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October 27, 2015
Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. October 2015.
Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, October 2015. "Takes dynamite to get me up. Too much of everything is just enough." Thank you Dana, Bill, Brad, Bruce, Larry, Planet Dembrow and Gregory Alexander Robertson (June 15, 1953 - June 15, 1990). All of you are miracles. Thank you, Greg, for teaching us without even trying.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2015
At Double Bridge Publishing: Dennis Maley's "A Long Road Home"
Author, novelist and pol Ben Disraeli would have liked a new D.C.-based publisher that even the surliest and most difficult writers have come to admire for its championing newer writers and getting new writing to the public. Crowdsourcer Double Bridge Publishing was launched fourteen months ago by Washington, D.C. businessman Richard O'Brien. A Long Road Home, a first novel by longtime journalist Dennis Maley, is one of several new titles O'Brien's upstart company has out this fall. Set initially in Savannah, Georgia, Maley's is a coming of age story featuring Jenny Harris, an ambitious but struggling young singer who, after losing her mother to cancer, find herself more alone, lost and unsure of herself than ever. Jenny unexpectedly meets her biological father, the debauched and isolated Irish-American writer T.K Connolly. The pair find themselves together in New Orleans, where each must attempt to find the strength to repair a damaged life.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:05 AM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2015
Despite Shell's Alaska decision, global oil is poised to drill in American Arctic.
Which in the scheme of things is productive, but not without its special uncertainties, expense and a super-short drilling season. As more ice melts off the Alaskan coast, drillers from all over the globe continue to look hard at the American Arctic. The state of Alaska, moreover, sees it as a magic opportunity for developing its economy. So do see Oil Industry not giving up on Artic drilling by Energy and Environment writer Kyle Feldscher at the right-leaning but sane, balanced and for me always-excellent Washington Examiner. It's one of several pieces featured this week in WE's weekly edition but updated online. Excerpts:
After Shell announced it would stop drilling for oil off the coast of Alaska for the "foreseeable future," environmentalists celebrated the end of the oil giant's northern adventure. But their victory almost certainly will be short lived.
The federal government moved on Friday [October 16] to delay for another 18 months the drilling that industry sees as inevitable. The Department of Interior announced it is canceling the 2016 and 2017 Arctic Ocean lease sales and ending discussions with two oil companies on Arctic Ocean lease extensions.
The decision by the department means lease sales will stop for the rest of the current leasing program, which started in 2012 and runs through 2017. Portions of the Chukchi Sea, where Shell decided to stop drilling last month, were up for lease in 2016. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said it didn't make sense to continue leasing in the wake of Shell's decision.
Energy experts say it's almost impossible for the United States to permanently keep oil companies from drilling in the American Arctic. As more ice melts, other countries are exploring new wells, and Alaska, with its huge energy industry, has state waters it is eager to see developed.
"The Arctic is not dead, and it's not even dormant," said Scott Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington.
The area's geology suggests massive oil reserves are under the water, said Dan Kish, a senior vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, an energy think tank that promotes fossil fuels. Exploration and drilling will continue because of a simple reason.
"They have no damn idea what's up there," Kish said.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2015
In Miami New Times: John Pate's Venezuela.
See feature in the Miami New Times this week on the killing of expat American lawyer John Pate two months ago in Venezuela. Thanks to my friend, international IP lawyer and fellow Ohioan Richard Holzer for sending this. I would not have seen it otherwise.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Presentism, Evil Depraved Christopher Columbus and Real Life.
Presentism should be self-explanatory. Think of it as the tunnel vision you get using a stuck or broken kaleidoscope. A broken kaleidoscope for time instead of for space. You judge long past times and human actions with conventions and values of 2015.
This week New York City criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice wrote a blog post on the real if arguably witless controversy about continuing to observe Columbus Day given some of Christopher Columbus' predatory activities in Hispania and the New World. Ever since The Great Neutering, and in English-speaking nations in particular, some perspective-challenged white liberals--the kind of visionary folk who using a 2015 baseline would demonize uber-Virginian Robert E. Lee given his leadership of Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War--have had a big problem with Chris Columbus and his long-respected holiday.
