• Perhaps you remember David Siegel, the timeshare billionaire who runs Westgate Resorts … you know, this guy:
Yeah, him. Maybe you remember Siegel’s 2012 memo to his employees, in which he warned them that if President Obama were re-elected, it would mean calamity for his business — lay-offs, “less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”
Well, Obama was re-elected and the sky didn’t fall. In fact, Siegel’s company is doing better than ever. “We’re experiencing the best year in our history,” he wrote in a recent memo to his employees, “and I wanted to do something to show my gratitude for the employees who make that possible.” And with that, the King of Versailles announced he was raising Westgate’s minimum wage to $10/hour.
So, um, good for him, I guess? Even if that means that previously this bazillionaire had been paying many of his employees less than $10/hour.
• Terrorism isn’t free speech. Al-Qaida shouldn’t be allowed to “adopt a highway,” and neither should the Klan.
A judge says the group was “singled out for scrutiny not given to the other applicants to the program.” Nonsense. The same standard was applied to all groups: Has this group engaged in more than a century of lethal violence, property destruction and intimidation? Only the Klan failed that simple test. Recognizing that the Klan’s words are associated with their actions does not constitute “viewpoint-based discrimination,” it’s simply a necessary step to ensure that Georgia’s highway signs do not threaten citizens with violence.
• Let’s not take the bait. PETA and Sarah Palin both, at this point, exist mainly just to do whatever they can to get attention based on the belief that they can turn that attention into money. Don’t encourage them.
• Here’s some good news involving the police: The Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau is adopting a policy of disengaging and de-escalating when encountering people who may be suffering from psychological distress or mental illness. Good. Every year, American police shoot and kill scores of unarmed people who are mentally ill, distraught or in distress. Many more are “armed” with kitchen knives or even things like butter knives. These people wind up dead only because the police act as though they’re on a ticking-clock deadline that requires them to subdue such people as quickly as possible, even when no one is being directly threatened. Disengage, de-escalate and just freaking wait.
• “Scotland is well on its way to getting 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2022.” I wonder if the United States will manage to have even one working offshore wind farm by then.
• What can account for the recent statistical decline of Christianity in the American Northeast? Mark Silk crunches the numbers and examines the data. Then he offers the wild guess that maybe all those priests raping all those children might have something to do with it. I’m not a statistician or a sociologist, but I’ll venture a guess that, yeah, shielding child-rapists probably hasn’t been a net positive for church growth in the region.
• The speaker is mostly broken in one corner of the outside garden section at the Big Box, broken in such a way that for most pop songs it plays the bass line, but not the vocals. And sometimes that’s pretty cool, as when XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton” came on the other night while I was working out there. If there’s any way to do it on whatever device you’re using to read/view this, crank up the bass and soak up the joyous wonder of Colin Moulding’s work here:
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