- This cop just loves him some tasers — as he’s shown again and again. Yeah, and that family loved their young son and brother, too. (I hope they end up owning you, Officer Pig.)
- Well, guess what? The Evergreen State College suffers “the Mizzou effect” after that flap where racist students tried to force white people off the campus.
- And it’s too bad that this ringing endorsement of thinking for yourself has to come from professors who were targets of the same kind of vile groupthinking wrath. (H/T PT)
- Trump’s Arpaio pardon has many terrible precedents. (Interesting overview of presidential pardons there, too. We’re also having two contentious discussions about this over at the Cabal).
- Christian artists should have the same free-speech rights as Colin Kaepernick.
- Got an Accuweather app? Borepatch sez get rid of it.
- Looks like just another story of a corrupt city government official (albeit one who got away with a lot before they caught her). So what I want to know is what the heck is ICE Homeland Security Investigations and why is it involved in a local case in Kingman, Arizona?
- Does it sometimes seem as if Amazon is taking over the world? Believe it or not, that’s an illusion. The company may be big in Seattle and big online, but it’s not as big a retailer as it appears. (H/T ML)
- Harvey highlights the the nationalized flood “insurance” nightmare.
- Seattle animal shelters take in dogs and cats rescued from Hurricane Harvey. Lesson learned from Katrina: you do not force people to make the choice of being rescued but leaving their animals to cruel fates. (Unfortunately these cross-country transports also carry a high risk of spreading diseases.)
- Texas bakers, stranded by flood waters, go on baking and baking and baking for churches and shelters.
- Did you know that Salvador Dali and Walt Disney made a cartoon together? Strange but true.
- Brilliant bar codes.
And just in case you need more good cheer:
https://www.ice.gov/hsi
Arpaio is a Great Sheriff and True American Hero, until your kid ends up in one of his tents. Robespierre’s Law, people.
Seems like any app that provides local information would have to track your location. Of course it doesn’t have to sell that data, but that’s a different issue. Not disagreeing with Borepatch.
As I understand the Seattle story, they’re taking in strays that were picked up by Texas shelters, and offering them for adoption. I think they’ve already been doing that, pre-Harvey. NTTAWWT, it’s a good thing; but unrelated to sheltering pets. We had a pet shelter here for those humans in our shelters.
Which are now all closed, as folks went home to the Rockport area or at least to a shelter closer to what’s left of their homes and jobs. We’re still on standby in case San Antonio shelters overflow with folks from Houston.
The other half of the federal “flood insurance” mess is that most homeowners have no idea that they need a separate federal “policy” to cover flooding. (I just explained it to my wife.) Realtors and insurance agents are supposed to inform their customers, but there are always those who don’t get the word, or don’t listen to it. “My home is under water! Why aren’t you writing a check?” Then they get mad at the insurance companies.
Of course the majority of property owners don’t need the coverage. By the time the water around here gets high enough to come in my door there’ll be so many places flooded that everyone will be broke.
God promised He wouldn’t do it that way again.
Larry,
The problem I have with Accuweather is less that they track people’s location than that they lie about it. And when they got caught they said they’d fixed it, but they lied about *that*.
– Borepatch
“As I understand the Seattle story, they’re taking in strays that were picked up by Texas shelters, and offering them for adoption. I think they’ve already been doing that, pre-Harvey. NTTAWWT, it’s a good thing; but unrelated to sheltering pets. We had a pet shelter here for those humans in our shelters.”
Yes, larryarnold. I think both the Seattle story and I tended to conflate two different, but related things. Existing shelter dogs are coming north for adoption AND to make room for evacuees pets to stay in more local shelters until they can retrieve them. The dogs coming north either don’t belong to evacuees or do belong to them but escaped or where abandoned and picked up as strays.
It’s so wonderful that shelters and rescue organizations are finally realizing our animals matter. I’m one of those who would refuse to evacuate without some provision being made for my dog and if there’s anything good in the present mess, it’s seeing how much help is so freely given now to both two-legs and four-legs.
Has anyone heard the results of the central bankers’ conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (8/25-27/17)? I’ve looked around and keep coming up dry. Or is it that possibly I’m naive in assuming they’d want to share?
“Does it sometimes seem as if Amazon is taking over the world?”
And don’t leave out Google;
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08/31/google-issues-ultimatum-to-conservative-website-remove-hateful-article-or-lose-ad-revenue/
Utah cop manhandles and arrests a nurse because she didn’t let him break the law
Thanks, jc2k. I saw that this morning and I’ve been seeing it everywhere all day — mostly from sources who think that nurse had a lot of guts and integrity or other sources who think every cop involved should be fired.
I was going to blog it over the weekend, but I think everybody will have seen it by then. Thanks to you they’ll have seen it here, too. 🙂
Comrade … Okay, so Amazon not so much, but Google really is trying to take over the world. Totally.
They’ve not only gone after conservative websites but also at least one liberal trust-busting one that opposed their monopoly. In a different era I expect the fedgov would have moved against Google by now. Not that I think they should. I just hope it’s not too late for a more honorable competitor to come along and knock Google out of its control of ‘Net searches. Google and F*c*b**k are SCARY.
The story about Amazon was interesting, and one more piece of evidence that on-line retail is not what it’s cracked up to be. As a business model, on-line retail has some problems. Shipping and handling expense is one. Delayed gratification is another. That’s why I believe the future of retail is still overwhelmingly going to be brick and mortar. On-line retail won’t go away, but it won’t grow continuously. I suspect we may soon see a flat-lining of it’s growth trajectory…and the result will be the sudden financial implosion of Amazon. Any company valued at $450 billion that can’t produce a dividend after almost 20 years in the business is most likely a yield-chaser’s bubble. Without continuous growth, that valuation cannot be justified.
Some very large brick and mortar retailers have been going through some painful contractions in recent years. Competition from Amazon is usually given as the primary reason. I think it is misplaced blame. The real reason is debt. All of the retailers who have gone bust were heavily indebted. Any disruption of sales, whether from a new competitor, a slight downturn in the economy, a shift in consumer preferences, was going to make it very difficult to service that debt and still keep operating.
Retail has a lot of problems right now. Overbuilding, encouraged by tax laws, subsidies, and 40 years of easy loans, has made many retail companies vulnerable to changes in their income stream. Amazon is one of those changes, but not the only one.
Ironically, Amazon will suffer a similar fate when it’s market valuation adjusts to it’s actual performance.
Can’t verify as “true fact”, but I’ve read that online retail sales are 16% of total sales.
So, yeah, debt. Too much expansion by chains in the face of a failing economy. As one in agreement with http://www.shadowstats.com, my own opinion is that we’ve not actually recovered from the 2007 recession.