The Completely Foreseeable Consequences


It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.1 Douglas Adams, describing the products of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, in So Long, Thanks for All the Fish The late Douglas Adams, in his absurdist, five volume Hitchhiker’s Guide…

Sidney Powell’s Source


When Fox News asked Sidney Powell what her sources were for her . . . surprising . . . claims about the 2020 presidential election, she forwarded an email she had received to several “journalists” at Fox News. The email, first revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ motion for summary judgment as to liability in Dominion’s…

The Crash Test Dummies Scandal


(WC’s family tree doesn’t include even a trace of Irish blood. Besides that, in law school, WC’s apartment was across the street from the biggest, loudest Irish pub in the city. So WC generally takes a pass on all things St. Patrick. You can doubtlessly find abundant Irish content elsewhere on the Web.) Yes, there…

Trump’s Lawyers: The Fallout Continues


It’s been a while since we looked at the lawyers who supported Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. While Trump is still using the lie on his 2024 campaign trail, his former lawyers are paying the price of knowingly defending and perpetuating a lie. Most recently Colorado lawyer Jenna Lynn Ellis…

Class Action Lawsuits: Flawed Tools and Bread Crumbs


The theory is pretty good. Where a very large number of person have been injured by a common cause, they can form as group, called a “class,” and collectively bring a lawsuit, called a “class action,” to recover their damages. Otherwise, you have millions of individual lawsuits. But, as the settlement recently approved and paid…

A Short Course in Vaccines


This is an immensely complex area of medicine. WC is not a virologist or an immunologist, although he has read fairly widely in those fields. Additionally, to make this discussion manageable, WC has necessarily simplified but not, WC hopes, over-simplified. WC’s recent post on two Idaho legislators’ effort to block use of all mRNA vaccines…

The Costs of Credit Card Convenience


Fairly early in his legal career, WC helped an Alaska bank set up one of the first locally-branded credit card programs in Alaska. WC’s task was to conform the MasterCard “standard” agreements with Alaska’s arcane finance laws. Much of that Alaska law has since been amended to better conform to nation-wide practices, but the experience…

In Which WC Becomes a Criminal


There are folks who would argue that WC, as a lawyer, has been a criminal for decades. The public’s opinion of lawyers holds them in something considerably less than esteem. But this time, WC is deliberately setting out to violate a law, in fact, a law that hasn’t even been formally adopted yet. You see,…

WC’s Epic Fails: Augustana Creek


It wasn’t called Augustana Creek at the time of these events. So far as WC knows, the creek and the glacier at its head didn’t have an Anglo name. and if the Athabaskan people had a name for it, that seems to have been lost. The Richardson Highway, as it runs through the central Alaska…

A Few Winter Birds


In addition to the Rosy-finches and Barn Owl WC has posted earlier, WC and Mrs. WC saw a very nice selection of other Idaho winter birds in south-central Idaho. Because you can never have too many bird photos, here’s a handful of the species we saw that WC was able to photograph. While there are…

David Lindley

R.I.P. David Lindley, 1944-2023


David Lindley, multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire, peerless sideman and astonishing live act, died March 3. He may not have been well known to the general public, but among musicians he was regarded as a brilliant sideman. Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, he recorded with an amazing number and variety of artists, performing pretty much…

A Very Good Day of Birding


WC nd Mrs. WC made a short road trip this week, chasing winter birds. The trip was amazingly successful, and there will be more than one blog post about it. Among the highlights a lifer and two and half species photographed for the first time. The target birds – a primary reason for the trip…

The Milk of Human Kindness


There has been a kerfuffle over milk. Is the stuff that comes out of female mammals the only “milk”?1 In almost any supermarket today, you can buy soy milk, oat milk, coconut milk, almond milk, walnut milk, rice milk and a dozen or more other “milks” that have never been near a female mammal, let…

Are We Clubbing Baby Seals?


WC is being deliberately vague in this post about where and when the events reported here occurred, and has altered the facts slightly to make the players difficult to identify. Their identities aren’t the point of the post. It wasn’t baby seals; it was baby sea otters, not that that’s any better. But, yes, an…

Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla, in the House chamber on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019 at the Alaska State Capitol. (Loren Holmes / ADN)

Hypocrite of the Year 2023 – The First Nomination


Alaska state Rep. David Eastman (R, Wasilla, of course) has always been a racist, misogynist, oath-breaking jerk. But now he can add hypocrisy to his list of character traits. Negative character traits are the only kind Eastman has. Which qualifies him to be a nominee for Wickersham’s Conscience 2023 Hypocrite of the Year. If you…

Return of Bird of the Week: Horned Puffin


Another spectacular and improbable-looking bird, a sister species to last week’s Tufted Puffin, although more closely related to the Atlantic Puffin than the Tufted. The Horned Puffin”s range overlaps with the Tufted’s, but the Tufted’s is more extensive, particularly along the Oregon and California coast. Like the Tufted Puffin, the Horned Puffin is a pelagic…

The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Action: Sen. Tammy Nichols (R, Middleton) and Rep. Judy Boyle (R, Midvale)


Stupidity is dangerous. And sometimes legislators do things that are so stupid that they can only serve as a horrible warning to others. Two members of the Idaho Legislature, where there is more than few poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect, recently demonstrated these principles. Sen. Tammy Nichols (R, Middleton) and Rep. Judy Boyle (R,…

Some Good News on Climate Change


Readers sometimes criticize WC for writing mostly about bad news. It’s a fair criticism but, on the other hand, some weeks it’s mostly bad news. But there is some encouraging news on getting the U.S. just a little greener. The good news is that it’s now less expensive to build solar and wind turbine green…