Another case of victimhood denied

Woodrow Wilson’s replacement

While searching for a picture of Aunt Jemima, I came across this story about two men suing Quaker Oats for $2 billion, for appropriating the likeness and secret recipe of their great-grandmother.  While two billion dollars seems a tad high for such a crime, surely that pancake recipe must be worth something, right?, and if you don’t ask, the answer’s always no.

Sadly for the cause of justice, the answer was still no, even though they asked. Earlier this year, a judge tossed the case out of his courtroom, not even allowing the plaintiffs to place their claim before a jury.

Two men claiming to be relatives of Anna Short Harrington—the woman whose face and overall likeness was used to create the character and logo Aunt Jemima, the most iconic face in pancakes—had filed a class action lawsuit seeking $2 billion plus punitive damages.

 

Last week a judge tossed the case, noting that the two men—D.W. Hunter and Larnell Evans Jr., both of whom claimed to be Harrington’s great-grandsons—came to court with little more than a story about the woman and a photo that they now claim to be unable to find.

According to TMZ, “Hunter told the judge his grandmother once gave him a photo of Harrington—a photo he no longer has—and claimed that proved his relation.”

I really hope that for the sake of the legal profession’s reputation and good name (cough cough), this case was brought pro se, and not filed by anyone admitted to the bar.

 

Out of touch

1960: Perfect together – Che lights Sartre’s Cuban cigar

Obama kisses French ass.

“We love the French,” Obama said. “Sometimes, we Americans are too shy to say so, but we’re not feeling shy today.”

“We’ve never forgotten how the French people stood with us after 9/11 and today we stand with you,” Obama said. He invoked his own intimate ties to Paris. “By my bed in the residence is a picture of me and Michelle in Luxembourg Gardens, kissing,” Obama said, as he spoke of Americans’ love, and his own, for the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower and walks along the Seine.

Obama is not speaking to working class Americans, whom he despises (2008: “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” ) but to the effete left, his friends on the coasts. No one else likes the French, but since Obama doesn’t know anyone else, he doesn’t know that.

 

Finally, Trump says something which I can whole heartedly applaud

Official FWIW corporate vehicle

On waterboarding: “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway”.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, the Puritans can’t squeeze the joy out of

The ironically named “Think Progress” organization warns against buying turkeys from afar, lest you increase the world’s temperature.

Figuring out just how to reduce your personal carbon impact can be a daunting, and at times, confusing task (just ask the King of Sweden, who recently decided to give up baths for the environment).

Getting through Thanksgiving, when emissions-heavy activities like airline travel and tables full of food are the norm, can be a especially tricky for a die-hard climate activist. Here are have a few tips for a more climate-friend Thanksgiving. (We can’t help with the food coma, though.)

Choose your turkey wisely

A lot of outlets suggest you do away with the Thanksgiving turkey altogether, but if the idea of sacrificing the holiday’s classic main course sounds border-line sacrilege, paying attention to the type of turkey you buy can go a long way toward reducing your environmental impact. Of all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes, turkey has the biggest environmental impact, so it is worth a little extra scrutiny. Not only does meat take more resources than vegetables, turkey often has to travel quite a ways to get to your table. From the Smithsonian:

Cranberries, potatoes and turkeys for the Thanksgiving table often travel 1,500 to 2,500 miles from the farm, according to the Worldwatch Institute, three times as far as the average American guest and 25 percent farther than they did two decades ago. These so-called “food miles” are one consideration when conserving the resources, namely fuel, that go into making a meal.

This is exactly the kind of conversation I imagine Dollar Bill’s family having around the table this Thursday (of course, they will call it “the day of mourning”, in memoriam to the Indian savages Bill’s Hugenaut ancestors slaughtered so their distant heir could whine in disgust at them).

So what will Bill’s family eat? There are no fresh vegetables available locally this time of year, so they’ll have canned, stewed tomatoes from their summer garden (put up in recyclable glass jars), fish caught from local waters (oops! Not sustainable, and unavailable this time of year anyway) ah, maybe some bread from local wheat? Tap water?

