My fellow Americans – A lot of people ask me, “Tom, why are Democrat-run cities such shitholes?” I was reminded of this by President Biden’s upcoming “soak the rich” tax plan. In my view, there are three Democratic philosophies that destroy American cities. For example, did you know that Detroit in 1950 was the richest city in America? Now it’s a wasteland where half the residents can’t even read. The first philosophy is that Democrats hate rich people because “they don’t pay their fair share.” What is their “fair share”? What is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for? I would suggest it’s nothing, but Democrats enact punitive tax rates on the most productive people, who then leave town and go somewhere else. The second philosophy is that Democrats hate business because corporate fat cats “don’t pay their fair share.” So they enact anti-business policies, the result… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Detroit
Woke White Boy on Education Reform and Anti-Racism
“K-12 schools across the country must urgently profess solidarity with Black Lives Matter, vow to dismantle white supremacy and remake themselves into racism-free zones. “We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions.” “‘Heteropatriarchy’?” “We declare war on the intentional barriers white people have built to harm Black people. We grieve for all of the Black lives taken by white supremacy.” “Sounds like indoctrination is the key word here.” “No, it’s an opportunity for engagement. What’s really different now is talking explicitly about whiteness.” “Parents must be thrilled with the use of words like diversity, equity and inclusivity to group and stereotype human beings by skin color and attribute characteristics to your personality based on skin color, not to mention the anti-white and anti-American messaging.” “Well, I’m tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences. They gleefully soak… Read more →
My Boyhood Sports Icons Are Dying: Al Kaline
Al Kaline played all 22 years of his career as a right fielder for the Detroit Tigers, played in 18 All-Star games, won 10 Gold Gloves, a World Series in 1968, had 3,007 hits, 399 home runs, a .297 batting average and was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He died today at the age of 85. On his 80th birthday, he said: “To this day, I can’t believe the life I’ve had. I wanted to be a baseball player — and do the one thing I was good at. “Even now, I love it so much.” RIP Al Kaline Read more →
What is a “Mass Shooting” and Who Commits Them?
The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree.” The FBI definition of “mass murder” is three or more people murdered in one event. The FBI doesn’t have a definition for “mass shooting.” You have to actually die for the FBI to take notice of you. As of this writing, of 75 mass shootings in 2019, where the race of the perpetrator is known, 22 were white, 39 were black, 8 were Latino, 3 were Asian, 2 were American Indian and 1 was Arab. Many of the 2019 mass shootings are currently unsolved, thus the race of the shooters is not known, but they often took place in black areas and claimed black victims. Mass shootings of black citizens is not generally considered newsworthy, possibly because media have written inner cities off as unsalvageable, so what happens… Read more →
61% Say It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Retire
61% Say It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Retire — Rasmussen Reports I feel like this is something the whole country can agree on. Granted, 61 percent is not 100 percent but you have to take into account that 25 percent of Americans think the sun goes around the earth, nearly 30 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map and half the residents of Detroit can’t read. Hillary Clinton has come out of seclusion just as we remember the 16th anniversary of 9/11, and as both Texas and Florida are underwater, and all she wants to talk about is Hillary Clinton. This woman is completely tone-deaf, always has been and apparently always will be . . . Read more →
10 Reasons That NY Times Chart Might Not Mean What You Think It Means
From the New York Times: Money is not the only metric for measuring life outcomes. Charts and articles like this seem to reflect an inappropriate obsession with narrowly materialist values. If you do want to measure your life with money, it looks like the 99th percentile is where you want to be. Why aren’t you there? Why aren’t you a CEO? Why aren’t you making a million a year? If you can’t figure out how to get there, don’t begrudge the people who did figure it out. If you don’t have the education, motivation, intelligence or skills to get there, don’t begrudge those who do. The amount of wealth is not a fixed amount. It’s not a zero-sum game. If it were, it would be concerning that a few people are very wealthy. But it isn’t. The distribution of income has to be skewed to the right because income is… Read more →
