As IF Times

link Hertz to fight Muslim workers suit over prayer breaks | Reuters.

When you read the article, you will notice a standard legal line which we see on a regular basis but which we mostly accept as background noise.

As restitution for the despicable and unreasonable demands of the Hertz company, the aggrieved workers want as part of their settlement, back pay plus damages for emotional pain and suffering.  This little phrase has worked its way into western culture over the past few generations as one of the standard reparation demands in any grievance lawsuit.  In doing some cursory research, there is no definitive record of how this standard restitution came to become part of most damages actions today.  If anyone out there knows, by all means please enlighten me.

Being an evolved and sophisticated society, we no longer practice the eye for an eye stuff stipulated in the Bible and which practice is still adhered to even to this day in numerous Muslim cultures.  The closest western cultures come to retributive justice is the death penalty for certain heinous crimes, but because of the lengthy appeals process, is actually more like the possibility of an eye for an eye, but first,  30 years on death row while we talk about it.

Instead, we substitute the notion that to alleviate whatever mental anguish was suffered by party A as a result of actions by party B, that a transfer of money from the aggriever to the aggrieved would be satisfactory compensation for the insult.  It’s easy to see how this makes sense at some level and in fact every year,  grotesque amounts of money changes hands in furtherance of this principle via tort lawyers, insurance companies, aided by all and sundry types of experts in damages lawsuits.

In many cases, such as the one referred to in the article, the ability to place a dollar value on the extent of the insult is iffy at best.  If the folks described in the article are wanting compensation for the time they were not allowed to pray, divide the hourly rate of pay by the minutes lost to praying and voila, it’s done.  I’d hazard $10 tops.  Any more than that and a case could be made that there was more time spent praying than driving cars around…in which case, Hertz should really hire legitimate workers.

In many other cases, the notion of making someone pay as compensation for some aggrievance, real or imagined has become an end in of itself.  The spectre of having to battle lawyers in both the courts of public opinion as well as the legal courts that are staffed with learned but misguided jurists has contributed mightily to the costs of mostly everything that people consume today from aspirins to x-boxes.

One of the more transparently greedy schemes to extort money in the guise of compensation came recently in a headline from the Durban climate talks.  There was a proposal that the U.N. was to be granted the power to tax or fine nations that exceeded some fanciful metric of climate transgression.  This body is to be named (in an orotund voice) The International Climate Court of Justice, not to be confused with the old Justice League of America. This body would have the power to enforce nations to pay ‘climate debt’.

The lack of logic of this proposal is stupefyingly obvious.  If the climate transgressions are as imminently fatal to the earth as they all claim, what good will transferring money to the U.N. do?  Presumably, this money will go towards alleviating emotional pain and suffering for…well, someone.   If we’re all gonna die because of flatulent cows and aerosol hairspray, why bother moving money around from one pocket to another?  How is having some extra cash going to help you if the seas rise and the atmosphere turns into a solid?  If on the other hand, there were some guarantee that this proposed pool of fine money were to be spent on spaceships to send Global Warming alarmists off to another planet, then I’d be all in favour of the idea.

However, like the Hertz employees, the end game for the Global Warming crowd is the same; it’s just extortion at a larger scale. At the moment at least, the chances of such an outcome are low.  At least I pray it is.

link School turns heating off to ‘save planet’ | The Sun |News.

And speaking of morons, the hits just keep on coming.   When people with questionable judgement are placed into positions of power or influence, only grief can ensue.   Surely people such as this headmaster have suffered some kind of physiological injury because there has obviously been a severance of the cord connecting his brain hemispheres.   At the very least, the logic wire has come loose.

If the entire global green movement is to have any credibility at all, they should at least be honest about what the end goals are.  If you follow the string of logic to its ultimate conclusion, the end game is to wipe mankind completely off the planet.  Which is of course, preposterous.  But that’s the only possible way by which all human damage to the planet can be halted.

Who knew that when the first Neanderthal rubbed a couple of sticks together to make a fire that this was the beginning of the end for mankind?   (And they still have the nerve to show their faces on insurance commercials for Geico….shameless ).  From that moment on, it was as if the light bulb went off for mankind as to how to make their existence better.  Now that they discovered how to warm themselves from the elements, it was only a matter of time before cooked food was next.   Fast forward millions of years later and we have New York City.  What the earthies are trying to do is turn the clock back on all of this.  If the green movement is to gain any credibility at all from here, why not just be blunt about what they’re after?  At the moment, they’re pushing the notion of windmills and bicycles, but we all know that’s as likely to last as long as a paycheck in a casino.  To really eliminate any possible scarring of the earths’ delicate eco-system, man has to go.

Do the earthies really think people will resume living in caves, foraging for berries and chasing animals for food?  The entire basis for the existence of all life from amoebas to zebras is the basic struggle of the organism versus the environment.  Survivors adapt, procreate and populate.  Non adaptors get eaten or go extinct.  Some guy named Darwin wrote an article about that at the turn of the century.  The very fact that most humans have developed a superior brain to all other living creatures confers upon them a certain latitude to modify their environment for better living.   There’s no point in having superior reasoning and thinking skills yet still live in the same circumstances as a brown bear in the log hollow just down the path.  That’s preposterous.  That’s why we build condos.

Is the world a better place if people were stripped of their ability to travel, to invent, to mix cultures, to watch football, to eat cooked food?  Look at the tribes living in the African Serengeti Plains.  I don’t see lots of people like Headmaster goofball moving there for the simple life.  This whole save the earth movement should set an example by setting up camp somewhere in Africa and show us all how it’s done…with no internet access.