[Maxine Waters’] message was clearly intended to get to the jury. If you acquit, or if you find a charge less than murder, we will burn down your buildings. We will burn down your businesses. We will attack you. This was an attempt to intimidate the jury. It’s borrowed precisely from the Ku Klux Klan of the 1930s and 1920s when the Klan would march outside of courthouses and threaten all kinds of reprisals if the jury ever dare convict a white person or acquit a black person. And so efforts to intimidate a jury should result in a mistrial. — Alan Dershowitz Rep. Waters lives in a nice house in the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park. Her mansion is valued at $6 million. I guess living outside the boundaries of the district you represent is allowed, because Hancock Park is outside of her South Central LA district,… Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Bernie Madoff and Barack Obama
The death of Bernie Madoff reminds me that I never understood why he was so vilified. He ran a Ponzi scheme. All of his investors knew it was a Ponzi scheme. They chose to get in, and gambled that they could time their exits just right. Some succeeded, some failed. . . . The fact that he not only claimed to return 10% in every kind of market condition but actually did so constituted something like proof positive that he was running a Ponzi scheme, for anyone who cared to take notice. So I think Madoff’s “lies” go into the same category as the alleged “lies” of Barack Obama when he said that under Obamacare, anybody who liked his/her old health insurance policy would be able to keep it. Nobody capable of arithmetic could have believed such an outlandish statement — unless they gave it no thought whatsoever, in which… Read more →
The Knowledge of What They Really Are
Let’s express this as clearly as it can be expressed. Any journalist who treats unverified stories from the CIA or other government agencies as true, without needing any evidence or applying any skepticism, is worthless. Actually, they are worse than worthless: they are toxic influences who deserve pure contempt. Every journalist knows that governments lie constantly and that it is a betrayal of their profession to serve as mindless mouthpieces for these security agencies: that is why they will vehemently deny they do this if you confront them with this accusation. They know it is a shameful thing to do. . . . Even when they learn that they deceived millions of people by uncritically repeating a story that the CIA told them was true, they will — on the very same day that they learn they did this — do exactly the same thing, this time with a one-paragraph… Read more →
Status
My phone showed a call from CHESHIRE CT, either someone from Connecticut or a Cheshire Cat, but I didn’t want to talk to either one.
What is the Likely Result of Overcharging the George Floyd Case?
Active law enforcement officers, by policy, can’t have a voice in America. They’re not allowed to speak their mind. They’re not allowed to say what they’re going through because of department, anti-social media policies. It’s down to the point now where if their wives or husband likes something, they’re being questioned over that. So, I’m that voice. I don’t have the restrictions of having a department policy over me. And I have my ear to the law enforcement officers across the nation, what they’re going through amongst themselves with their supervision, with politicians, with the community. And I speak on that. And again, we get back to that false rhetoric, the narratives. There’s 800,000 police officers, sworn law enforcement officers in America. There are 300 million police community contacts a year, 30 million criminal investigation contacts, 1.7 million violent felonies. Police in 2019 shot under a thousand people and only… Read more →
They Must Not Have Prepped Her For That One
It’s funny when someone gets killed with their own sword, in this case the lunacy of implicit bias. And she never sees it coming: Tom Cotton is savage. pic.twitter.com/P2q9V2yubE — Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 13, 2021 Read more →
Taylor Lorenz is More Privileged Than You Are
Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censors their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence. Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy. . . . No discussion of this tactic would be complete without… Read more →
Do You Know What They Call a Quarter-Pounder in Denmark?
It is utterly embarrassing that “pay people enough to live” is a stance that’s even up for debate. Override the parliamentarian and raise the wage. McD’s workers in Denmark are paid $22/hr + 6 wks paid vacation. $15/hr is a deep compromise – a big one, considering the phase in. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 3, 2021 Denmark doesn’t have a statutory minimum wage though. Per-capita income in the US is about the same as in Denmark, even though we are a multi-cultural nation of around 330 million people that naturalizes another 900,000 people every year, many from poor nations, and that Denmark is a homogeneous country of fewer than 6 million citizens that, in recent years, has effectively shut down its borders to poor immigrants. Also, in Denmark, everyone pays high taxes, not just the high earners. A Danish fast-food employee at $22/hr (about $45,000/yr) pays around half their… Read more →
Alan Dershowitz: All Americans Need to Fight Cancel Culture
I hope all Americans wake up to this. I hope it’s not just the “shoe is on the other foot” test. Now, the conservatives are the victims of cancel culture so they’re big supporters of the Constitution and constitutional rights. During McCarthyism, it was the left that were the victims, and the right were the oppressors. We need both the right, the left, and also the center to stand united against censorship, against cancel culture, and in favor of the marketplace of ideas. We have the right to flip the channel if we don’t like what’s on Newsmax. Change the channel, but don’t tell the carriers, the satellite carriers, and the cable carriers, to deny us the right to watch Newsmax. That is wrong. — Alan Dershowitz Read more →
A Positive Human Future?