Income Inequality Explained
Michigan Man Dies in Crash While Masturbating to Porn Video
Michigan man dies in crash while driving and masturbating to porn on his phone — NY Daily News Years ago, I was in a public restroom stall in an office building when I felt a mild earthquake. It occurred to me that a bad way to die would be to have a building collapse on you while sitting on a toilet, only to be pulled out of the rubble on the evening news with your pants around your ankles, covered in excrement. But even that ignominious scenario pales in comparison to the egress of Clifford Ray Jones, age 58, who was driving down I-75 in Detroit with his pants off, watching a pornographic video on his phone. His hands were somewhere other than at the recommended position of 10 and 2 on the steering wheel when he crashed his 1996 Toyota and was hurled out the sunroof. It’s embarrassing enough… Read more →
IRS Refunds $4 Billion to Identity Thieves
The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to an inspector general’s report released Thursday. The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai. In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston. — Associated Press Hmmm . . . aren’t there some sort of sanity checks built into the IRS system? Doesn’t a warning bell go off when 655 tax refunds are sent to a single address in Lithuania? Does this erode your confidence in the federal government’s ability to manage complex systems and gigantic sums of money? I’m sure they’ll do a much better job… Read more →
I See a City That’s Coming Back
We are one nation. We are one people. We will rise and we will fall together. Anyone who doesn’t believe it should come here to Detroit. It’s like the commercial says: This is a city that’s been to heck and back. And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back. — Barack Obama, Sept. 5, 2011 Read more →
But I Didn’t Mean It
POTUS: “When the auto industry was on the brink of collapse and Gov. Romney said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt,' I said no.” — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 16, 2012 Read more →
Here is Your Wakeup Call, America: Detroit Just Went Bankrupt
Detroit used to be known as “the Paris of the midwest” – a city of wide streets, imposing buildings, and home to the great US auto industry. In 1960, it had the highest per capita income in the nation. But decades of decline, racial tension and corruption have brought the motor city to its knees. — The Guardian Highest per capita income in the nation! I did not know that. Anyway, Detroit filed for bankruptcy last week with debts of more than $18 billion. The city’s population has dropped from 2 million in 1950 to 700,000 today, as Detroiters have become fed up with decades of mismanagement and rising crime and poverty. Detroit’s murder rate is at a 40-year high, only a third of its ambulances are in working order, and nearly half its streetlights are broken. Citizens wait 58 minutes for the police to respond to calls, compared to… Read more →
NARCh 2011 – Day 2
Two more round-robin games today, morning and evening . . . Devil Dogs 6, Detroit Mission Stars 2 Devil Dogs played a great game, best I’ve seen them play this season. ISCA Grizzlies (NJ) 5, Devil Dogs 3 The Grizzlies are a good, fast team. That said, the Devil Dogs played a subpar game. Tomorrow is a critical day. Final round-robin games in the morning, after which the top teams start the single-elimination playoff rounds. By the end of the day, only four teams will be left standing. If the Devil Dogs win their last round-robin game, they’ll be in the playoffs at 3-1. If they lose, they’ll be 2-2 and could still get a low playoff seed, but it will be a close call . . . Read more →
NARCh – Day 1
The Devil Dogs played their first two round-robin games today. In the afternoon game, they beat the Motor City Moose from Detroit, 5-3. Devil Dogs scored the first three goals, but the Moose came back to 4-3 down before the Dogs scored a late goal for the final margin. After the game, we came back to the hotel, barbequed some burgers and hot dogs, then drove back to the arena for a 9 p.m. game against the Mission Mayhem, a local team from here in Ontario. Devil Dogs won, 3-2. My son had a nice goal. A teammate tried to saucer a pass to him as he skated to the front of the net, but the pass stayed airborne all the way. He took a short baseball swing at it and batted it in out of the air. When an NHL player does that, it’s a definite SportsCenter Top 10,… Read more →
Moldered City
The story of Glemie Dean Beasley plays like a country song. The son of a sharecropper, Beasley left school at 13 to pick cotton. He came to Detroit in 1958. His woman left him in 1970 for a man he calls Slick Willy. — The Detroit News His baby done left him / The pain won’t abate / Asked where she was going / She said, “To become secretary of state.” — Best of the Web Today Read more →