Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson, the “Human Vacuum Cleaner,” has died at the age of 86. Robinson played his entire 23-year career with the Orioles. He was selected to 18 All-Star Games and earned the 1964 AL Most Valuable Player award after batting .318 with 28 home runs and a league-leading 118 RBIs. He won 16 consecutive Gold Gloves. He was the best-fielding third basemen I’ve ever seen. Robinson’s most memorable performance came as MVP of the 1970 World Series, a five-game triumph over the Reds, He hit .429, homered twice and drove in six runs. In Game 1, Robinson delivered the tiebreaking home run in the seventh inning. One inning earlier, he made a sensational backhanded grab of a hard grounder hit down the line by Lee May, spun around in foul territory and somehow threw out the runner. Robinson contributed an RBI single in the second… Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Clapping for Nazis
The photo shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other members of the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian World War II veteran who later immigrated to Canada. Let me put this in hockey parlance so the Canadians can understand it. This is what’s known as an “own goal.” It’s hard to figure out how this happened, because Hunka’s introduction included the fact that he fought against Russia in WWII. Did no one think “Why was he fighting Russia? Russia was on our side.” It turns out that he was fighting Russia because he was in the Waffen-SS, i.e., he is (or was, at least) a Nazi. House Speaker Anthony Rota, who invited and introduced Hunka, has since resigned, and Trudeau has issued an on-brand non-apology apology. I haven’t heard that Zelenskyy said anything, but if he did, it was probably… Read more →
A Mystery of the Digital Censorship Era
A mystery of the digital censorship era is the ease with which its core ideas have been sold to people who were its fiercest initial opponents. The closer you look at mechanisms now used to isolate, remove, disrupt, and spy on everyone from environmentalists to antiwar activists to anti-mandate or anti-lockdown protesters, the more easily you’ll see a direct line to high-profile civil liberties controversies of two decades ago. The modern Internet surveillance state was born in programs bitterly opposed then by left-leaning intellectuals, of the type who subscribed to The Nation and carried NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs while protesting war in Iraq. — Matt Taibbi Read more →
A Beautiful Day in the Great State of Iowa
View this post on Instagram A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) Read more →
OnlyPans
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Isabella Maria DeLuca (@isabellamdeluca) Read more →
Robbie Robertson, 1943-2023
RIP Robbie Robertson Read more →
Success!
This is an actual job posting. I don’t know if I’d want to take success tips from someone making 22 bucks an hour . . . Read more →
Bruce Lee Playing Table Tennis With Nunchuks
This is one of the more amazing things I’ve ever seen: View this post on Instagram A post shared by table_tennis_love_ (@table_tennis_love_) Read more →
California’s a Brand-New Game
All the gold in California Is in the bank in the middle of Beverly Hills In somebody else’s name. So if you’re dreamin’ about California, It don’t matter at all where you’ve played before. California’s a brand-new game. — Larry Gatlin, “All the Gold in California” Read more →
Failing To Notify Parents When Their Child Changes Gender Is ‘The American Way’?
