I know, you’ve been waiting for this podcast to start your weekend right! And here it is! Things are looking up for you already! The news you may wish you had missed!
Number Eight. CNN. Kentucky school system closes after transportation disaster
There are disasters, and then there are disasters. The hurricane and the fire in Maui, where everyone was caught by surprise, certainly has room for some human culpability as regards the failed siren warning system; that’s one thing. But the school bus drama that unfolded in Louisville last week is quite another.
Some 65,000 students were shuttled forth and back on the first day of school by AlphaRoute, the contractor who owns the big yellow things with the tires that go ‘round and ‘round.
Once the fire began to sweep Maui, residents had seconds to decide whether it was time to roll. To determine when the buses would have to roll, the school bus administrators had to study a school calendar which had been available for probably a year.
New schools, new routes, multiple hubs, and not enough drivers contributed to what in the great scheme of things, say in about 30 years, will be seen as minor delays.
I can sympathize; it’s a big job. As some are now suggesting, it is possible that the Jefferson County Public School system is simply too big to manage that volume of human transport.
Reportedly, that first day of school, the last child got home that night at 10:00 PM. Let your mind wander to what that means, about kids — some as young as 5 — in close contact, one driver, no supper and no bathrooms.
Amid Kentucky summertime temperatures, administration called for snow days until the bus thing could get straightened out.
It makes home schooling sound so much more appealing..
Number Seven. Inside EVs dot com. Nightmare Frustration: Family Gives up on Electric Vehicle mid-trip
Canadians are such nice people. Dabir Bala from Winnipeg purchased a new Ford F-150 Lightning because he could save money on gas and also help save the planet, because he believes in “responsible citizenship.”
After the $100,000 it cost to acquire the truck and the charger, and upgrade his home electrical box, he took the family on a 1,400 mile trip to Chicago. Or, rather, he STARTED on the trip to Chicago.
With a cruising range of over 300 miles, he stopped for his first charge-up in Fargo. A two-hour charging cycle brought him to 90%, good for 215 miles for the next leg.
At Albertville, Minnesota, down to less than 25 miles range, the one charger available in town was unfortunately not working. He drove to nearby Elk River and found a second charger, that also didn’t work.
With 12 miles left and no other charging stations available, he called a tow truck and rented a Toyota 4Runner ICE.
(Internal Combustion Engine… ICE)
This tested the limits of even a well-mannered Canadian. He concluded he could use the truck neither for a weekend at his cabin, nor for a camping trip, nor for any road trip of more than one battery charge.
But it is probably good to have a quiet, reliable option for local trips to the grocery store.
One conclusion that has been suggested places responsibility where it truly belongs: Whoever plans and builds charging stations in the U.S. has dropped the ball. We’ll have to pick up the pace if we’re ever going to save this planet.
Number Six. USA Today. False claim: Michigan bill would make wrong pronouns a felony
Follow me closely. An Instagram post last month claimed that a new bill before the Michigan House would make using the incorrect pronoun for a person a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine.
The Instagram post racked up 10,000 “likes.” USA Today fact-checkers swung into action checking facts.
Clearly (at least it was clear to the fact checkers) the Instagram post was dead wrong.
Because the first and most obvious fact is that the word “pronoun” is not used in the bill. There. That should do it.
This led the crack USA staff to assert the claim was false.
What the bill DOES do is allow the state to file hate-crime charges against one who “maliciously and intentionally” intimidates a member of a protected group.
But USA Today reports that the notion that simply using the wrong pronoun would pass such a high bar of scrutiny is a bad-faith interpretation of this pure and pristine bill, has absolutely no legal basis and is “beyond frivolous.”
There is absolutely no way any prosecutor could be convinced to bring charges for merely using the wrong pronoun, which everyone would agree was a simple slip of the tongue with no harm intended.
And if any hare-brained prosecutor ever did bring such a charge, it would immediately be seen for the error it was and summarily be thrown out by any Michigan judge.
This, according to legislators who sponsored the bill and prosecutors who would enforce it, and who, after the press conference, were seen to be grinning, high-fiving and licking their lips.
Number Five. Reuters. Georgia court acknowledges early release of Trump document
The fourth indictment against Donald Trump occurred on Tuesday this week as a grand jury agreed that the 13 felony charges against him ought to be submitted to criminal trial.
Grand jury proceedings are intentionally shrouded in legal mystery, because any leaked information can damage one side or the other, and can bias a jury. Their findings are thus never released until it’s time.
But on Monday, the Fulton County Court Clerk accidentally hit SEND instead of SAVE and the full list of charges were released a day early.
Hey, it was an honest mistake, cut ‘em some slack.
The clerk’s office, which supports Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, then released a statement indicating the pre-released data was fictitious, not real, merely a test of the website to see if things would work, and should be completely ignored by every media outlet in the internet-connected world who suddenly had access to it.
And on Tuesday when the actual and correct and authorized document was released, it just so happened to match the earlier fictitious and entirely bogus document precisely.
There were lots more words wrapped around the event, but what occurred, occurred.
Related to nothing in this story whatsoever, Fani Willis, four days before the fictitious charges were released and five days before the actual charges were published, announced her new website in connection with her District Attorney re-election campaign.
But on a note that should give everyone pause, consider a couple of facts: (1) While Presidents can pardon persons guilty of federal crimes, no President has authority to pardon anyone guilty of state crimes. If there is a conviction, and it there is penitentiary time involved, no President can make it go away. (2) If Georgia can bring a case against Trump under the RICO statute for challenging the way votes were counted in Georgia, so can about 6 other states, independently.
We already have four indictments. What’s wrong with 10?
