- My luggage has taken hits at an alarming rate. To cite my most recent return flight: my mom had purchased/picked out some nice oversized colored luggage tags on sale at an outlet mall. I was using a blue one, which made it fairly easy to locate my luggage. All that remained of the tag when I got my suitcase was a thin strap of leather. How the hell did that happen? Did they try to pick up the luggage by its tag? Then there was time they destroyed the telescopic back handle of my luggage (same suspect reason). I've also previously written how I had an American Airlines flight canceled out of San Antonio, eventually getting transferred to Delta, but I had to retrieve my luggage--only to find the luggage thoroughly destroyed to the point it had to be heavily taped up just to move it. No personnel in sight, no explanation, apology or compensation. I had to limp my way to Delta, and an agent there had to apply another layer of tape. The luggage barely made it home, unusable for future use. Do these people have a conscience?
- A second example was a jewelry case I bought some time back for Mom for Christmas . It had stained glass inside; I shipped it USPS. When Mom got it, the stained glass in the jewelry case was totally shattered. Dad (who was working for USPS) said I should have marked it "fragile" more and/or upgraded the shipping; give me a break! Postal workers should be treating packages as if their own.
- Recently I subscribed to an Amazon minestrone soup carton .shipment. Someone took the shipment from my door, ripped open the box and tossed the contents in front of my door, damaging the product in the process.
- While I was an all but broke UH PhD student in my 20's, I was coming out of a strip mall (with an S&L where I kept my checking account) off Westheimer (a busy west Houston street). Some businessman in a suit was waiting in the INCOMING lane of the two-lane side street waiting for traffic to clear (I assumed he was waiting to cross lanes but wasn't sure why he was sitting in the incoming lane), which in Houston can take forever. We must have been sitting there for 2 minutes, and he never once looked in my direction. Just as the traffic clears, before I can react, he cuts across my lane and crushes my left fender. We get out of our cars, and he's looking at his car bumper in my fender, and says (I'll never forget), "Was that dent there before?" Long story short, he was insured by Traveler's, and I even drove to their Houston facility to get an estimate made. I was trying to get Traveler's to issue the check so I could have the repair done while visiting my folks for Christmas. I had filed a police report, where I made a slight factual error in describing the number of lanes in the side street; he was (illegally) in the left (incoming) lane, and the only relevant fact in the police report was that JT was in the lane next to mine, and I was in the right lane (in more ways than one) and JT hit my car by cutting across my lane. The bastard claims agent then used the incidental error in the police report to rationalize denying my claim! The dishonest son of a bitch then told me my alternative was to find a witness to corroborate my claim (this was before cellphones with embedded cameras, etc.), which effectively put the burden of proof on me. If I had known Travelers would pull a scam like that, I would have asked the driver whose car JT's was blocking to give me his contact information. After the fact, it was impossible--and it really didn't matter, because JT had already admitted it to his insurance company--that's why I had come to them to do a damage assessment. I went back to JT and told him that he had to do the right thing, but JT responded that he had done his part and wasn't involved in the claim agent's actions. My insurance company wouldn't have anything to do with it, because I wasn't at fault. I wasn't about to let the sons of bitches get away with it. I looked into taking him to small claims court. Somehow the dishonest claims agent got wind of it and called me, screaming I couldn't do that because JT was insured with them. In the meanwhile I couldn't get the case in small claims because JT avoided getting served. So one day I saw constables approaching my residence in UH graduate student housing, thinking how odd it was that they were coming in person to tell me JT had been served. Nope, they were serving ME! JT was counter-suing with probably one of the weirdest statements in legal history, claiming he had been in the outgoing/right lane (that was a lie), that at the last minute I had squeezed up between him and the curb, and he couldn't avoid hitting me. Once he sued me and admitted to hitting my car, it was game over. My insurance company entered the picture and quickly forced Travelers to pay off the claim. I'm still not sure why JT counter-sued; maybe in his own way he was trying to get his insurance company to do the right thing. But this is the same guy who had asked if the dent already existed, and I think he was more pissed I was going after him in small claims court. I still haven't forgotten JT and the claim agent, both of them deserving getting their asses kicked.
There is a liberty concept at play in the background, of course: the tragedy of the commons, i.e., when everybody owns something, effectively nobody owns it. For example, would I have pursued JT if I had been driving a government car? Probably not.
And So 2020 Begins
I'm modestly surprised just the month after the mid-terms Elizabeth Warren is already signaling her decision to seek the 2020 nomination. As I tweeted, I seriously doubt Warren will be the nominee, but Warren's candidacy may reflect the fact that Clinton will not seek a rematch, in my opinion Trump's best hope for reelection.
I'm not a pundit and certainly not someone who can speak of the allegiance of the Democratic Party. I think that Biden can make a credible argument that he can win back Trump's blue-collar Midwest/East coalition that Clinton lost (e.g., WI, PA, and MI), and the emboldened leftists like Warren may divide ideological support with Sanders, Harris and others, like the GOP conservatives in 2016. There is considerable talk of Beto O'Rourke, who lost a closer-than-expected challenge to Cruz last month, might pose a generational candidate, like JFK or Obama. You never can tell; I remember thinking Clinton's chances in 1992 were a long shot.
I suspect, but could be wrong, that the Democrats will fall behind Biden, much like they fell behind Kerry's 2004 challenge to G.W. Bush, realizing that a leftist like Dean would be a lost cause. They thought Kerry's Vietnam experience posed a credible challenge for independent-minded voters, and Kerry came close. Biden comes across as likable, maybe not like "I like Ike" but many voters may see him as the anti-Trump.
I cannot rule out that Trump, seeing the writing on the wall, may walk away from an FDR/Hoover blowout. I do not see him winning back the independents who at last glance had a 31% approval rating. He can't win reelection without independents. If we see an economic slowdown and/or unemployment picking up, Trump almost certainly would be scapegoated (there's a reason he's bashing his own Fed chief Powell). I wouldn't rule out Trump thinking lightning could strike twice in 2020 muddling his way to reelection, but it's intriguing to think what a Trump LBJ exit would mean. Maybe someone like Ben Sasse? One could only hope....
