The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake occurred in the early morning of Jan. 23, 1556 in Huaxian, Shaanxi during the Ming dynasty. Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records. It is one of the most fatal earthquakes in China, in turn making it one of the top disasters in China by death toll. Call me Nostradamus, but if this event happened on Jan. 23, 2023, it would be almost universally blamed on “climate change.” Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
If California Slides Into the Ocean
And if California slides into the ocean Like the mystics and statistics say it will I predict this motel will be standing Until I pay my bill. — Warren Zevon, “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” Read more →
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. — Orwell
All is Well! All is Well!
Microsoft to Lay Off 10,000 Workers as It Looks to Trim Costs — msn.com Google to lay off 12,000 employees, the latest tech giant to cut thousands of jobs — usatoday.com Regal Cinemas is closing 39 more movie theaters. See the list — cnn.com Another day, another round of layoffs and closures, another sunshine up the butthole economic report from the Biden administration: We’re not in a recession! Employment numbers are great! Someone is lying to me and I don’t think it’s Microsoft, Google and Regal Cinemas. Read more →
Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
The recent rainstorms here in California are “proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously,” according to our governor, Gavin Newsom. Because we never in history had rainstorms until very recently. He’s not very smart. If we got no rain this winter, he would have blamed that on “climate change” too. Read more →
Fast Food Robots
How robots are helping address the fast-food labor shortage https://t.co/xh8Ghv9rZX — Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 21, 2023 There’s not really a fast food labor shortage. It’s created by the fact that unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies can total up to $120,000 per year for a family of four. Not bad! If you can make six figures for doing nothing, you wanna go be a fry cook? The robots address the fact that the absurdly high numbers that people want to make for minimum-wage work is well beyond the value that minimum-wage workers add to the bottom line. The real minimum wage is always zero. Read more →
Who Funds Democrats?
Red vs. Blue, us vs. them … it's the political prism of a simpleton. Who do you think funds Democrats? https://t.co/m6FJ0jorl9 — Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 18, 2023 Read more →
The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again
Black Lives Matter wants LAPD to stop responding to minor traffic incidents https://t.co/zHvBVAJnDI — O.C. Register (@ocregister) January 17, 2023 Well, the Law of Unintended Consequences has already kicked in on this one. I feel like if I know this, someone at BLM should know it. In the aftermath of George Floyd and Defund the Police, cops — the ones who were still funded — didn’t engage with Black citizens because, you know, if that’s the way you feel about cops, go ahead and do whatever you want. One result, as you can see in the chart, is a spike in traffic fatalities for both Black men and women. The same unintended consequence affected the murder rate: Read more →
A Time For Choosing
This is a time for choosing. Will we choose democracy over autocracy?Community over chaos?Love over hate? These are questions of our time that I ran for president to help answer. And of which Dr. King’s life and legacy will guide us forward. — President Biden (@POTUS) January 16, 2023 That depends. Is aggregating state and corporate power to censor the internet democracy or autocracy? Is it community? Is it love? Read more →
No Child Knows They Are Trans
This is my belief. No child knows they are trans they know they feel different. Trans is a diagnosis you get through therapy and care, not from the internet. — Buck Angel® Transsexual (@BuckAngel) January 16, 2023 Read more →
Wealth Tax
How do those two things even go together? What gives the government the right to use any individual citizen for the benefit of others? https://t.co/4WUNRlURzz — Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 16, 2023 Read more →
2022: The Year in Books
These are the books I read in 2022, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion. Books of the Year: On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleža (fiction) and Night Train by Martin Amis (contemporary fiction). My Library at LibraryThing Read more →
Does Money Buy Happiness?
Does money buy happiness? I’ve never seen any evidence of this but the girl cutting my hair today said it does. “It allows my husband and I to have a house so it gives us freedom.” I should have delved into this a little bit more for a couple of reasons. When I’ve owned a house, I’ve found that it gave me less freedom. If I’m renting a place, even a house, and I decide that I don’t want to be there anymore, I can just leave, which I can’t do if I own a house. Of course, there would still be the issue of moving all of my possessions. Owning things is problematic. Do I own my stuff or does my stuff own me? I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really want to own anything: houses, cars, furniture. That would be real freedom. That still leaves the… Read more →
Unemployment Stays Unbelievably Low
Bed Bath & Beyond to Close Three More Stores in Los Angeles, Orange Counties https://t.co/ELCIzMhY3Q — Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 14, 2023 The company is closing about 150 stores overall, plus layoffs in corporate and supply chain. You can swap new company names (Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, etc.) into these layoffs and closing stores stories every day and still get sunny government economic reports based on nothing I can see except unbelievably low unemployment numbers. And when I say “unbelievably low,” I mean literally not believable (see here and here). Read more →
When Empires Start to Collapse
Yeah, I think if you look at history, it’s really interesting when empires start to collapse, when you start to get such a breach between how the elite lives and how the rest of the country lives. There are usually two options: you can either start to placate and appease the vast majority of the country who are living in deprivation — some symbolic gestures of social programs just enough to keep them mollified so they don’t go out into the streets — or you can decide, “You know what, we don’t really care how angry the citizenry gets. What we’re going to do instead is ‘paramilitarize’ the country, we’ll put them under a massive surveillance system. “We’ll keep a really close eye on everything they’re doing, we’ll listen to their communications and we’ll crush, first by demonizing and then, criminalizing and, then, censoring any form of dissent so that… Read more →
Democratic Election Deniers
I just wanted to “bookmark” this as it provides a good catalog of Democratic election deniers over the past 20 years or so. House Democrats’ New Leader Doesn’t Believe in Democracy Read more →
The Difference Between Television and Movies
The thing about TV series that I don’t understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end. But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle — and then they’re beaten to death until they’re exhausted and die. They don’t actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a… Read more →
Another Explanation for Low Unemployment Numbers
People who are not employed but not looking for employment are not considered unemployed and are not included in calculating the unemployment rate. I’ve theorized that one reason for the artificially low unemployment rate is people dropping out of the workforce, although I couldn’t explain why so many people were dropping out of the workforce. But now I think I can explain it. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, an economist-founded nonprofit, analyzed how unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies in each state stacked up against employed people’s compensation. The writers of the report found that these two benefits alone could total up to $120,000 per year for a family of four. In 14 states — including North Dakota, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, and Minnesota — unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies were found to be the equivalent to a head of household earning $80,000 in salary. In other words, a spouse would have… Read more →
I Dislike Oxford Commas
I dislike Oxford commas. They’re unnecessary, they take time to type and they slow down reading. Keep it quick, keep it simple. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons) Read more →
Lying Your Way to the Top
For more than a decade, I have been saying in all kinds of venues, in my written journalism, in speeches, and in interviews, that the most bizarre and surreal aspect of American journalism is that getting caught lying is no barrier to advancement and success. Specifically, I’ve long said, as long as you lie for the right people and causes mainly to advance the interest of neo-liberal global economic institutions, or do the bidding of the U.S. security state, then, I said, you can lie for as much as you want and it will not have any impact whatsoever on your career in corporate journalism. But that formulation that I’ve long endorsed is far too generous to the point of being misleading. Indeed, it’s actually untrue to say that getting caught blatantly lying has no effect on one’s career in corporate journalism. I was wrong about that. It does have… Read more →