forever. I still remember some from my childhood. But in the last few years, something happened to end-lines. (…) The linguistic similarity is staggering.” 

The same “insight” that sits behind the 27 taglines (that young consumers celebrate individuality above all else) has also led to the “X, Your Way” end line construction. We have Nespresso’s “Indulge, Your Way”, Sonos’ “Sound, Your Way”, Dunelm’s “Dun, Your Way” and many, many more.

And so brand adverts, identities and taglines are all starting to look the same. But where does this all leave us?

Conclusion

So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.

The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.

UGC all looks the same

There are many reasons why this might have happened.

Perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimisation. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalised.

Regardless of the reasons, it seems that just as Komar and Melamid produced the “people’s choice” in art, contemporary companies produce the people’s choice in almost every category of creativity.

But it’s not all bad news.

I believe that the age of average is the age of opportunity.

When every supermarket aisle looks like a sea of sameness, when every category abides by the same conventions, when every industry has converged on its own singular style, bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive.

So, this is your call to arms. Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity.

It’s time to cast aside conformity. It’s time to exorcise the expected. It’s time to decline the indistinguishable.

For years the world has been moving in the same stylistic direction. And it’s time we reintroduced some originality.

Or as the ad agency BBH says.

When the world zigs. Zag.

Former President Trump in a new Monday night interview on Fox News declared he would “solve” the Russia-Ukraine war “in 24 hours” if he’s elected president. His words came following his kickoff campaign rally for his 2024 White House bid held in Waco, TX over the weekend. 

He told a crowd of many thousands: “I will prevent World War III, which we’re heading into” – and was met with widespread applause. But in his Monday appearance on Sean Hannity’s show, Trump explained: “If it’s not solved, I will have it solved in 24 hours with Zelensky and with Putin.”

“The key is the war has to stop now because Ukraine is being obliterated,” Trump said.

Recently both Ukrainian and Western officials have admitted heavy losses and that more ammo is needed on the front lines in order to match the Russians’ superior artillery bombardment and supplies. For over the past month pro-Kremlin forces have made steady gains around the strategic city of Bakhmut in Donetsk, having nearly encircled it. But the Ukrainians have kept up the fight, and poured more manpower and weapons in. 

China has this month tried to mediate in order to jump-start peace negotiations between the two warring sides, and Beijing has even had close contact with the Zelensky administration, but these efforts haven’t appeared to go anywhere thus far, also amid Washington and NATO skepticism. 

Trump tells Sean Hannity that he would solve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day. “A peace between them” pic.twitter.com/toimU57Kwk

— 3sidedstory 🇺🇲 (@3sidedstory) March 28, 2023

As for Trump, he remains confident, having repeated lately that he can ‘get along with’ and talk to Putin candidly. According to more from the Monday night Hannity interview:

“So you’d prefer if you were president, you think you would have a negotiated settlement?” Hannity asked Trump.

“Within 24 hours,” the former president replied.

Trump went so far as to emphasize he gets along “very well” with Putin. Recent polls have shown that a majority of Republican voters want to avoid deeper US involvement in the war.

A new IPSOS-Axios poll shows a divide on Ukraine policy among conservatives, with the debate and momentum clearly shifting in favor of those who want to avoid deeper US involvement in the war.

“Four in five Republicans want the U.S. to remain the world’s leading power — but fewer than half support giving Ukraine weapons and financial support to try to save itself from Russia, according to the latest wave of the Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index,” an IPSOS-Axios poll published earlier in mid-March found.

Utah has experienced one of its snowiest winter seasons in history. Ski resorts are repeatedly breaking snowfall records while the risk of avalanches soars. 

A video was shared on Twitter on Monday, capturing the dramatic scene of a massive avalanche at Sundance Resort.

A friend just shared this with me. Avalanche at @SundanceResort. Just now. pic.twitter.com/j2hcCNRdPl

— Chris Harrington (@CCH360) March 27, 2023

Sundance Resort tweeted the avalanche injured no one, and it happened just outside the boundaries of its trails. 

Today there was a natural avalanche that started on Mount Timpanogos and carried down the mountain into an area outside our ski area boundaries. Footage shows the dust/wind cloud reaching guests who were watching but no one was hurt as deposition area never reached our boundaries

— Sundance Resort (@SundanceResort) March 28, 2023

Last Friday, Utah broke the record for snowpack with more than 700 inches of snow this season.

