Mammon category archive

Jack Ohman takes on the strange case of Duke University’s attempt to prevent the estate of John “Duke” Wayne (ne Marion Robert Morrison) from marketing “Duke” Bourbon, claiming that associating the word Duke with bourbon would somehow defame Duke University, which wants sole rights to its own defamation.

A nugget:

As John Wayne Enterprises is a fine California corporation, I have to side with it, as a contributor to our standing as the eighth-largest world economy. Plus, Duke University is wack, which I am quite certain is a legal term.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go to the University of North Carolina or anything like that. I just went to the University of Minnesota, which has a mascot called the “Golden Gopher.” Duke University has a “Blue Devil,” which is faintly satanic. No. It’s actually satanic. And blue.

Lawyers for the color blue, based in New York, filed a lawsuit last week challenging Duke University’s use of the color. The blue legal team, noted that “our color is currently being defamed by a school founded with money earned by sale and distribution therein of tobacco, a known carcinogen.”

Read the rest. It’s a treat.

As George Smith points out, not so much.

John Romano considers the selling out of public scbools in Florida, because “profit” and “public good” both start with “p.”

Also in Florida educational initiatives . . . .

. . . parents of children attending the Balere Language Academy in Miami-Dade County grew concerned three years ago after discovering empty beer bottles in the school.

It turned out that this charter school, which taught kids from kindergarten to sixth grade during the day, had been operating as a nightclub during the evenings.

Much more Florida at that link.

Via Juanita Jean.

. . . and he doesn’t get a lyft.

Later on, he does have a pleasant ride from an Uber driver. His column goes on to explore the pros and cons of Uber, including the underlying duplicity of Uber’s “business model.” A nugget (emphasis added):

Uber is hip and progressive. And I wanted to be both. So I decided to ask an Uber driver to take me from my house to a location about 5 miles away. I’d get my morning exercise by running home.

With my shoes laced and energy chew chomped, I opened the Uber app, requested a driver and … uh-oh. No one wanted to pick me up.

“NO uberX AVAILABLE” read the pop-up screen.

(snip)

Taxicabs must follow set rates. Uber says it mustn’t.

And when an Uber driver struck and killed a 6-year-old girl in California last year, Uber said it wasn’t liable. Why? Because Uber said the Uber driver wasn’t really an Uber driver — that he didn’t have a passenger at the time and was “never an employee, agent, joint venture or partner of Uber.”

Overall, Uber claims it doesn’t need government regulations because it’s already safer and better insured than government requires.

Well, guess what? That’s what virtually every business claims about every regulation — they don’t need it.

The last four days, my local rag has recapped the story of the killer Chinese dry wall, which destroyed houses and families.

If you want a preview of life in a Randian paradise of unbridled individualism, lack of accountability, absence of regulation, and rampant greed, read it.

One of them happens to be the Governor of North Carolina, who used be (natch) a functionary in the Duke’s fiefdom.

Facing South debunks some of said minion’s lies about the Duke and him. A nugget (emphasis in the original):

3. McCrory initiated action against Duke Energy over its coal ash? FALSE.

In claiming that he’s “the only governor that ever took action against Duke Power Company,” McCrory implies that he took proactive steps to address the company’s coal ash pollution. That is not the case.

(snip)

“After watching the illegal pollution for years and taking no action, North Carolina authorities sued Duke Energy only after we notified the state and Duke Energy that we would file suit,” Rick Gaskins, the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation’s executive director, said at the time. “The people who depend upon Mountain Island Lake for their drinking water will be protected only if the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, an independent citizens group, is present in Court to ensure that the laws are enforced and that the drinking water reservoir is fully protected.”

An echo from the killing of Travon Martin: George Zimmerman’s attempt to cash in from NBC gets cashiered.

Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson ruled that the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer is entitled to no money from the media giant.

She issued a summary judgment in the network’s favor, meaning that unless an appeals court reverses her, the case is now dead.

A “summary judgement” means that, in the judge’s estimation, the case was so weak that letting it go to trial would be a waste of the court’s time.

Follow the link for details.

I don’t shop at Walmart.

I will not patronize an outfit whose business model is exporting jobs and treating employees (and suppliers*) like dirt.

Walmart is always lower.

_________________

*I have worked with persons who worked for Walmart suppliers.