Sounds miserable but then, that’s the way they like it.

And a happy National Day of Mourning to you, Bill

Obama is in Paris precisely to sign the treaty that will help this man along

Would that he’d show the same resolve towards real threats

Peruvian mountain climber sues German energy company for contributing to global warming and melting the Andes’s glaciers.

And, as reported here a week or so ago, here’s what Obama will sign, and is working on a way to get around the constitutional requirement that the Senate approve all treaties.

At the upcoming United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, participating nations have prepared a treaty that would create an “International Tribunal of Climate Justice” giving Third World countries the power to haul the U.S. into a global court with enforcement powers.

Congress would be bypassed – left out in the cold – by this climate deal, critics say.

Policies once left to sovereign nations could be turned over to a U.N. body if the U.S. and its allies approve the proposed deal in Paris during the summit scheduled for Nov. 30-Dec. 11.

According to the proposed draft text of the climate treaty, the tribunal would take up issues such as “climate justice,” “climate finance,” “technology transfers,” and “climate debt.”

Buried on page 19 of the 34-page document is the critical text – still heavily bracketed with text that hasn’t been completely resolved and agreed upon – reads:

[An International Tribunal of Climate Justice as][A] [compliance mechanism] is hereby established to address cases of non-compliance of the commitments of developed country Parties on mitigation, adaptation, [provision of] finance, technology development and transfer [and][,] capacity-building[,] and transparency of action and support, including through the development of an indicative list of consequences, taking into account the cause, type, degree and frequency of non-compliance.

The U.N. held a preparatory conference in September in Bonn, Germany, that drafted language to be approved at the upcoming Paris climate summit. At the Bonn meeting the U.N. brought together more than 2,000 participants from governments, observer organizations and the media.

But none of those media chose to report on the proposed new global tribunal.

Say it, brother

You will recall that the man promised a “nuanced” response to terrorism and Middle Eastern affairs – this is it

CNN does CNN

Who loves ya, baby?

Christiane Amanpour berates racist America for not welcoming refugees, the invites Muslim terrorist to spout the usual platitudes about Islam being a “religion of peace”. 

Admittedly, no one except the most deluded of liberals watches CNN, but this thinking seeps into the real media too.

Here’s the chairman of the Grand Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, spreading his lies to our village idiot, the gullible Amanpour:

Our religion is not one of violence, of jihadism, of terrorism, of women who kill. In what page of Qur’an is that written that a woman must take bombs inside her body to explode and kill other people? In what part of Qur’an is that said? In what page of Qur’an is it said that we shall kill innocent people? Young people?

Boubakeur then lamented that “little by little,” the Islamic State had won over the young Muslims of Europe. He declared that it was a “great error … not only of Muslims, but of the world to accept this.”

Then, Boubakeur called on Muslims in France to assimilate:

[It is] very important [for] French Muslim people to express their French nationality, their French taste, their French values, their French [rejection] of what is the danger for them, France, and for our religion also.

And here’s another take on the gentleman:

Homeland security expert Patrick Poole reported on Boubakeur’s rejection of Islamic “assimilation” with Western values in PJ Media last January. Boubakeur certainly does not oppose ISIS’s — or, in general, Islam’s — embrace of violence when he isn’t on Amanpour’s set:

[I]n 2006 at the height of the Danish Cartoon crisis, Boubakeur had published an article denouncing the cartoons and concluded by issuing a warning to all those — including Charlie Hebdo — who would publish caricatures of Mohammed, saying: “He who sows the whirlwind shall reap the whirlwind.”

Stop drawing Muhammad, and start abiding by Sharia blasphemy laws … or else.

Boubakeur, rather than being the assimilation-supporting, violence-spurning moderate Amanpour wanted him to be, is guilty of fanning the violence that resulted in deadly riots across the globe and ended in the horrific slaughter at Charlie Hebdo’s offices.

Hillary Clinton: open the floodgates to musselmen or we’re toast

I’m scared to death!