There is apparently a name for this syndrome. Our mutual friend Stephanie West Allen, lawyer, writer, speaker and how-your-brain-works blogger who from time to time colludes with a neurologist and physician in Denver circles known only as Dr. Quaalude, introduced Scott and I both this week to a term for this historical perspective dysfunction and possibly new mental disorder: "Presentism." Presentism. As a scientific term or DSM label, granted, it's a bit goofy. But it's hands down more viable and appropriate than my past candidates brain damage and Grosse Pointe voodoo.
Presentism should be self-explanatory. Think of it as the tunnel vision you get using a stuck or broken kaleidoscope--but a broken kaleidoscope for time instead of space. Below and indented is my verbatim if imperfectly-worded comment (one of 38 Simple Justice readers have made to date) to Greenfield's able piece, entitled "Columbus Day at the Outrage Factory." I'd have spent more time polishing my comment to his post but The Twins came over unexpectedly that morning with new purchases from extremerestraints.com.
However, and not to excuse my imperfect prose, if you read Greenfield's Simple Justice piece and some of the other comments, you will get the idea. Also featured in the main Greenfield post is one Marc John Randazza, an Italian-American and respected 1st amendment lawyer who owes me $20, a case of Diet Coke and the number of a new brothel hidden away in east Georgetown. Finally, my comment to the Greenfield article:
I majored in southern American history (and later Japanese history to get a different perspective) at Duke University. I fled the Duke English department and switched majors because the history courses I had dabbled in were better, I thought, for teaching 19-year-olds how to think.
My family here in America is white European English and German. We have been in America nearly 400 years on one side and a mere 265 years on the other. All were devout Protestants or at least claimed to be.
As lowly English artisans and trades people in the New World we killed-–and were killed by, some of us dying very bad deaths–-Indians in Massachusetts. In the American south, we were at first poor German farmers and eventually owned slaves in Virginia in a number of businesses. We freed slaves voluntarily, too–-but we might not have but for a move west to Missouri by one family branch.
All-–yes all; no exceptions-–white liberal academics and political pundits in 1900 would have been considered racists and in most cases vile racists today. It would be good to expand our minds a bit. This should not be a difficult concept for bright people in 2015. Time changes what is “offensive, hurtful and wrong.” All who commented here-–yes all; no exceptions–will be regarded as racists and in most cases vile racists a hundred years from now.
(Especially Greenfield because I’m told that among other things he secretly hates and wants to exterminate all philandering WASP fucks like me and because he heard that I once said to my wife at a Jewish wedding I attended at Tavern on the Green in 1990 that “Muffy, these people really got rhythm.”)
Anyway I’ll tie my cultural horse to all of the forgoing and honor my “vicious” European ancestors in America. I’m proud of them all. They were doing the best they could with their circumstances. Their parents were different and their own ancestors were different. They were all religious people, for fuck’s sake. And they were creatures and to some extent prisoners of the mores of the time they inhabited-–just as we are now.
Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo c. 1519
Posted by JD Hull at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2015
Heroes: ARH
My Mom, 87, just told me on her cell phone that she's driving over to her 10:00 AM workout class and will need to call me back "around noon." Check.
Lindsey, Suffolk, England
Posted by JD Hull at 11:42 PM | Comments (1)
Memo to Millennials: Rock 'n' Roll before The Great Neutering.
Satin shoes, plastic boots, cocaine eyes and speed-freak jive. Hey GenY, the no-launch generation. You're being passed over. We're not going to let you screw up (1) the Work Ethic or (2) Rock 'n' Roll. You will never have either.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2015
Sensitive Litigation Moment: The "C" word.