They told me that, once their employer got hooked into selling products through Walmart and the contract came up for renewal, Walmart pressured the suppliers to reduce their wholesale prices. When the supplier protested that cost of production could not be reduced further, Walmart offered to school them in exporting production to China.

Not nice people.

Paul John Scott explores a (yet another) dietary delusion: pushing chocolate milk as low-fat “healthy” in school meals. A nugget (emphasis added); do read the rest:

We embraced the erroneous low-fat paradigm because a University of Minnesota-based expert named Ancel Keys had a gut feeling that saturated fat caused heart disease; collected carefully chosen data from dietary practices in Greece and Italy to back up his hunch, then brushed off all contrary evidence. Keys quickly developed alliances at the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health, on Capitol Hill and at the USDA — with the help of an eager and unquestioning health press much like that of today. (Time magazine placed him on its cover, and this was back when people still read Time magazine.) In a less-known Minnesota connection to the tale, Teicholz describes how the largest-ever trial of the Keys hypothesis was conducted here in the 1960s. Most doctors do not know about the 9,000-patient Minnesota Coronary Survey, however, and that’s because it failed to find that cutting saturated fat reduced the risk of heart disease — whereupon the author kept the results to himself for 16 years. This is how science is treated in the dietary policy world: as publicity to be either promoted or suppressed depending upon what it finds.

Also, don’t eat too much salt. Just save it up so you have a grain to take with every commercial, ad, column, and news story you see that includes dietary advice, and, especially, commercials for “supplements.” Usually, all they supplement is their manufacturers’ income.

Heh.

A Massachusetts law firm that specialized in assisting banks to foreclose on beleaguered homeowners now finds itself on the receiving end of an eviction notice.

(snip)

According to court documents, however, Geaney and his partners didn’t pay the rent they owed under the pre-existing lease either, racking up over $88,000 in unpaid rent. The firm allegedly has been bouncing checks. Amanda Lundergan, a lawyer from Florida, claimed that the firm never responded to inquiries as to why the checks she had been sent bounced.

The most corrupt states in the nation, according to Department of Justice prosecution data.

Facing South reports on the findings in The Impact of Public Officials’ Corruption on the Size and Allocation of U.S. State Spending by Cheol Liu of the City University of Hong Kong and John L. Mikesell of Indiana University at Bloomington. The “corruption rankings” were based on the number of public officials convicted of violating corruption laws.

A nugget:

The authors then considered how corruption affects state spending. They hypothesized that the observed expenditures in the 10 most corrupt states should be greater than the estimated expenditures. That expectation held for nine of the 10 most corrupt states, excluding South Dakota.

The average “corruption gap” annually per capita? $1,308.

“This implies that the nine most corrupt states could have spent $1,308 less annually per capita, on average, if they had succeeded in maintaining only an average corruption level,” Liu and Mikesell write.

. . . Or the thirteen hundred bucks per capita could have been used fix potholes and schools, rather than to fix the game.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

Chauncey Devega investigates the wingnut echo chamber. A nugget:

The Right-wing media presents itself as an antidote against “liberal bias”. In reality, the Right-wing media is a toxin to American civil society and the public sphere, poisoning them through extreme political polarization and disinformation which is designed to generate rage and alienation among voters.

The focus of the rage which is created by the Right-wing media machine is not unfocused: it is directed at some type of Other such as people of color, the poor, working classes, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, Muslims, etc. who are depicted as enemies of “real (white) Americans”.

This ditty from Dick Destiny seems to fit right here.

Thom explores the “Pay for Performance” scam.

This week North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a bill that opens up the state to fracking for natural gas. The Energy Modernization Act will allow drilling permits to be issued 61 days after the state Mining and Energy Commission approves final rules for the industry, which is expected to happen by next summer.

The report goes on to point out, in the This Surprises You How Dept.? that North Carolina’s Republican legislators can’t be trusted (emphasis added).

The new law breaks a pledge from legislators that they would review and approve the rules before the state’s drilling moratorium could be lifted. Environmental advocates also criticize the law for failing to adequately address the risks associated with fracking and for weakening safeguards. Supporters claim it will boost North Carolina’s economy.

I am certain it will boost North Carolina’s economy. Construction jobs increase after earthquakes and fires.

Afterthought:

I’m so old that I can remember when North Carolina was held up as the “progressive face of the New South.” Now it’s gone all retro.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age.