Paraphrased (by Elizabeth Price Foley) : We’d better let every Muslim refugee in, otherwise Muslims already present in the U.S. will commit acts of terrorism and other violence.

And in Hillaryese:

Clinton, who wants to import thousands of Syrian refugees, told reporters in Reno that it would look bad not to let in Syrian refugees, and that might inflame Muslims against law enforcement.

“If you’re in law enforcement, … you want the people in the communities that you are looking to get information from to feel like they want to help you,” Clinton said at a Nevada roundtable. “And if the message from people who are running for president, for example, is that we don’t want to take any Muslims whatsoever, that’s not good for law enforcement.”

“Let’s not be casting this broad, negative rejection of everybody who might be Muslim. That is not smart to protect ourselves. And I want people to understand — that is a law enforcement issue,” Clinton added.

Residents of the other two states just haven’t met our guy

Doesn’t ANYBODY like me? Other than Fudrucker?

Malloy 3rd least popular governor in America.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, Republican, is the most popular.

Price cuts

65 Hunting Ridge

65 Hunting Ridge Road, from $9.950 million to $9.5. Call me crazy, but I don’t think someone who wasn’t interested in a $9.950 home is going to jump into action when enticed by what’s essentially a rounding error.

11 Flagler
In 1928, who expected the Spanish Depression?

Moving a bit closer to town, and with a more substantial price cut, 11 Flagler Drive has dropped from $11.250 million to $9.995. Trouble with this house is that it’s a 1928 version, completely out of favor these days, and only 5,277 square feet. The owners did add a guest cottage of 3,648 square feet in 2004 – the original house hasn’t been touched since 1998 – but that, in my opinion, only serves to highlight the cramped conditions in the main house.

Highest and best value here may lie in its 4.4 acres in the R-2 zone, if it can be subdivided. Two building lots here would go for $4.5, maybe $5 million, total. If that’s it, this listing has a long way to go before it sleeps.

Carelessness rewarded

I’m gonna sue!

Man who lost his testicle awarded $368,000. Good lord, the things come in their own carry sack – how can you lose one?

I warned about this when they pushed for a state-wide property tax on automobiles

Senate President Martin Looney: “Heh heh heh- have I got a surprise for YOU!”

Camel’s nose under the tent and all that. Next up (hat tip to reader “Byram” for sending this along) a “mansion” tax on homes. You may read that as a “Greenwich tax”.

[Mayor of New Haven, Toni Harp] –

“You could raise [income taxes] a little bit. Do you really want to destroy our infrastructure? Or pay a little bit more?” Harp asked.

She also spoke of the need for a more reliable revenue stream, so the state doesn’t end up in these mid-year emergencies in the future. [long time residents will remember that this was the excuse for imposing an income tax, too. Oops!]

Toward that end, she recommended over the longer term replacing the current tax on corporate earnings—which she said companies find “all kinds of ways to get around”—with a tax on corporate real-estate property and machinery.

“It wouldn’t need to be all that high,” Harp said. Meanwhile, under the current system, “we can’t project what our revenue will be. That makes no sense. We have to come up with a system that is more stable.” [Again, exactly the argument made for an income tax]

State Senate President Martin Looney of New Haven said Harp’s idea is “certainly worth exploring” when the legislature looks at longer-term budget solutions.

He suggested legislators look at a “mansion tax” to add a statewide property tax on homes of the wealthy, beyond the municipal property taxes the homes’ owners pay.

It’s coming, and coming soon.

But wait: “settled science” says that global warming causes volcanic eruptions; surely not the other way around!

Trouble ahead Trouble behind and you know that notion just crossed my mind

Volcanic eruption in 1982 sent global temperatures soaring.

Scientists have discovered there was a huge shift in the environment that swept across the globe affecting ecosystems from the depths of the oceans to the upper atmosphere.

They said an abrupt spurt of global warming, fuelled by human activity and a volcanic eruption in Mexico, is believed to have triggered these changes between 1984 and 1988.

The researchers said the global warming that occurred in the 1980s was the largest shift in the climate to have occurred in around 1,000 years.