Dem Governor: Failing To Notify Parents When Their Child Changes Gender Is ‘The American Way’ — freebeacon.com The Democratic governor is Phil Murphy from New Jersey, who says that “outing” LGBTQ students to their parents is a violation of the child’s constitutional rights. Thus, opposing parental notification is “the American way.” “Listen, we took these actions because it’s the right thing to do,” Murphy said. “Let’s protect the rights of these precious kids. Let’s do things the right way, the American way.” I wasn’t even aware that constitutional rights apply to children. Without researching it, I suspect they don’t. I also don’t think that children have the cognitive maturity to make decisions on their own about sexuality and gender identity. Transgenderism, for example, is a mental disorder: gender dysphoria. It’s a diagnosis obtained via medical care and therapy, not obtained via the internet. There almost certainly is not someone at… Read more →
It Never Gets Old
View this post on Instagram A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) Read more →
Days of Wine and Roses
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. — Ernest Dowson Read more →
Missouri v. Biden
Here’s how federal judge Terry Doughty yesterday described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” — Matt Taibbi Read more →
National Math and Reading Scores are Plunging
National math and reading scores are plunging. In the new educational philosophy, test scores are just a racist measure of racist things. Parents who are pro–standardized testing are far-right hate groups. Obviously closing schools for years was really bad. You can see the scores drop off a cliff after 2020. But overall, the scores are actually lower than they were 40 years ago. We’ve made no progress in educating kids since 1980. There was progress till slightly after 2010 and then . . . What has happened in that time? I bet deciding that math and reading are racist didn’t help. And teachers being primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores. Midwestern public school teachers are trading tips on how to transition kids without telling parents. (I don’t know why these stories are only covered in non-US media.) Having teachers paint your son’s nails does not improve… Read more →
An Alternative Approach to Student Loan Relief
The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's disastrous student loan forgiveness program. We have a bad habit in America of paying people to do the exact opposite of what we want them to do: more $$ to stay at home than to work, more $$ to be a single mother than married, more $$… pic.twitter.com/kexfAig09l — Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 30, 2023 I knew Biden wasn’t allowed to do this. Here’s the good news. You can just flip those signs over, write a new begging message on the back, and go stand on a freeway offramp. Read more →
Supreme Court Kills Affirmative Action
The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. — thenation.com The author of that piece really hates white people. I don’t recommend reading it, you will not be a better person for having done so, as it consists solely of sweeping generalizations, broad judgments, unfounded inferences and racial insults. Even if five points (out of a possible 100) were deducted for each verifiable fact, it still scores at least a 95. Grammar and spelling are passable. The only “fact” I remember being cited in support of affirmative action is actually false: In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities. The article that the author links to doesn’t even say that. Black and Latino enrollment in the… Read more →
Diversity at Harvard
The Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on Thursday. The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The email states that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and “to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.” Whatever that means. But what does race have to do with it? Why is race the deciding factor? I think it would be easy to find a young black person and a young white person who’ve lived very similar lives. Or to find two young white people who’ve led very different… Read more →
If Your House Burns Down and You Rebuild It, Did You “Create” a New House?
Over 13 million new jobs created.More Americans are working than ever.Record number of small business applications. Bidenomics is growing our economy. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2023 I love these Biden tweets on job “creation.” ChatGPT tells me that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the loss of more than 22 million jobs in the United States. The 13 million jobs that Biden “created” are those lost jobs coming back. But he’s still 9 million short. What happened to those people? The unemployment rate is low, which suggests that people have left the labor force for some reason. If COVID didn’t kill them all, then they may have retired, given up (not everyone wants to work at fast-food restaurants), or cobbled together a welfare package they can live on. The labor force participation rate (shown below) has never come back to pre-pandemic level, and people who have left the labor force… Read more →
Billionaires
The average billionaire in America pays 8% in federal taxes. Teachers and firefighters pay more than that. That’s why I proposed a minimum tax for billionaires. Republicans are against it, but I’m going to keep fighting for it. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 26, 2023 Reading Joe Biden’s Twitter is exquisitely painful, like a sore tooth that you can’t stop pushing on with your tongue. How do these things even go together? Americans are not taxed on their net worth, they’re taxed on their income. At least that’s what I think he’s talking about. Income tax. Although there are a lot of other federal taxes: self-employment tax, gift tax, excise taxes, etc. Is he talking about taxing people’s net worth? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I’m not a billionaire myself because I don’t know how to make that happen. If someone has figured out how to do… Read more →
Climate and Environmental Justice for Ignorant Bigots
When @KamalaHarris and I were elected, we vowed to enact the most ambitious climate and environmental justice campaign in American history. That’s exactly what we’ve done. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 25, 2023 “Climate and environmental justice”? What is that and how much does it cost? Are we being atmospherically sodomized by ignorant climate change deniers? Read more →