AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Treating People Well: The Extraordinary Power of Civility at Work and in Life.
Archive for 2018
January 14, 2018
THAT WOULD BE AWFUL: The SEIU May Have To Refund A Lot Dues This Year.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: “Lottie L’Amour is a multi-award winning plus-size blogger with 11,000 Instagram followers, and she says that she gets unwanted, unqualified advice about her health all the time.”
WHO PLAGIARIZES FROM THE WEEKLY STANDARD? Daily Beast Reporter Resigns After Blatantly Plagiarizing Article.
OPEN THREAD: Take the ball and run with it.
A #METOO MOMENT: Georgetown Advisor Wishes Rape Upon Conservative Millennial.
THANK YOU, FRACKERS: T. Boone Pickens says trading oil has become boring.
I HAD MISSED THIS: ARMED FEDERAL AGENTS ENTER WAREHOUSE IN PUERTO RICO TO SEIZE HOARDED ELECTRIC EQUIPMENT. “On Saturday, a day after becoming aware of a massive store of rebuilding materials being held by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the U.S. federal government — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with their security detail — entered a Palo Seco warehouse owned by the public utility to claim and distribute the equipment, according to a spokesperson for the Corps. . . . A security contractor who recently returned from Puerto Rico told The Intercept that crews of linemen brought down from the U.S. were frustrated about the lack of rebuilding materials, which made it virtually impossible for them to fix downed infrastructure. Paraphrasing conversations with the electric crews he accompanied, the source said one worker told him that ‘we just sat in the truck and watched a movie because we have nothing to do today. … Around Christmas, a lot of the power workers were saying, “We’re going on vacation because we couldn’t do our job because PREPA was making it so difficult.”’”
ANN ALTHOUSE CELEBRATES her 14th Bloggiversary. All traces of timidity are long gone.
JAMES BOVARD IN THE HILL: Fed’s misconduct in Cliven Bundy case stems from Ruby Ridge. “Many of the heavily-armed activists who flocked to the scene feared that the FBI snipers had a license to kill the Bundys. Their reaction cannot be understood without considering a landmark 1990s case that continues to shape millions of Americans’ attitude towards Washington: the federal killings and coverups at Ruby Ridge. . . . FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back after he stepped out of his cabin, wounding him. Horiuchi then shot and killed Vicki Weaver standing in the cabin door holding their 10-month old baby.”
I REMEMBER DEMOCRATS IN 2016 THINKING THAT DEBATING TRUMP WOULD BE AN EASY WIN: McAuliffe on 2020 run: Could you imagine debating Trump?
CALIFORNIA MAN IS GIVING FLORIDA MAN A SERIOUS RUN FOR HIS MONEY: Drugged driver crashes car into second story of California building, officials say.
That’s pretty impressive air for a Nissan Altima.
CRIMINAL LAW: How to make an innocent client plead guilty. “The idealist in you — the one who enrolled in law school to “change the system” and to fight for justice on behalf of those who need it most — hopes your client will proclaim a decision to go to trial. But a wary voice in the back of your head reminds you of the risk and life-altering consequences of losing.”
This is just another consequence of the one-sided power of prosecutors, something I addressed in my Ham Sandwich Nation piece.
PANDEMONIUM AND RAGE IN HAWAII.
MICHAEL WALSH: SHOULD FRANCE TAKE AN ISIS RECRUITER BACK? “The answer is, of course, non. But whether France, now entering its Islamic cultural death throes, has the fortitude to stand up against a bona-fide traitoress is questionable.”
Read the whole thing.
FALSE ALARMS OF THE APOCALYPSE: At a time when state and non-state actors alike are resorting to disinformation operations, reliable official information is critical. If only our officialdom itself were reliable.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL ABUSE AND EXPLOITATION? After James Franco, Entertainment Needs New Rules For Sex Scenes.
AT AMAZON, Qooltek Multipurpose Laser Level.
A LESSON FROM HAWAII: America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era.
I’m glad that Ajip Pai has the FCC working on a fix.
AT AMAZON, deals on bestselling Game Downloads.
SUING THE INDUSTRIAL AGE: New York City’s lawsuit against oil companies for having caused Superstorm Sandy is absurd.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday that New York City is filing a lawsuit against Big Oil, seeking unspecified damages that will likely total in the tens of billions of dollars. The immediate cause for the suit, filed against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, is the damage and expenses associated with climate change— caused by the oil companies, on this view. In particular, the city wants to recoup the costs of rebuilding from Superstorm Sandy and the $20 billion that it plans to spend on storm resiliency. The fossil-fuel energy industry, the city’s lawsuit claims, “deliberately engaged in a campaign of deception and denial about global warming and its impacts, even while profiting from the sale of fossil fuels.”
Asked about the litigation strategy, de Blasio dismissed the suggestion that it might be hard to prove that the defendants caused the hurricane. “I think we are going to win the argument that climate change exists; I feel really confident about that one,” he chuckled. “And I think it’s pretty clear these five companies had something to do with it.” New York City corporation counsel Zachary Carter described the case as a straightforward tort action, based on damages from Sandy. “The theory of this lawsuit,” explained Carter, “is it exploits our nuisance laws, and that both in terms of public and private nuisance we believe that’s a cause of action that . . . gives us certain strategic advantages in litigation.” The $200 billion, multi-state tobacco industry settlement, reached in 1998, is the model for the city’s litigation, said the mayor. “The tobacco analogy is important,” he observed, explaining that a cultural change occurred after Big Tobacco admitted to having buried evidence that cigarette use is unhealthy. “We no longer assume that the fossil fuel companies are innocent; in fact, if we identify them as guilty, it changes the reality . . . and that can spread like wildfire.”
So when does de Blasio give up his own personal addiction? An article in the New York Times headlined “Battling Climate Change from the Back Seat of an S.U.V” notes:
Purring in the mild winter day, a small armada of S.U.V.s was parked Thursday morning along 42nd Street outside the New York Public Library. Inside was Mayor Bill de Blasio, at an interfaith prayer breakfast that went on for quite a while.
By divine right of mayoralty, or someone, 13 vehicles waited at the curb in a no-standing zone, among them four black S.U.V.s (three Chevy Suburbans and one Yukon XL) an ambulance, a huge E.M.S. vehicle and a police school safety van. The engines on those big boys were running while the mayor was inside, for about two hours.
* * * * * * *
Many mornings, Mr. De Blasio is driven 11 miles to his gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, from the official mayor’s residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Gracie Mansion.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Exxon is taking the advice of a famous community organizer and punching back twice as hard:
Notwithstanding their claims of imminent, allegedly near-certain harm, none of the municipalities disclosed to investors such risks in their respective bond offerings, which collectively netted over $8 billion for these local governments over the last 27 years. To the contrary, some of the disclosures affirmatively denied any ability to measure those risks; the others virtually ignored them. At least two municipal governments [one of them San Mateo] reassured investors that they were “unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the County and the local economy.”
As Steve Hayward asks at Power Line, “So which is it, San Mateo—serious climate risk or not? What happened to those certain probabilities in your lawsuit?”
I suspect a similar disparity can be found in New York State municipal bond offerings.
Update: “Not absurd but logical,” Richard Fernandez tweets, responding to de Blasio suing the oil industry. “The public’s biggest problem is its refusal to take Left Wing and Islamist declarations at face value. They mean it. Every single word.”
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? Sexual Assault in the Restaurant Industry.
