Big Youth - Cool Breeze

Testing! Big Youth bringing the content. 

Isn't this included on the Harder They Come soundtrack? Different version, I think. 

Joe Biden's Free Pass (From Me)

President Biden and I have come through the last forty years together, connected by newspapers. Joe, if I may be so bold as to call an old friend by his familiar name, was often reported in the newspapers, and I have always been an avid newspaper reader. From his hair-plugs, to his dubious record of bipartisan legislation, to his carefully cultivated “hey, man!” working class facade, Joe has always been a gold mine for reporters. There was always a good story in Joe, from his vanity, to his activities, to his shenanigans. It’s quite a trail of malarkey, and easy to follow.

Which makes me wonder: with so many decades of gold there to mine, why do our current class of content providers stay so close to the optical-illusion scandals recently created by Republican operatives? Barisma; Hunter’s laptop; the Biden crime family; Joe’s new surprise grandchild. None of that means anything anyway, and it all pales in comparison to readily discoverable and extremely disagreeable material in his political history. There lies the true mystery of Biden’s presidency.

I made some notes about it in early 2019, but I have never shared the results herein. The country was in serious trouble already, and Joe was clearly going to be the best chance to beat Trump in 2020. I thought that it would be unpatriotic to expose the dirt that could cost Joe the nomination, or the election, because to do that would inflict a deep wound on our country, already rubber-legged in its brawl with evil.

I decided that I would give Joe a pass. I would smile and watch the parade go by. I would go so far as to support the suggestion that he was doing a great job and not making a bit of trouble, no, not a bit of it. Why should I not behave thus?

You may consider the pass to be in effect now, and also that it will remain so into the foreseeable future. We need Joe. He’s really selling it. He’s got good numbers. The last new gripe against him was that he appeared in public wearing white sneakers. (Which means they’ve got nothing.) Joe might get elected and endure another four years. He might live!

There is also a good chance that Trump will be elected again. After his own fashion, perhaps. The nomination, at least, will happen before any of these trials now in various stages of pretrial foot-dragging. If Trump is nominated by the Republicans, we can be sure that the cry of “let the people’s voice be heard” will ring out across the land. If Trump is one of the nominees, he will, like last time, act like the casting of all of the votes makes him president immediately. That’s irrespective of the vote count. It will either be a clear Trump victory, or simply another stolen election. What happens then is anyone’s guess. My Magic Eight-Ball is in the shop.

Problems

There will always be more than one way to look at a problem. You may look at the problem through a different filter. You may examine the problem in a different light. You may look at it in a mirror. Sometimes simply letting your eyes go out of focus will cause the problem to stand out in brighter relief. A problem is part of a pair that also includes a solution. Some problems are solved, and may thereby be resolved. Some are never solved, which may be for better or for worse.

All individuals face numerous problems in their lives. Problems big and small; important or insignificant; interpersonal or within the individual. Our greatest challenge is recognizing the existence of the big, important problems. This is easier said than done.

Many of us are plagued in life by a swarm of problems. We may understand that they are all related to each other in some way, but that understanding gets us no closer to seeing the essential problem itself.

This is where I find myself in this end-game of my life. We seniors live from day to day, waiting to die. Waiting for our turn. We dream of dead friends and family, and are cursed to live in the ruin that we have made of our life. Our decades of experience may give us some perspective regarding our problems. Identifying a problem when it is too late to fix it is much worse than never having identified the problem at all.

Here is a good question: is a problem that is never identified really a problem at all?

Life’s greatest joke might be to provide us with the intelligence needed to identify the important problems in our lives, while denying us the cleverness that would be required to solve them.

Sad But True - Transplants

People come, and people go. They may have died or simply moved on. I got used to it living in Los Angeles for almost thirty years. Now I have also seen a lot of it in Thailand as well. People want to check it out. Some will stay forever. I almost stayed in LA forever. External circumstances drove me to Thailand. (No, not police. The jobs and the favorable cost of living.) Some stay a few years, and then they decide that they want to return to their old lives, or try Oregon, or Berkeley. You may simply say good luck, or you may have formed a very close bond with them and will miss them terribly. 

Those who die do so on their own motion. That probably wasn't their idea, so you can't hold it against them. You may, however, miss them. If you are a person who loves their friends, all of this can be difficult. 

Good luck to all of my friends who have moved on. To the living, to the dead, and to the ones who had their reasons. I love you all. 

Liability Waivers: Fun Facts

It seems like a silly thing to even consider. Descending to a depth of 13,000 feet in the cold, unforgiving North Atlantic ocean in a weirdly amateurish, home-made submersible. I followed the story of its loss with some curiosity, although without real interest. What kind of company slaps a thing like this together, ignoring the safety conventions and the laws of both Murphy and physics, and sends it down full of billionaire adventurers who pay $250,000 per person for the privilege? The answer seems to be: the kind of company that trusts its risk of liability purely to the customers’ signatures on liability waivers.

This morning I read the articles about the loss in the N.Y. Times and the Daily Beast, and both strongly suggested that the company would be building its defense to wrongful death law suits (more essentially, negligence suits) on its supposedly strong liability waiver. That thing certainly seems to mention “possibility of death” everywhere that it is possible to squeeze it in. Oh, if only it were that simple.

My first legal observation was, “those things are usually found to be against public policy, aren’t they?” Well, it turns out that the answer is “yes,” as long as you include the “usually.”

I like to check a bit before I shoot my mouth off, so I consulted Professor Google. I always favor real law websites, so I read a nice article in the National Law Review (June 24, 2023). I’d say that they have also been following events as they unfold.

They also started off by pointing out that liability waivers are unenforceable if in violation of public policy. They dropped in more of the subjunctive than I did by making it conditional on an extra “if.” The article relied quite a bit on a case named Atkins v. Skimwest. Atkins starts with a warning of what is to come, “case law does not favor liability waivers.”

Atkins goes on to say that liability waivers “are not automatically invalid,” but that they will in every case be “strictly construed against the party seeking to rely” on them. The waivers must be ridiculously specific about every single risk that exists and that the customer is waiving. What’s more, the person signing the waiver must have been given the opportunity to bargain over the waiver, to bargain not only over the risks to be waived but also over signing the thing at all! Have you ever heard of that happening? Me neither.

The customers here are people to whom $250,000 is a weekend outing for one. They are billionaires proving once again that it is hard to think of things to do with all of that money. Have any of them actually sought legal advice about the waiver? A good lawyer would advise them to bargain with the dimwits running this company. “Tell you what, I’ll give you $350,000 if I don’t sign the waiver.” The answer is no? “Okay, $500,000.” Still no? No counter offer (“for a million, you can go without the waiver”), no back and forth? You have not been given a chance to bargain in good faith. You must sign, or no deal. You can sign, and the waiver is void for violating public policy. The defense fails.

Just imagine the legal horsepower available to an estate worth billions of dollars. At least when the plaintiffs can be trusted to pay their bills. This should be interesting.

Test June 24 2023

 

Test June 24 2023

Let’s take a test!

It’ll be fun.

Stubborn All Stars - Open Season

I have a Hepcat Records sampler from the late 1990s that includes this song. Is it a cover? A mystery! I love this version either way.