Due to the record-high snowpack, the Utah Avalanche Center has posted a “considerable” avalanche risk for many areas in the state.

So much for global warming in Utah… 

Authored by Ron Paul via RPI, [emphasis ZH]

Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans.

What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued US occupation of Syria and Iraq.

Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China. US policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s. US switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace.

Then the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate.

So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying – Washington’s modus operandi – actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Republicans and Democrats in the US both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the US has resisted for years: peace in the region. Should we be surprised that the continued US occupation is not welcome in the Middle East?

The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for US multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the US is so unpopular in the Middle East?

How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine that Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

The end of the US occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the US Military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the US military cannot meet its recruitment goals?

Here’s an easy way to protect US forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will be in the hot seat, as he is expected to be deposed under oath regarding his bank’s decision to keep deceased pedophile sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as a client despite public knowledge of his status as a registered sex offender, the Financial Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

The sworn deposition – the latest development in two combined high-profile cases, is expected to take place in May behind closed doors.

The lawsuits claim that JPMorgan, which banked Epstein for 15 years from 1998 to 2013, benefited from human trafficking and ignored several internal warnings about their client’s illegal behaviour. The lender has described the claims as meritless.

The pre-trial process unearthed communications between JPMorgan employees that contained a reference to a “Dimon review” into the bank’s relationship with Epstein. The bank has denied that Dimon had any knowledge of such a review. -FT

The US Virgin Islands and a group of Epstein victims claim Dimon had knowledge of Epstein’s activities based on emails exchanged between the late sex offender and former executive Jes Staley using his JPMorgan email address.

“Jamie Dimon knew in 2008 that his billionaire client was a sex trafficker,” argued US Virgin Islands attorney Mimi Liu during a March hearing in front of Manhattan US District Judge Jed Rakoff, referring to the year Epstein was first criminally charged with sex crimes, CNBC reports.

“If Staley is a rogue employee, why isn’t Jamie Dimon?” Liu said during the hearing to discuss the bank’s efforts to have the USVI lawsuit against the bank dismissed.

“Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew,” Liu continued, noting that there were several cash transfers and wire transfers made by the prolific pedophile (Epstein), including several hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to several women which should have been flagged as suspicious.

“They broke every rule to facilitate his sex trafficking in exchange for Epstein’s wealth, connections and referrals,” said Liu, adding “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.”

That said, a person familiar with the bank’s internal probe into what Dimon knew says there are no records of any direct communications with Epstein, or records of discussions related to retaining him as a client.

Last week Judge Rakoff denied JPMorgan’s request to dismiss the lawsuits, and allowed several claims to proceed against the bank. He also ordered JPMorgan to hand over documents between Dimon and former general counsel Steve Cutler from before 2006, the year Epstein was first arrested.

Dimon’s looming deposition comes after other senior figures at the bank, including Mary Erdoes, the head of the bank’s $4tn asset and wealth management business, were scheduled to be interviewed by plaintiffs’ lawyers as part of the lawsuits.

Former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley is also set to be deposed by his former employer’s lawyers in April, after the US bank countersued him for any potential damages. JPMorgan’s complaint claims Staley witnessed and participated in sex crimes at Epstein’s residences, and alleges he did not disclose this “despite having a fiduciary duty” to do so. -FT

Staley, who emailed Epstein to say “That was fun … say hello to Snow White,” has denied all knowledge of Epstein’s activities.

The US Virgin Islands disagrees, saying that Staley “visited Epstein’s properties in the Virgin Islands and elsewhere,” and “exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein from his JPMorgan email account in full view of JPMorgan, including some with photos of young women, discussed Epstein’s provision of services to him during his travel on dates that closely corresponded with Epstein’s payments to the same young woman from his JPMorgan accounts, and discussed young women or girls procured by Epstein using the names of Disney princesses.”

Recall, Staley’s lawyers said “Snow White” was not a “code word” when @sjhmorris and @carolinebinham first broke the story in 2021https://t.co/HrKR7l5SS2 pic.twitter.com/ym5KEY3Dwn

— Robert Smith (@BondHack) February 16, 2023

Epstein and Staley exchanged more than 1,200 emails over several years, however up until now their contents had never been disclosed. Staley – who left JPMorgan to become CEO of Barclays two years later, stepped down from the latter in 2021 following a UK Financial Conduct Authority probe into his relationship with the pedophile financier.