There are about eleven active phosphate mines in the United States. Four of those mines are in Idaho, in the southeast corner of the state, centered on the small community of Soda Springs. The town’s claim to fame – other than being a Superfund site – is that travelers on the Oregon Trail stopped there…
WC is associated with a prominent environmental organization. Be clear: the views expressed in this blog post are WC’s views and in no way reflect the position of any organization with which WC is associated. WC has written before about the Simplot Grand View Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – CAFO – just north of Grand…
First, consider Martin Shkreli’s business model: found a company. Use it to acquire sole-source drugs that treat life-threatening conditions in small populations of patients. Then dramatically jack up the price. In August 2015, Shkreli did just that, buying the rights to the decades-old anti-parasitic drug Daraprim for $55 million. Daraprim is used to treat the…
The technical, linguistic term for it is a Gricean Implicature.1 You know, the Mafia thug walks into the store and says, “Nice place you’ve got here. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.” Or, if you prefer, U.S. House Speaker Kevin “You’ve Sold Out” McCarthy2 looks around at the U.S. economy and says,…
WC was raised on salmon. Canned salmon, frozen salmon, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, dried salmon; growing up in Alaska, it was the most abundant, least expensive food and WC ate a lot of it. Based on nearly 70 years of eating all five Pacific species of salmon, there’s no question in WC’s mind that king…
On September 18, 2018, the New York Times ran a long article titled, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Scheme as He Reaped Riches from His Father.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. Donald Trump, outraged that his niece had cooperated with the Times reporters and provided documents to them, sued the Times.…
Florida Governor Ron “Pander” DeSantis has picked a fight with the Disney Company. As Jimmy Buffet noted many years ago, “You don’t mess with the mouse in Orlando,” although he was putting words in the mouth of the fictional Skip Wylie at the time. The Disney Company employs 75,000 people in Florida, brings some 50…
An endless cold, snowy and dank April has ended. Which makes it time to have a look back with updates to earlier posts, mention of stuff that didn’t rate a post and lost opportunities for snark. Because WC spent a chunk of April is warmer climates, there is less to update and this post is…
The Idaho Legislature is engaged in a Holy War against abortion. And the thing about letting religious zealots have their way is that, blinded by their holy mission to deny women control of their own bodies, they lose sight of the consequences of their actions. That’s what’s happening in Idaho now. The Idaho Legislature has…
Make no mistake. Over time, and in many different places, when it comes to making ourselves happy, we humans have long relied on the humiliations and failures of other people. “Not Just a German Word: A Brief History of Schadenfreude,” Tiffany Watt Smith Smith’s excellent, long essay on the guilty pleasures of Schadenfreude makes the…
As a rule of thumb, as you head north on Alaska’s Parks Highway, things get weirder, until you reach the unpopulated Denali State Park. Palmer is different; Wasilla, a few miles further north, is pretty strange, as any reader of this blog knows. If you go a little further north, in the area represented by…
This blog post is being written while WC is sitting in his unmarked, unconnected, no-power cave wearing a tinfoil hat and writing this piece of True Non-Googled Account of History for future generations using his charcoal pencil by earwax candlelight, while occasionally talking to trees.1 Because you just can’t be too careful when writing about…
The thing to remember about the Founding Fathers is that the country they rebelled against had a state religion. That state religion served the myth of the divine right of kings, defending and justifying the British monarchy. The American Revolution was as much against the state religion as the monarchy that religion justified. The separation…
WC thanks the late Jonnie Swift for the inspiration for this post. WC also acknowledges the contributions of Deci Juvenalis. The State of Idaho Department of Law has been intensely frustrated in its efforts to execute the many folks waiting on death row. Idaho has the death penalty and Idaho law currently provides for execution…
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…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. This is the second part of a two-parter. Recap: Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. So this is a two-parter. Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the King Cove Road? The…
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…
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…
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…
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…
On December 5, 1969 the Oregon Daily Emerald, the student newspaper at the University of Oregon, sent WC to cover a speech to be given by Ted Gold. Gold wasn’t well known at that point, but was a member of Students for a Democratic Society – the SDS – and a future member of the…
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…
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,…
Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News is headed for trial in a couple of months. Dominon’s case for liability is very strong, and the lawyering by Dominion is top notch. Dominion’s decision to seek summary judgment against the Fox defendants means that its documents seeking summary judgment are now public record, at least…
Coda: (figuratively) A conclusion (of a statement or event, for example), final portion, tail end. Wiktionary, “Coda“ The thing about Donald Trump is that it is always about Donald Trump. Not the country that, as President, he swore to defend. Not the voters who made him president. Not the political party he was supposed to lead.…
The Thacker Pass Lithium Mine would be located in north central Nevada, the largest lithium mine in the United States, and would produce about a quarter of the lithium that the United States needs. The entirety of the mine is on federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s undeniably big: when fully…
Karlee Besse, an accountant in British Colombia, recently lost her wrongful termination claim against her former employer in Canada. Instead, the judge ordered her to pay back her former employer, Reach CPA, for “engaging in time theft.” The outcome wouldn’t have been possible but for software her former employer installed on her computer. It’s a kind of…
The most powerful earthquake to strike Turkey in the last hundred years has caused incredible damage and loss of life in southern Turkey and Syria. It’s instructive to look at the underlying geology, because it has important lessons for folks living along the San Andreas Fault. The earthquake and aftershocks are along the East Anatolian…
A philippic is “a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, delivered to condemn a particular political actor.” The best known philippic is Paul Simon’s song of the same name. WC can’t pretend to lyricism, but let’s examine the Republican-controlled, Idaho Legislature’s treatment of children. WC has no children. But WC has served as guardian ad litem…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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