HOW THE CHANGES IMPACTED THE GLOBAL CLIMATE

The study found there was a steep increase in global temperatures around the world in the wake of the El Chichón volcanic eruption.

These included a 60 per cent increase in winter river flow into the Baltic Sea, and a 400 per cent increase in the duration of wildfires in the western United States.

They also noted there were shifts in the winds high in the atmosphere and an increase in the number of days of topical storms.

Costa Rica suffered dramatic declines in amphibian and reptile populations in the 80s.

The researchers said the changes first appeared in South America in 1984, moving to North America in 1985, the North Atlantic in 1986, Europe in 1987 and Asia in 1988.

These dates coincide with significant shifts to an earlier flowering date for cherry trees around the Earth in Washington DC, Switzerland, and Japan.

They also coincided with the first evidence of the extinction of amphibians linked to global warming, such as the harlequin frog and golden toad in Central and South America.

They warn the findings demonstrate how unavoidable natural events, such as major volcanic eruptions, can multiply the impacts of human activity in short timescales.

Professor Philip Reid, an oceanographer at Plymouth University who led the research, said: ‘Our work contradicts the perceived view that major volcanic eruptions just lead to a cooling of the world.

‘In the case of the regime shift, it looks as if global warming has reached a tipping point where the cooling that follows such eruptions rebounds with a rapid rise in temperature in a very short time.

‘The speed of this change has had a pronounced effect on many biological, physical and chemical systems throughout the world, but is especially evident in the Northern temperate zone and Arctic.’

So, we hand over control of our lives to the UN Global warming experts, shut down our economy, and one measly earthquake can undo all our efforts? Does that sound rational to you?

“Well of course, earthquakes are a thing of the past, just like snow” global warming profiteer Al Gore told FWIW. “So stop worrying, and trust us; we know best.”

51 Keoffram Road

51 Keofferam Road, Old Greenwich

A reader asked what happened to 51 Keofferam Road, and wondered whether it has sold or gone to contract. In fact, neither: after 281 days trying to fetch $5.950 million, its listing was cancelled last week.

The owner paid $4.2 million for it in 2005, when it was newly built, and its last listing makes no mention of anything new added to it since, so I’m not convinced of the wisdom in trying for so much appreciation; nor, it seems, was the market. [UPDATE: a reader says that was just for the land! Good God]

Being in the AE (“high flood risk”) zone would, after Sandy, make this less desirable now than it was in 2006.

Or that’d be my guess.

By this logic, Yale University must be renamed, and, if I had my way, converted into a vocational training school for professional victims (if it isn’t already)

Mayor of New York demands that Yale rename Calhoun dormitory  because Calhoun was a supporter of slavery.

But gee, Elihu Yale himself made his fortune in India in the late 1600 – early 1700s, in the diamond trade. Since even today the diamond mining industry is beset with horrific tales of child labor and near-slavery, it’s a safe assumption that conditions in India 300 years ago were worse. Was Elihu a slave owner, or just a profiteer from slavery? A distinction without a difference, but this passage suggests he was both:

In 2007, after complaints from students, a portrait which showed Elihu Yale being attended to by a dark-skinned “servant” wearing a metal collar was removed from the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall. Yale University officials told reporters that Elihu Yale had never owned slaves, but conceded that the painting had been put into storage “to avoid any confusion”.

I don’t think locked metal collars were a fashion statement at that time, at least, not for  their wearers. The slaves’ owners thought them peachy.

And what about the oppressed victim of this sort of micro-aggression whose “safe space” has been violated, De Blasio’s son Dante?  Young Dante matriculated at Yale this fall and is already involved in the movement to rename Calhoun. The young man was admitted to all ten colleges he applied to, and no wonder – he’s the child of a powerful, liberal mayor, he’s a legacy, through his grandfather, of Yale, and he’s half-black. A perfect trifecta (redundancy used for emphasis).

But again, he’s a victim.

Oh, the humanity!

Elihu Yale, his friends, his slave. Bliss in England