Pelé is the the only man to win the World Cup three times, winning with Brazil in the 1958, 1962 and 1970 tournaments. At the time of his first World Cup competition, Pelé was 17 years old and the youngest player to ever participate. In 1999, the International Olympic Committee gave him the honor of Athlete of the Century. RIP Pelé Read more →
Individuals Have Rights
Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group can do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are those rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. . . . Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection. — Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia Read more →
We Cannot Remain Silent, Except When We Can
We cannot remain silent about Elon Musk’s reckless decision to suspend numerous journalists’ Twitter accounts. — Center for American Progress, AFT and other progressives The New York Post responds: “Journalism is the cornerstone of free speech,” 14 progressive groups fume. “An attack on journalism” is an “assault on one of our fundamental pillars.” No, progressives can’t “remain silent” when that happens — unless, of course, it’s The Post reporting a story that’s unfavorable to a Democratic nominee for prez, as with the paper’s 2020 scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop. When Twitter banned The Post for that, you could’ve heard a pin drop from the supposedly high-minded defenders of “journalism” and “free speech.” Read more →
Render Unto Ukraine What We Need at Home
Now, I don’t think it’s controversial to note that many Americans here at home are not doing very well. You can pick whatever problem you think is the gravest: lack of wage increases and wage stagnation; the need to work multiple jobs if you have children, especially even if you’re a married couple — the fact that one parent, if they want, can’t stay home and take care of their children any longer, what was a foundational property of American life for decades and that no longer is the case. It’s gone. There aren’t enough good jobs, so people have to work two jobs just to sustain their family, to pay other people to raise their kids, and to pay other people to take care of their elderly parents. Huge numbers of people are without health care. Some of those people without health care got Medicaid benefits during the COVID… Read more →
Ukraine: What is the Benefit?
I regard this as the most important question when it comes to the always profound debate of whether the United States government will involve itself in a war or, for that matter, it’s the most important question when it comes to debates over whether the U.S. government will do anything. In what ways has your life or the lives of your families been improved, secured, or enhanced by the more than $100 billion sent by the U.S. government to fuel this war on the other side of the world? Now, to be fair, there are some Americans whose lives have been materially improved by these expenditures. Those are the tiny sliver of Americans who own large amounts of shares of the leading weapons manufacturers. 2022 has been quite a poor year for the stock market in general. Stocks are down across the board. [NYSE has an overall loss of 13.3%… Read more →
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of: RESIST
I hate all forms of it: RESIST, resistor, resistance, any of the preceding as a hashtag . . . What do resistors think they’re resisting? The dominant force in DC, Hollywood, academia, the US Security State, corporate media and Big Tech is liberalism. Resistors are about servitude to power. As devastating as it is to their self-image as brave dissidents and radicals — nobody in any power center regards them as threatening. They’re servants, obedient dweebs, useful tools for these institutions of power. No Democratic politician or group would be censored by Big Tech. Read more →
FBI: Exposé of Our Spread of Misinformation is “Misinformation”
The “Twitter Files” have been coming out in installments over the last couple weeks or so, documenting how the FBI, CIA, the Democratic party, almost every major news outlet, and tech giants like Twitter collaborated to label any information that might make people want to vote against Democrats as “misinformation,” and using that label to justify hiding the information from public view. The centerpiece of this collaboration was the Hunter Biden laptop story, reported by the New York Post shortly before the 2020 election. 50 members of the U.S. intelligence community signed a letter, which, if you read it carefully, said that the laptop could be Russian “disinformation,” although there was no evidence that it was Russian disinformation, and they really had no way of knowing whether it was Russian disinformation, but that it looked like like the kind of sneaky trick that Russia would pull, knowing that it would… Read more →
It’s Great to Be an American
Stanford University has released a guide to eliminate “harmful language.” I haven’t read it. It must be pretty extensive as it has 10 “harmful language” sections: ableist, ageism, colonialism, culturally appropriative, gender-based, imprecise language, institutionalized racism, person-first, violent and additional considerations. Among the words the university urges people to avoid is “American.” People are instead urged to use “U.S. Citizen” because “American” typically refers to “people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas.” The Americas, the index notes, comprises 42 countries. Well . . . the United States is the most important country in the Americas. Or if it isn’t, what is? Anyway, this guide reminds me of a couple of things. George Orwell used to say “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And Salman… Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews: Night Train by Martin Amis
A police officer investigates the apparent suicide of a longtime friend. There are layers here. Peel them away and each one is darker than the last. If you have someone on your gift list who you’d like to see become so depressed that they end their own life, give them this book. Rating: Read more →
Winter Palace
Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder. I spent my second quarter-century Losing what I had learnt at university. And refusing to take in what had happened since. Now I know none of the names in the public prints, And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces And swearing I’ve never been in certain places. It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow. — Philip Larkin, “Winter Palace” Read more →
Love Songs in Age
She kept her songs, they kept so little space, The covers pleased her: One bleached from lying in a sunny place, One marked in circles by a vase of water, One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, And coloured, by her daughter – So they had waited, till, in widowhood She found them, looking for something else, and stood Relearning how each frank submissive chord Had ushered in Word after sprawling hyphenated word, And the unfailing sense of being young Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein That hidden freshness sung, That certainty of time laid up in store As when she played them first. But, even more, The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, Broke out, to show Its bright incipience sailing above, Still promising to solve, and satisfy, And set unchangeably in order. So To pile them back, to cry, Was hard, without lamely admitting how… Read more →
A Berkeley Prof Explains Why Grocery Prices Are Skyrocketing
The question is why are they skyrocketing NOW? There's nothing in your tweet that hasn't been true for 10 years. You don't have to be a Berkeley prof to know that so why are you pumping out this BS? https://t.co/rtp6bJM65G — Paul Epps (@paulepps) December 22, 2022 Read more →
Why Must Teachers Buy Their Own Supplies?