Pre-trial pro-trip for adepts. Some days lobbing the "C" word into brief chat about obvious differences between Rules 34 and 45 with a talented if lazy 35-year-old female opposing counsel plaintiff's lawyer gets more done than 10 Baby Boomers on Crack. Consult manual closely before attempting this.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
Fair, balanced, pissed off: Fox News says Hillary owned stage in first debate.
Like a big dog again, Hillary. Where you been? And where oh where were you, Senator Jim Webb? I expected my fellow Gaelic poet-warrior to whup some serious weenie ass of the non-Hillary participants. Try that again please, sir. Anyway, a Fox News piece by contributor and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson this morning says Hillary Clinton won the first Dem U.S. presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas last night. Excerpt:
The Democrats’ plan for a Hillary coronation is going to go ahead as scheduled. Mrs. Clinton made no terrible missteps. The other candidates rallied to her on the email situation. She had the best command of the stage and played up being a woman.
Clinton’s dismissiveness of the email situation probably draws Joe Biden into the race. Her public trust numbers will not benefit from her answers. The latest Fox News poll already shows that Hillary Clinton is performing worse against Republicans than Joe Biden.
But Hillary won the debate. She did not make any missteps, was not thrown off her game, and allowed no other candidate to outshine her.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:40 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2015
The Manhattan we loved long-time: "It's Chinatown, Your Honor."
Just 20 years ago, before The Great Neutering had squeezed the last bit of edge and play out of Western males, a first-chair lawyer in the middle of a four-week commercial trial defending the hallowed likes of Lever Bros, GM or IBM in the Southern District of Manhattan could still walk a few blocks north and set all his chickens free during a short court recess:
If it weren't for the massage parlors on Mulberry and Bayard Streets, I would not have been a successful trial attorney. I cannot count the numerous times I trekked to those establishments during a short recess or lunch break in the middle of a trial. After my happy ending, I would come back to court reinvigorated and re-energized. I really miss the pre-Giuliani days of NYC.
--Partner Emeritus, October 2, 2015 at Above The Law
Before Guiliani and The Great Neutering: Mulberry Street, NYC, c. 1900.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
Unpublished novels or memoirs, anyone?
If you do, visit Double Bridge Publishing. Double Bridge uses crowdsourcing to get unpublished books critiqued, edited, cover-designed, published, marketed, sold and distributed. I am general counsel to start-up DB, which published six titles in 2015. This quarter we are interested particularly in biographical works about sport-philandering Baby Boomers who claim they helped deliver the first baby born at Woodstock or swived either Grace Slick or Alvin Lee before either was famous or developed a drinking problem. That should be legions of you. What's not to like here?
Posted by JD Hull at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2015
Rude but heartfelt plea to DC's talented, independent, ever-expanding GenY women attorneys.
To the District of Columbia's oversupply of rotund GenY professional women, especially lawyers:
1. Whoa. What's going on? You girls beefin' up, or what? Ladies in their twenties and thirties typically emulate Audrey Hepburn--not Kim Davis. This is Washington, D.C. It's the East Coast--not Flint, Cincinnati or Omaha. Listen. Young women here need not be big enough to have their own zip codes. Dang.
2. Yes, I know that law students during those three years are famously unfit--yes, same with the guys--and it's hard to get through school, interviews, take the bar exam and start that plum job looking like a total Betty. However, being fleshy, fat or generally dumpy and unhealthy are not yet suspect classes for 5th and 14th Amendment purposes. No ADA safe harbor or affirmative action bootstrapping yet.
3. Yes, you will work, live, look and feel better if you exercise 30 minutes four times a week.
4. No, I don't want to date you folks. You're too young. And you're too busy and happy pursuing your infamous sport-hobby of slowly, incrementally, steadily finishing the job of neutering your spineless same-aged boyfriends to be doing 10Ks and triathlons every weekend. I get it.
5. But, ladies, you're putting the Big Hurt on my vision. Bike rentals, gyms & jogging paths are at every corner in this world class city. Try the crystal meth. Dirt cheap, I hear. Something. Blimey.
