My day job is assisting individuals and small businesses as a lawyer. I taught real estate law and American history in the Dallas County Community College system. I have owned and operated private security firms and was a police officer and criminal investigator for the Dallas Police Department.
I am interested in history and historical research, music, cycling, and British mysteries and police dramas.
I welcome comments, positive, negative, or neutral, if they are respectful.
Scotland, that is. Also known as “Little D” Back during the 1970s, North Sea oil boom, Dallas (Texas) Morning News columnist and chili guru Frank X. Tolbert visited the little village in the far reaches of northern Scotland. I recently can across this photo (which was published in D&W half-tone in the newspaper then). Frank noted, among other things, the local distillery produces a Scot’s Whisky known as “Dew of Dallas” which he sampled with approval.
Located at 57 33’N 3 28′ W
In my continuing effort to demonstrate that the main problem with our economy is government regulation, I offer George Will’s column last week in the Washington Post. Will offers the 70 year experience of the founder of Carl’s Jr, fast food restaurants, and his successors.
“In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.
“So did millions of defense industry workers and their cars. And, soon, Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine — fast food. Including, eventually, hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Karcher died in 2008, but his legacy, CKE Restaurants, survives”.
Sort of. While CKE is still making hamburgers, hot dogs, or whatever (I’ve never eaten at one), it appears to be still in business, selling lots of food, and coincidentally, employing workers at 3,200 restaurants. Now I know that there are those who scorn the “hamburger flipper” industry is being déclassé at best, but it is in fact an industry that employs a lot of entry-level workers particularly teenagers looking for part-time job, as well as those who may be marginally employable elsewhere. It can certainly be a way station for those unemployed in “their field” while they are looking elsewhere. Aside: I have tried very hard to avoid referring to those who deride certain industries and jobs as “underemployment”, as idiots, but I can no longer help myself. They are.
One of CKE’s current problems which will cause it to at least downsize is Obamacare.
“Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties,” CKE says “would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in the next year.” It appears hard to say where in that spread the costs might land. Earlier this year, when In discussing the future of medical costs in a public forum sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis, Parkland Hospital and Health Systems CEO Dr. Ron Anderson, said that the scariest words in the Obamacare act are “the Secretary [of the Department of Health and Human Services] shall” leaving open an incredible amount of power in the rule making process. Who knows what the current Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who has no aversion to making regulations, or one of her successors, might prescribe. Whatever those regulations may require, we can be certain that they will be so incredibly detailed, arcane, and obscure that it will be impossible for anyone to be in compliance at any given time. (See my essay on the difficulty budding child entrepreneurs have in purveying lemonade published last Saturday 12/3/11.) There is more.
“Rising health-care costs are, [CKE’s Andy Puzder] says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like ‘card check’ in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.” The prospect of unionized fast food employees sort of boggles the mind, but maybe that’s all part of our nannies’ plan to read us of the plague of burgers and fries.
Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman tends to corroborate that last notion. It his recent column http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-1201-chapman-20111201,0,419567 he writes of the government’s Institute of Medicine urging the FDA to “gradually step down the maximum amount of salt that can be added to foods, beverages and meals.” war on salt. Chapman quotes Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, who says that “we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority.”
Is it? We have been hearing about the ill-effects of too much salt for decades. Almost every proponent of a healthy diet includes limitation on sodium intake in their advice. It has become an article of faith among nutritionists and dietitians, and even, it appears most physicians.
According to an article in the July 2011 issue of Scientific American, a respected periodicals dealing with science issues and developments (it has been in publication for over 166 years), researchers “reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.” See “It’s Time to End the War on Salt” This article also cited additional studies that compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day.
It seems that Mr. Chapman has a point. But even if the average consumption of salt by Americans might be harmful to their health, he asks what business is it of our federal government. Federal regulators have no grounds to dictate how much our food may contain, Chapman asserts. Any consumers who want less sodium are free to spurn restaurant meals and grocery items laden with heavy doses. Food companies don’t use salt because they like it but because their customers do.
Exactly.