That's mismanagement. Avg per pupil spending in US is almost $15K. 30 kids in a class would be $450K. Deduct the teacher's salary and there should be enough left for supplies. P.S. Non sequiturs and false choice fallacies are not REQUIRED for every post. https://t.co/PMisLtoe4a — Paul Epps (@paulepps) December 21, 2022 Read more →
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Loudoun County Public Schools seem to epitomize everything that’s wrong with public education in America. Former superintendent Scott Ziegler and public information officer Wayde Byard were indicted by a special grand jury amid an eight-month investigation into the district’s mishandling of two sexual assault cases. A male high-school student sexually assaulted two female students in the LCPS district between May and October of 2021. The “gender-fluid” male student, who was wearing a skirt at the time (which would make it easier to rape a fellow student than having to remove a pair of trousers), sodomized a ninth-grade girl in the girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. The perpetrator was transferred to another LCPS school, Broad Run High School (BRHS), where he sexually assaulted another female student. A 15-year-old boy was convicted of both assaults and sentenced to complete a “residential program in a locked-down facility.” The initial assault in… Read more →
My Boyhood Sports Icons are Dying: Franco Harris
I’ve always thought Franco Harris was wildly overrated as a running back, but he was a four-time Super Bowl champion so there’s that. RIP Franco Harris RIP Franco Harris The immaculate reception happened 50 years ago this week. pic.twitter.com/T9FXJPvs3y — McNeil (@Reflog_18) December 21, 2022 Read more →
Labels, Concepts, Division, Polarization
The following is excerpted from Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono: It is like having two wooden boxes side by side into which one is putting ping-pong balls. The balls have to go into one box or the other. . . . If one of the boxes is labelled “black balls” and the other one “white balls” then each ball is dropped into the appropriate box depending on whether it is black or white. If there are any grey balls then some sort of decision has to be made as to whether they go into the black box or the white box. Once the decision has been made the balls go into the white box just as if they were white or into the black box just as if they were black. The apparent nature of the ball has been shifted to make it fit in with the established pattern.… Read more →
I Got a Bonus
I got my year-end bonus today. I really hadn’t given it any thought, how it was calculated, where it maxed out, because any company I’ve ever worked with where I was eligible for a bonus, I never got it. And my experience has been that nobody else ever gets the bonus either, with the exception of people in sales and people in the highest echelons of the company. Rank-and-file people don’t get bonuses. If the company wanted to pay you the bonus, they’d make it part of your salary. Anyway . . . I do training classes for software engineers, and it turns out my bonus is calculated based on graduation rate and student surveys, where students respond to statements like “I receive actionable feedback on my performance” on a 5-point scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. I had no idea. As it turns out, I did get the… Read more →
COVID Vaccine Side Effects
Every drug commercial you see on TV, half the commercial is a voice-over listing all the side effects, many of which are worse than the disease that the drug is intended to treat. May reduce your body’s ability to fight infection, which could lead to serious illness or death . . . “Death” is almost always in there somewhere. And these are drugs that have been through years of trials, full FDA approval, not just emergency approval or experimental approval or whatever it’s called for the COVID vaccines. What are the side effects of COVID vaccines? Who knows? There wasn’t time to test for them, except very short-term stuff like you might feel tired or you might have a sore arm. In the software business, we call this “testing in production,” meaning we don’t have time to fully test the product in a non-destructive way, so we slam it into… Read more →
Sam Brinton: History-Making Government Official or Mental Case?
This article seems to be nominating the guy for sainthood. “History-making”?! He’s the first male government official to come to work in a dress? I’m not even sure he can claim that title. Maybe Rachel Levine was first. Or maybe it was someone else. But Levine uses female pronouns and Brinton doesn’t, so I guess that’s historic. This, to me, is not a good look for a government nuclear energy official: Yes, we all of us have our kinks or peccadillos, but we don’t have photos of them on the internet. What sort of vetting process is in place in the Biden administration? Mental disorders are obviously not a disqualifier. Are we seeking to make ourselves an international laughingstock? The article is as sympathetic as it’s possible to be, lamenting the fact that Brinton has been “misgendered,” and referring to his thefts as “accusations.” (Yes I know, innocent until proven… Read more →
Why Is a Same-Sex Marriage Bill Historic When It’s Already Legal in Every State?
I’ve seen a lot of coverage on this and I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve seen the bill described as “historic.” I can, however, count the number of times I’ve seen mention of the fact that same-sex marriage and interracial marriage are already legal in all 50 states: Zero. I know people, probably you do as well, who’ve been in same-sex marriages for decades. I know people (including me) who’ve been in interracial marriages for decades. So what is historic? Read more →