It would be nice if modesty prevented me from saying that my household income is much higher than the median Indian household income.
A lot of you white people out there are pulling down the average.
Trump Back on Facebook
Here's an alternative: We could consolidate government and corporate power to crush dissent. It worked for Mussolini! Well … for a while it did. https://t.co/n3MOYo7HLg
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 26, 2023
A Ukrainian Question
In what conceivable way are American citizens benefited or having their lives improved or increasingly secured by escalating the U.S. role in the war in Ukraine? Or conversely, in what conceivable way would your life or the lives of most Americans be harmed by changes in the governance of various provinces in Eastern Ukraine? How would your life be affected if the citizens of the Donbas region decided, as Kosovo decided 20 years ago, that they preferred to be independent or be governed by Moscow rather than by Kyiv? Why would that matter to your life? Why is the U.S. government willing to provoke so much danger to the globe, so much risk of escalation, and a practically direct proxy war now with the world’s largest nuclear power? Over what? Over who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine.
Accountability Without Consequences
‘I was too ambitious’: Spotify CEO announces layoffs among 6% of employees as tech job cuts continue — msn.com
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said that the decision to restructure Spotify is an “effort to drive more efficiency, control costs, and speed up decision-making,” adding that he takes “full accountability for the moves that got us here today.”
I love it — and when I say I love it, I mean I don’t love it — when someone says they take “full accountability” for some disaster, knowing perfectly well that there won’t be any personal consequences.
There’s no accountability without consequences. Had he said “I’m forfeiting my salary for the year and donating it to the employees who lost their jobs,” now that’s something I could respect.
Popular Bookstores, Including Barnes & Noble, Are Closing Locations, Starting Feb. 11 — bestlifeonline.com
JCPenney Is Closing Even More Locations, Starting Next Month — bestlifeonline.com
JCPenney already filed for bankruptcy and closed 200 stores in 2020.
Another day, another round of layoffs and closures. That must mean it’s time for another sunshine up the butthole economic report from the Biden administration.
With unemployment at a record low and the two strongest years of job creation in our history, there are reasons for economic optimism all across our country.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2023
This reminds me of papers I wrote in high school and got them back with “Evidence?” scrawled all over them.
Any “job creation” news over the last two years should come with an asterisk, given that we lost 20 million jobs due to COVID shutdowns, so a large number of the jobs being “created” are jobs that we already had, then lost, then we got them back.
And creating jobs is easy, if all you want to do is put people to work. You can give them a job digging holes then filling them in again. The question to be answered is are we creating productive jobs.
I’m leaning toward an answer of no, given that CNBC says that 63 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck (I’ve heard higher numbers but “paycheck to paycheck” is not a well-defined metric) and that many people have found that they can make more money from unemployment and other subsidies than they can from working.
There Were Earthquakes Before Climate Change?
The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake occurred in the early morning of Jan. 23, 1556 in Huaxian, Shaanxi during the Ming dynasty.
Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records. It is one of the most fatal earthquakes in China, in turn making it one of the top disasters in China by death toll.
Call me Nostradamus, but if this event happened on Jan. 23, 2023, it would be almost universally blamed on “climate change.”
California Just Quit Flavored Tobacco
According to a flyer I picked up in a local convenience store, “a new California law makes it illegal to sell most flavored tobacco products, including vapes and menthol cigarettes — protecting our kids from a lifetime of deadly addiction.”
If a kid wants to smoke and vapes are not available, won’t the kid just smoke regular cigarettes like we did as kids? Vapes are probably not good for your health but I have heard that they’re not as unhealthy as cigarettes.
I’d rather see kids smoke cigarettes than vape anyway. Not my kid, but your kids and other people’s kids. Smoking is cool. Think Steve McQueen, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, etc. Vaping is, pardon the expression, gay.
Still I’m appalled at the idea that individual rights can be violated by the state using its coercive apparatus in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.
And as far as protecting kids, is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to protect their kids, would choose the members of their state or federal government?
Menthol cigarettes . . . if smoking menthol cigarettes helps someone get through the day, why is that anyone else’s business? No one is coming up to you, jamming a menthol cigarette in your mouth and making you smoke it, are they? If not, mind your own business.
If California Slides Into the Ocean
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. — Orwell
All is Well! All is Well!
Microsoft to Lay Off 10,000 Workers as It Looks to Trim Costs — msn.com
Google to lay off 12,000 employees, the latest tech giant to cut thousands of jobs — usatoday.com
Regal Cinemas is closing 39 more movie theaters. See the list — cnn.com
Another day, another round of layoffs and closures, another sunshine up the butthole economic report from the Biden administration: We’re not in a recession! Employment numbers are great!
Someone is lying to me and I don’t think it’s Microsoft, Google and Regal Cinemas.
Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
The recent rainstorms here in California are “proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously,” according to our governor, Gavin Newsom.
Because we never in history had rainstorms until very recently.
He’s not very smart. If we got no rain this winter, he would have blamed that on “climate change” too.
Fast Food Robots
How robots are helping address the fast-food labor shortage https://t.co/xh8Ghv9rZX
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 21, 2023
There’s not really a fast food labor shortage. It’s created by the fact that unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies can total up to $120,000 per year for a family of four.
Not bad! If you can make six figures for doing nothing, you wanna go be a fry cook?
The robots address the fact that the absurdly high numbers that people want to make for minimum-wage work is well beyond the value that minimum-wage workers add to the bottom line.
The real minimum wage is always zero.
Who Funds Democrats?