If you were a farmer in Nebraska 100 years ago when the Titanic went down, you wouldn’t have known about that for about six months. Today we’re bombarded with news, almost all of which is bad, and yet people wonder about the epidemic of depression and anxiety. What is journalism’s vision of a positive human future? Where are the people who are being praised for bringing about a positive human future? Where is the news about virtue and heroism in the world? Read more →
I’m Actually Old Enough to Remember Freedom of Speech
Poland Proposes $13.5 Million Fines for Tech Giants Engaging in Ideological Censorship — The Epoch Times I’m actually old enough to remember when the USA, not Poland, carried the torch for freedom of speech. We took it for granted I suppose, but Poland has much more recent experience with being told what they are not allowed to think, say or write, and they don’t like it. Na Zdrowie, Polska! Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote the following: I was born and raised among people for whom freedom was the most precious of values. In Poland we are so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it. For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how we are meant to live and what we are meant to feel, and what… Read more →
Nobody Believes in Anything. Problem?
I get a daily email newsletter from the New York Times, in which one of this week’s entries was a conversation with John Schwartz, a Times reporter who focuses on the climate. If Schwartz has any qualifications on the subject of climate science like, say, a relevant degree or something, he modestly omits it from his Times bio. Much of the Pacific Northwest is blanketed in snow. Texas continues to endure frigid weather and electricity outages. Another winter storm is spreading across much of the country. How is this consistent with global warming? Well, as Schwartz “explains” it, when temperatures go up, that’s a sign of global warming, and when temperatures go down, that’s also a sign of global warming. He adds, “We’ve always had floods, fires and storms, but climate change adds oomph to many weather events.” “Oomph”!? Follow the science! Nobody believes anything from the media anymore,… Read more →
Preserve Your Right to be Victimized
How Many Synonyms Can There Be For the Word “Lies”?
I’m hearing from the media that whereas President Trump provided “a torrent of lies,” President Biden has “missteps,” “characteristic stumbles” and “false statistical interpretations.” But not lies. 🙂 I’m envisioning media gnomes wearing out their thesauruses for the next four years trying to come up with synonyms for the word “lies.” A couple of things I don’t like: Being treated like an imbecile who doesn’t grasp nuances of the English language and doesn’t know when he’s being brainwashed. The absence in our country of an honest free press. This would really solve a lot of problems. A lot. Read more →
Newsom Recall and Signature Matching
Our governor here in California, Gavin Newsom, once considered a rising superstar in the Democratic Party, is suddenly facing a serious effort to get him removed from power. The petition “Rescue California” has gathered over 1.5 million signatures, enough to qualify to put his recall up for a vote; but the State of California is poised to go into overdrive to throw out signatures that do not match exactly. The state of California is controlled by a whole bunch of Democrats. One-party rule. They are going to go through every single signature and throw out ones they don’t like. California’s suddenly renewed interest in strict signature-matching when it comes to the Newsom recall petition contrasts with its comparatively low 0.6% ballot rejection rate in the 2020 election, a rejection rate notably lower than the March primary even though more than twice as many people voted. Donald Trump, of course, would… Read more →
EppsNet at the Movies: Happy Old Year
Happy Old Year is a Thai movie about letting go of the past, holding on to the past, self-awareness (or lack thereof). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry . . . I had to take off a star because, and I’m not spoiling anything here, the male lead has two girlfriends, not really at the same time, and I can’t imagine what either of them sees in this selfish putz. I’d give the star back if the lead actress took her clothes off but she doesn’t. 🙁 Rating: Director: Cast: IMDb rating: ( votes) Read more →
Why Do We Have Pessimistic Brains?
From my notes on Coursera’s Positive Psychology course: The most recent geological epoch that we lived through, the Pleistocene, was the Ice Ages. Famine, flood, ice, drought, more ice. Now, imagine a primate mentality that thought, “What a lovely day today out there. I bet tomorrow is going to be really lovely as well.” That mentality got crushed by the ice. The mentality that survived, the brains that we have, are bad weather brains. They’re brains that say “looks like a nice day out there, but tomorrow the ice is coming.” And that is the way we process, automatically, information about a good world. Depression, anger, paranoia have served us very well. In the Ice Ages, it was a very good idea to think that bad stuff was coming. But consider the possibility that human progress actually exists, and that prosperity, a good world, living well, not having a tragedy… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is demanding that people stop using animal terms as insults — such as calling other humans “chicken” or “pig” — not because they want to encourage good manners but because it’s “speciesist” language. I really don’t understand the obsession some people have with telling other people how to speak. Read more →
Dude, Where’s My Insurrection?
Oh gosh, I hope this doesn't mean the magnitude of the threat has been wildly exaggerated for political gain, media excitement and ratings, censorship orgies, and laying the foundation for a new fear-driven Domestic War on Terror to control politics and information. https://t.co/oHhUPojpSO — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 21, 2021 Read more →
Mail-In Voting Not Valid or Fair?
Jeff Bezos and Amazon do not want their workers voting by mail on unionization. Amazon says mail-in voting wouldn't be "valid or fair."https://t.co/S2Hk4mvR7e — OutKick (@Outkick) January 24, 2021 Read more →