Raising the hue and cry against salt, even if too much of it is a bad thing, reduction in intake by trying to make a public health crisis out of it is counterproductive to such a goal. Chapman maintains that it “mutilates a useful concept. Air pollution West Nile virus and E. coli are matters of public health because they inflict harm on broad groups of people against their will and often without their knowledge.” No one eats too much sodium other than by choice.
Leave it to the nannies, nags, and busybodies. A brave new world may be upon us.
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Since I appear in the bankruptcy courts on behalf of creditors (and only creditors – too many possibilities for conflicts of interest in trying to represent clients from both sides), I have a pretty good insight about how this works. Bankruptcy used to mean that a debtor cannot pay his bills so the court would take over his property, liquidate it, and divide up the proceeds amongst the creditors in proportion to the debts owed. The debtor would then be put out on the street with the clothes on his back, if that. Most bankruptcies were involuntary on the part of the debtor. Today, there are still involuntary as well as voluntary liquidation provisions, but the most common types of bankruptcies are either the voluntary Chapter 11 reorganizations, primarily used by ongoing businesses that get into financial difficulty, or Chapter 13, use only by individuals who propose to pay back a portion of the debts they owe according to a plan which meets certain criteria.
For the past several decades our sensibilities have been assaulted with cries of numerous kinds of “justice” mostly, but not entirely, from the left wing. We have heard “economic justice”, “racial justice”, “gender justice” (which I would suppose refers to grammatical constructions), and, the ubiquitous “social justice.” Now at the United Nations meeting in Durban, South Africa, there are demonstrations for “climate justice.” I have never seen, or found a way to use, any of those terms in a coherent sentence without enclosing them in quotes, as above. Anytime one uses an adjective — a modifier — the word is limited in some manner. Either justice is just for all involved in the event or transaction, or it does not exist at all. All of these modified forms of “justice” ultimately involve favoring members of one artificial group over one or more members of another, and disregard “individual justice”, which is also invalid because it is redundant, unlike the oxymoronic others.
It was brought to my attention that BLT Steak at 1625 I Street NW, in Washington, D.C. has recently offered a choice of 99% burger or 1% burger. The former is a 6 oz. cheeseburger with, of course, American cheese on whole grain bread for $9.99, while the latter is a 8 oz. Kobe burger, braised Kobe short rib, with foie gras, gold leaf, and Grey Poupon for $58. BLT, reportedly a favorite of K Street lobbyists, offers other politically themed burgers described at this link.
I am definitely for the 99%er – no poop for me, either grey or gold, but the inclusion of the $1700/oz. garnish on the 1%er, makes me wonder if the next prospecting opportunity lies at the D.C. sewage treatment plant.
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Jonathan Massey, the principal architect for Corgan Associates on the current reconfiguration of the Love Field terminal here in Dallas, last summer first heard the question of the location of the Boeing 707, N26000, which served as Air Force One when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn-in as President on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. According to a story today in the Dallas Morning News, the spot had never been marked and was long forgotten.
Massey, attentive to detail like only an architect can be, apparently went on a personal crusade to discover not only the exact location of the airplane, but that of President Johnson when he took the oath. From photographs, diagrams and floor-plans, and other documents long gathering dust in archives and museums, including our own Sixth Floor, he finally determined, within inches, where LBJ actually stood. It is 96 50′ 9.85″ W longitude; 32 50′ 42.22″N latitude. This has to give a new meaning to precision, or maybe obsessive compulsiveness.
Speaking of compulsiveness, can I add my own? David Flick, the staff writer who authored the new item reports that only four other presidents have taken the oath of office outside of Washington (George Washington, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge). I believe it is actually five. John Adams was inaugurated in Philadelphia, which was serving as the national capital while Washington, D.C. was still being built – and it wasn’t named “Washington” at the time.
May I add one more observation. Four Presidents have been assassinated while in office, and there have been fourteen known attempts (which include, as of recent, President Obama) of varying degrees of competence. Only Lincoln’s murder, the attempt on Truman, and, possibly, McKinley’s assassination were organized political conspiracies. The others, despite the efforts of those with various agendas, have not proven to have been anything other than the work of obsessive compulsive nut cases. I emphatically include Lee Harvey Oswald’s terribly unfortunate success.
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My always alert, knowledgable, and prescient brother Steve contributes this interesting tidbit from the writersalmanac.com