Red vs. Blue, us vs. them … it's the political prism of a simpleton. Who do you think funds Democrats? https://t.co/m6FJ0jorl9
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 18, 2023
The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again
Black Lives Matter wants LAPD to stop responding to minor traffic incidents https://t.co/zHvBVAJnDI
— O.C. Register (@ocregister) January 17, 2023
Well, the Law of Unintended Consequences has already kicked in on this one. I feel like if I know this, someone at BLM should know it.
In the aftermath of George Floyd and Defund the Police, cops — the ones who were still funded — didn’t engage with Black citizens because, you know, if that’s the way you feel about cops, go ahead and do whatever you want.
One result, as you can see in the chart, is a spike in traffic fatalities for both Black men and women.
The same unintended consequence affected the murder rate:
A Time For Choosing
This is a time for choosing.
Will we choose democracy over autocracy?
Community over chaos?
Love over hate?These are questions of our time that I ran for president to help answer. And of which Dr. King’s life and legacy will guide us forward.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 16, 2023
That depends. Is aggregating state and corporate power to censor the internet democracy or autocracy? Is it community? Is it love?
No Child Knows They Are Trans
This is my belief. No child knows they are trans they know they feel different. Trans is a diagnosis you get through therapy and care, not from the internet.
— Buck Angel® Transsexual (@BuckAngel) January 16, 2023
Wealth Tax
How do those two things even go together? What gives the government the right to use any individual citizen for the benefit of others? https://t.co/4WUNRlURzz
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 16, 2023
2022: The Year in Books
These are the books I read in 2022, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion.
Books of the Year: On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleža (fiction) and Night Train by Martin Amis (contemporary fiction).
Does Money Buy Happiness?
Does money buy happiness? I’ve never seen any evidence of this but the girl cutting my hair today said it does.
“It allows my husband and I to have a house so it gives us freedom.”
I should have delved into this a little bit more for a couple of reasons.
- When I’ve owned a house, I’ve found that it gave me less freedom. If I’m renting a place, even a house, and I decide that I don’t want to be there anymore, I can just leave, which I can’t do if I own a house. Of course, there would still be the issue of moving all of my possessions. Owning things is problematic. Do I own my stuff or does my stuff own me? I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really want to own anything: houses, cars, furniture. That would be real freedom.
- That still leaves the question of money. Because you can own a house and still not have any money. You can still live paycheck to paycheck. Any neighborhood I’ve ever driven through that had nice, expensive-looking houses also contained a surprising number of very ordinary looking cars. Residents have enough to afford the house but not enough left over for other things, like cars. Again, the freedom question. Do you own the house or does the house own you?
The idea that having a lot of money would make you happy and solve all your problems is certainly pervasive in America, even though I don’t believe it myself. I notice every time I’m in a convenience store, there’s at least one customer buying lottery tickets. And I couldn’t possibly count the number of people I’ve heard say something to the effect of “I wish I had the money to just quit my stupid job and do whatever I want to.”
I also notice that there are a lot of people who have all the money they could ever need and they still don’t seem very happy. Rich people in rehab, rich people in serial dysfunctional relationships, rich people dying young, followed by an alarming toxicology report, rich people ending their own lives.
Lisa Marie Presley died this week after going into cardiac arrest at the age of 54, which is not even close to a normal human lifespan. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions: 1) She was financially well off; 2) Her toxicology report will be illuminating.
Her dad was fabulously well-to-do and effectively killed himself in his early 40s. With Elvis, I’ve always thought that it must have been very hard to be loved as much as he was — and no one was ever loved more than Elvis — and then to get old (40 must have seemed very old to him) and lose that. All the money was not enough to live through it.
Singers and musical groups never seem to retire no matter how much money they have. I saw Randy Newman not too long ago at the Hollywood Bowl and he addressed that.
“People ask me why am I still doing this at my age. I tell them that I like it, and nobody’s applauding at home.”
Now I think we’re getting closer to the truth, that what makes people happy is a sense that they have a purpose, a reason for being alive. Even if carrying out that purpose brings in a lot of money, it’s not the money that makes them happy, it’s the purpose.
Unemployment Stays Unbelievably Low
Bed Bath & Beyond to Close Three More Stores in Los Angeles, Orange Counties https://t.co/ELCIzMhY3Q
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) January 14, 2023
The company is closing about 150 stores overall, plus layoffs in corporate and supply chain.
You can swap new company names (Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, etc.) into these layoffs and closing stores stories every day and still get sunny government economic reports based on nothing I can see except unbelievably low unemployment numbers.
And when I say “unbelievably low,” I mean literally not believable (see here and here).
When Empires Start to Collapse
Yeah, I think if you look at history, it’s really interesting when empires start to collapse, when you start to get such a breach between how the elite lives and how the rest of the country lives. There are usually two options: you can either start to placate and appease the vast majority of the country who are living in deprivation — some symbolic gestures of social programs just enough to keep them mollified so they don’t go out into the streets — or you can decide, “You know what, we don’t really care how angry the citizenry gets. What we’re going to do instead is ‘paramilitarize’ the country, we’ll put them under a massive surveillance system.
“We’ll keep a really close eye on everything they’re doing, we’ll listen to their communications and we’ll crush, first by demonizing and then, criminalizing and, then, censoring any form of dissent so that they have absolutely nowhere to turn. So, they can get as angry as they want. We’ll just make ourselves so powerful and so opaque, no one will know what we’re doing — but we can see everything they’re doing, that there’s nothing they can do about it anyway”. Amazingly, it is the American left who has become the main ally in imposing that.
The only part of this I take issue with is that I don’t think there’s any need to “placate and appease” anyone to keep them from taking to the streets. In America, this is done with mindless entertainment and gadgetry, i.e., “I’d like to revolt against the government but I’d have to miss my TV programs.”