They have dragged out their life in stupor and semi-sleep, they have married hastily, they have made children at random. They have met other men in cafes, at weddings and funerals. Sometimes, caught in the tide, they have struggled against it without understanding what was happening to them. All that has happened around them has eluded them; long, obscure shapes, events from afar, brushed by them rapidly and when they turned to look all had vanished. And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
The Unbearable Whiteness of Liberal Media
Via The American Prospect, a left-leaning publication: Read more →
Those Who Think Differently Are Disinvited
Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, was scheduled to speak this coming Sunday at Smith College, but she withdrew her name after nearly 500 people signed a petition objecting to the policies of the IMF. Similar outcries foiled speaking engagements by former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University, among several others. — WSJ.com As Nietzsche used to say, “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Read more →
That L.A. Sunshine
Also featuring the USC Marching Band horn section . . . Read more →
You know, the future’s a huge, gigantic place. I have no idea what’s going on out there, I’m just going to walk into it and see what happens. — Neil Young
Random Thoughts on Paying College Athletes
Where is the money going to come from? Most people seem to think that college athletic programs are big money makers. They aren’t. Despite the big revenue dollars associated with two sports — football and men’s basketball — 90 percent of Division I athletic programs, because of the much larger number of non-revenue sports, operate at a loss. They’re subsidized by the general fund of the university. Paying athletes would require additional dollars to be directed away from academic endeavors: hiring and paying professors, funding research, offering financial aid to non-athletes, etc. Title IX requires gender equity. You couldn’t just pay football players and men’s basketball players. Everyone would need to be paid equally in some sense, even in non-revenue sports. How much money are we talking about? Let’s say at a medium to large school, we have 500 to 1,000 student athletes and we’re going to pay… Read more →
Singing the Song from the Heart, Without Any Accoutrements, Without Any Production
The whole idea of a singer-songwriter singing the song from the heart, singing a song that means something to them and actually singing a song that’s good enough to stand up on its own without any accoutrements, without any production, without any machines supporting it, without any formulated beats, without any computer making sure that all the rhythms are justified so that everything is perfect, you take all those things away and put a great song there with a great performance, even if it’s not by the greatest vocalists in the world or the greatest guitar player or instrumentalist in the world, if that person is believing what they’re singing and it’s truly there and the song is great and the song is written from a real place, then the song’s going to resonate with anybody who wants to listen to it. — Neil Young Read more →
Good Riddance to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they say will be a centuries-long, “unstoppable” process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet. — West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning – NBC News.com I’m trying to think what the big deal is here. The Southern California city I live in, which is currently 12 miles from the coast and 70 feet above sea level, will, in 500 to 1,000 years, be only 55 feet above sea level. My favorite beachfront restaurants and hangouts will no longer be standing, but they wouldn’t have been anyway. Read more →
The Single Greatest Source of Economic Error
But the underlying fallacy — the failure to notice that things must add up — is, in my experience, the single greatest source of economic error. Politicians routinely promise to make medical care or housing or college educations more widely available by controlling their prices; economists routinely scratch their heads and ask where the extra doctors or houses or classrooms are going to come from. You can no more speed up the line for medical care by lowering prices than you can speed up the deli line by handing out tickets. — Steve Landsburg, The Big Questions Read more →
One Percenters
“Progressives” love to complain about the alleged unfairness of the amount of income earned (“Progressives typically use misleading terms such as “claimed by”) the top 1 percent of income earners. Why not complain instead about the unfairness of the amount of tax revenues received by the top 1 percent of net-tax-revenue recipients? Why are the annual tax-receipt incomes of this small group less worthy of condemnation than are the annual pre-tax market-earned incomes of “the 1 percent” who are the regular objects of criticism, envy, and childish populist moralizing? — Don Boudreaux Read more →
Lit Quizzes
New additions to the First Lines and Last Lines quizzes: First Lines These notebooks were found among the papers of Antoine Roquentin. One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds. Last Lines The building-yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain in Bouville. However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of “indifferent” nature: they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end. His bruised memory has subsided again and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor—neither the noseless man who killed Hestas nor the cruel Procurator of Judea, fifth in that office, the knight Pontius Pilate. Read more →
Time Management
We had a time management seminar at the office today but I couldn’t find a way to fit it into my schedule. Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Angela Davis
I still believe that capitalism is the most dangerous kind of future we can imagine. — Angela Davis Alternatives to capitalism have resulted in shortages, famine, mass murder and societal collapse (cf., Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Venezuela … I could go on and on but I think we both get the point). Can anyone list a few capitalist countries where this has occurred? If not, what does the word “dangerous” mean in this context? Angela Davis is now 70 years old. Can anyone list a few well-known Angela Davis-style radicals who lived a long life in any of the aforementioned countries? Read more →
Pug Photos on Flickr
That’s Why It’s Called the Opposition Party
Charlie Crist, former Republican and currently Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, on why he changed parties: I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president. I’ll just go there. I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me. It was so intolerable that Crist left the GOP in 2010 — four years ago — and he’s just bringing this up now? Has anyone asked this fool why Republicans have been unfriendly to all other Democratic presidents? Or why Democrats have been unfriendly to all GOP presidents? What is his theory on that? Is he really this stupid or is he counting on his target audience being this stupid? I suspect the latter . . . Read more →
The War on Poverty is 50 Years Old
The New York Times has an update from McDowell County, West Virginia, on how the War on Poverty is going after 50 years . . . Of West Virginia’s 55 counties, McDowell has the lowest median household income, $22,000; the worst childhood obesity rate; and the highest teenage birthrate. It is also reeling from prescription drug abuse. The death rate from overdoses is more than eight times the national average. Of the 115 babies born in 2011 at Welch Community Hospital, over 40 had been exposed to drugs. . . . Many in McDowell County acknowledge that depending on government benefits has become a way of life, passed from generation to generation. Nearly 47 percent of personal income in the county is from Social Security, disability insurance, food stamps and other federal programs. . . . The poverty rate, 50 percent in 1960, declined – partly as a result of… Read more →
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? — Henry David Thoreau
2048 * 2 = 4096
The Potato Chips Are Not Optional
A woman comes home from the grocery store with three bags of Lay’s Potato Chips . . . “These were on sale,” she says. “You buy three bags and each bag is $1.53. You know how much one bag is usually? $4.50. It’s like buying one bag and getting two bags free.” “How much would it cost if we bought no bags of potato chips?” someone asks. “That’s not an option.” Read more →
British Healthcare Fact of the Day
In Britain, even though they’re already paying for the National Health Service, six million Brits — two-thirds of citizens earning more than $78,700 — now buy private health insurance. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 travel out of the U.K. annually, spending more than $250 million, to receive treatment more readily than they can at home. — WSJ.com Read more →