Audrey Hepburn riding a bike.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2015
Pantheon: Margaret Cho
Hoosier Daddy? Not. Gross us out more, Margaret.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2015
What if your smart phone, iPad and the Internet were just important tools--and not the main events?
When I see old friends out at restaurants checking their iPads for texts or e-mails, see strangers walking the streets of the greatest cities on earth looking down at their smart phone screens or see couples under the proverbial apple tree talking on the phone (hopefully not with each other), I wonder what others probably wonder: is the Internet a new reality, a better one, a worse one or just a different one? What is the Net really doing to everyone and every thing? What does it teach every day to all of us? What are we gaining and losing? If you feel the same occasional angst, consider buying and reading Tom Keen's The Internet is not the Answer. This is an honorable book and worth your serious attention.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2015
Washington Examiner: What's happening to America's 40-year-old crude oil export ban?
Despite my unsavory limousine liberal past, I've become an ardent fan of the Washington Examiner, a decade-old right-leaning weekly/online publication with smarts, calm and class. I'm especially fond of its energy and environment coverage by John Siciliano. See "The push to end the 40-year-old ban on oil exports heats up". Excerpts:
The energy industry is making a hard shift from lobbying against ozone regulations to lifting the 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports, in anticipation of a vote next week in the House to repeal the ban.
The industry was engaged for weeks in an eleventh-hour push against costly Environmental Protection Agency rules to reduce smog-forming ozone emissions that it says would harm energy and infrastructure development across the country. Now, energy groups have replaced that campaign with a push to get Congress to repeal the oil-export ban.
Around the country, the group Producers for American Crude Oil Exports will be shelling out advertising bucks for a television blitz to be shown during this weekend's college football games. The ad says President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran undermines U.S. oil and gas producers by lifting sanctions on the Persian Gulf country and allowing it to begin selling Iranian oil in the global market.
At the same time, groups are fighting against repealing the ban. Ralph Nader's Public Citizen consumer advocacy group is actively protesting lifting the ban, while refiners represented by the CRUDE Coalition continue to press lawmakers against repealing it. The coalition says lifting the ban would raise gasoline prices, while making the country more dependent on imports, including those from Iran.
The House bill was expected to come up for a vote last week, but the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio forced the GOP leadership to push it back. Aides say they are hopeful the bill will be brought to the floor ahead of the Columbus Day holiday [of] Oct. 12.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2015
At Above the Law: Dan Harris on American* hostage-business debtors in China.
This past week there was an especially excellent and eye-opening piece from my fellow Midwesterner and friend (and one-on-one basketball-challenged homeboy) Dan Harris, China business lawyer: "Maybe Owe Money To China? Don’t Go There." As usual from Dan Harris, this Is stuff business law can use. No. Maybe even today. Excerpt:
Most of the hostage cases my firm has handled have involved American businesspeople whose company allegedly owes money to a Chinese company. The American businessperson is being held hostage in an effort by the Chinese company to get paid. Around half the time the American company admits to owing the money, but (quite believably) claims not to have the money to pay off its debt all at once.
The other half of the time, the American company insists that it does not owe the Chinese company anything near the amount claimed by the Chinese company. The disputed amount usually stems from the Chinese company having provided the American company with bad product for which the American company is not willing to pay full price.
The American held hostage usually has had his or her passport taken by the company to whom a debt is allegedly owed and is then kept under fairly loose security in a mid- to lower-tier Chinese hotel, usually in the second- or third-tier city in which the Chinese company is located. After a week or so, the hostage usually comes to realize that he or she is not going to be physically mistreated but by the third or fourth month, they become pretty desperate to get out.
Well done. But it's time for our game, Dan. Hoosier Angels--with jump shots just like mine--walk with me every day.
*And other humans and brands.
Owe money to a China business? Headed there? Don't get boxed-out from your scheduled return. You with me?
Posted by JD Hull at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)