In the event that Donald Trump were found guilty, sentenced to prison in Georgia, and also wins the 2024 general election, there is a Constitutional question as to whether he could legally pardon himself. There is a dispute about this among commentators like Jonathan Turley (no, he couldn’t) and Mark Levin (yes, he could), but it is territory where the U.S. has never been.
I don’t think I’ve seen a movie with this many moving parts.
Number four. Washington Examiner. Richard Dawkins signs controversial declaration
Just as transgender women have finally begun to succeed in ways that were never possible when they were men, Someone Important has suddenly emerged to pull the rug out from under them.
It appears, by the way, that the term “transgender woman” applies to an entity who is now declaring to be a woman, and who got here by the transgender route. In other words, a man who decided to become a woman. Which is somewhat overstated, but never mind that detail.
Conversely (or perversely), it would follow that a “transgender man” is someone who now claims to be a man but started out as a woman.
Just to clarify the vocabulary. Which seems to be changing on us daily.
But back to the rug pulling thing. World famous atheist Richard Dawkins, best-selling author of The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006) has committed the incomprehensible sin – whoops, if God is a delusion, so is sin – the incomprehensible error of asserting that sex and gender identity are two different things.
Have you noticed that all these cultural arguments get tangled up in vocabulary?
Sex, according to Dawkins, is a matter of biological reality, while gender identity is somewhat more subjective. But it is the former, i.e. reality, that actually defines a person. And the definition of the person has huge implications for, say, who should compete in a major bicycle race, or weightlifting competition, or a swim team.
Let alone who should get to use whose shower room.
So Dawkins has broken ranks with the political left on this issue — this one issue — and it will be instructive to see how he is treated by the LGBTQ lobby. Not that he probably cares.
Number Three. Money dot com. Commentary. ESG cheerleaders are suddenly pivoting
Okay, try to follow this one. I’ll make it as simple as I can.
ESG is “environmental, social and governance” and refers to how investment decisions are made by big investors, such as insurance companies and pension funds. ESG rates corporations on how friendly they are, for example, to left-leaning environmental initiatives. The LGBTQ agenda also plays large in the ESG world.
Companies which follow an ESG philosophy are not necessarily more profitable for their stockholders than the knuckle-draggers in less woke environments. But sometimes their stock is recommended because they are ESG-sensitive.
This means the recommended investments might make a lower return than if they had ignored ESG. But the individuals who own IRAs or 401(k)s don’t usually have much control over where their investment house puts the money.
Who tells the investors where to invest their funds?
Internationally, there are two super-large investment advisory firms, ISS and Glass Lewis. These make investment recommendations to institutional investors (such as the money behemoths BlackRock, StateStreet and Vanguard), and ISS and Glass Lewis dominate almost all of the investment advisory business in the world.
ISS and Glass Lewis both employ an ESG approach, and offer that advice to their clients. Their clients traditionally take their advice.
Or they did, until state treasurers and financial officers began to realize what’s up. State officials are required by law to ensure that funds in their turf are invested appropriately. ESG can kill corporate profits.
Recently, 19 states in the U.S. sent letters to the investment advisory firms “expressing concern” over the way their advice was offered. It emerges that the advice (to invest in ESG-friendly corporations) had been provided in secret.
The stockholders, and even investment company management, were unaware their money was being used to further ESG goals. Profits were being suppressed by ESG initiatives, and portfolio returns were perhaps lower than they should have been.
Because of this pressure, BlackRock has started to back up from ESG. So has ISS.
There is no fraud or embezzlement necessarily involved here, only an investment philosophy from the left side of the political aisle.
As far as the 19 states that objected, and have gotten some traction in rolling back the ESG advice, I wonder which states they are? Red or blue?
Number Two. USA Today. Best US states for electric vehicles — shocked by the answer
California, that beautiful land of fruits and nuts, has over 1 million electric vehicles. They all stay within 3 blocks of home, but there are lots of them out there.
With fewer than 14,000 charging stations in the Golden State, that works out to 71 cars per plug-in. I expect they are taking turns.
The speed at which an EV’s battery is charged up varies widely (some estimate from 20 minutes to 5 days), but if we assume 2 hours, that means each charging station, working 24/7, would be occupied for a solid 6 days every week, round the clock.
It’s an issue.
So where does one go to find the most charging-friendly environment? A place where there is almost always a free charging station? No one in line, take all the time you want. In fact, stay the week for a really full battery.
North Dakota, of course.
That haven of woke, liberal feel-good friendship is the state in the union most friendly to EV drivers in need of voltage.
That is probably because the state only has 220 electric cars but 69 charging stations. Nirvana for the EV!
Not only that, but I’ll bet that those EVs are rarely used in winter — does it get cold in North Dakota? — because the heater and defroster use the same battery as the drive train. It’s not a good place to get stuck with no juice.
Number One. Washington Examiner. Anheuser-Busch heir offers to buy back Bud Light
On the heels of a really encouraging second-quarter report that the beer fabricator had only lost $400 million in three months (that’s over $3,000 per minute), thanks to the super-profitable and totally reasonable affiliation with Dylan Mulvaney, they may have found a respectable off-ramp for the Bud Light brand.
Billy Busch, heir to the family’s modest $18 billion fortune, has offered to purchase the brand back from the troubled brewer.
He claims that he knows who their customers are, and what they want, and Busch and his team can Make Bud Light Great Again.
Who knows? AB InBev, the parent company, might just take him up on it. Probably a good move for them.
But I would surely miss the entertainment.
And that’s the Alligator News Roundup. Go to church this Sunday! Hear the Word of the Lord, which never changes and never fails. Let it lighten your load and enlighten your eyes! Have a good weekend! Curt
The Alligator News Roundup