EppsNet

We Cannot Remain Silent, Except When We Can

by Paul Epps on 26 Dec 2022

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.”

Render Unto Ukraine What We Need at Home

by Paul Epps on 26 Dec 2022

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 pandemic on the grounds that, ‘look, if we’re going to have this pandemic with a very serious disease that can kill a lot of people, then we ought to give people Medicaid’. Those people, however, are about to lose their Medicaid by the millions — not Ukrainian citizens, but American citizens.

Here you can see, from AP this week, “Millions to Lose Medicaid Coverage Under Congress’s Plan”. The AP reports: “Millions of people who enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic could start to lose their coverage on April 1 if Congress passes the $1.7 trillion spending package leaders unveiled Tuesday”. It has money for Ukraine, but not for your fellow citizens to have health care. “The legislation will sunset a requirement that the COVID-19 public health emergency that prohibited states from booting people off Medicaid.”

I really just want anyone to explain to me in clear language how it’s justifiable that the United States is spending $100 billion on a war on the other side of the world where there are no vital U.S. interests, while people at home are suffering in all sorts of ways.

— Glenn Greenwald (emphasis added)

Ukraine: What is the Benefit?

by Paul Epps on 26 Dec 2022

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% for 2022.] Fortunately, though, arms manufacturers have not succumbed to this decline. And that’s due almost entirely to the ongoing transfer of huge amounts of your money into the coffers of weapons manufacturers to send weapons to Ukraine and then to deplete our own depleted stocks. [Northrop Grumman stock is up almost 40% this year. Lockheed, up over 25%.]

The stockholders are Americans who own large amounts of stock in those countries. But for ordinary Americans, what is the benefit to them from these huge outlays of money for Ukraine? I’m asking that earnestly. I’ve yet to hear any politician who supports these expenditures even once articulate a reason why these expenditures could possibly improve the lives of American citizens, or why the U.S. role in Ukraine could do that.

— Glenn Greenwald (emphasis added)

More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of: RESIST

by Hostile Witness on 24 Dec 2022

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.

FBI: Exposé of Our Spread of Misinformation is “Misinformation”

by Paul Epps on 24 Dec 2022

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 be lazily reported (it was) as “U.S. intelligence community says Hunter Biden laptop looks like Russian disinformation.”

This was then used as a justification for banning the New York Post story from Twitter (even via direct messaging), suspending the New York Post Twitter account, and suspending other accounts that tried to tweet out the story.

We know now, with the 2020 election long past, that every word of the New York Post story was true, and that the FBI and the Democratic party were in constant contact with Twitter to suppress tweets and accounts containing “misinformation,” i.e., information that they would prefer to hide from the citizenry. The FBI even paid Twitter millions of dollars for its efforts in this scam.

The FBI has had about 2 weeks to respond to the “Twitter Files” and it seems like the best they’ve been able to come up with is to label them as — that’s right — “misinformation.”

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so dystopian.

It’s Great to Be an American

by Paul Epps on 23 Dec 2022

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 Rushdie has said, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” That’s a strong one because Rushdie has literally put his life on the line for it.

And here I’ll add my own admonition: Don’t traffic with anyone who considers it important to control the way other people speak.

EppsNet Book Reviews: Night Train by Martin Amis

by Paul Epps on 23 Dec 2022

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:

Winter Palace

by Paul Epps on 23 Dec 2022

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”

Love Songs in Age

by Paul Epps on 23 Dec 2022

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
It had not done so then, and could not now.

— Philip Larkin, “Love Songs in Age”

A Berkeley Prof Explains Why Grocery Prices Are Skyrocketing

by Paul Epps on 21 Dec 2022

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

Why Must Teachers Buy Their Own Supplies?

by Paul Epps on 21 Dec 2022

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

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

by Hostile Witness on 21 Dec 2022

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 the girls’ bathroom drew attention to the district’s policy of allowing transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms that align with “their consistently asserted gender identity.”

What could possibly go wrong with a policy like that? Oh right, the anal rape of a ninth-grade girl.

My platform as a superintendent — and maybe I couldn’t get the job with this, but then maybe I could — would be:

If you have a penis, you will either use the boys’ bathroom or piss in your pants, I don’t care which.
If you wear a skirt into the boys’ bathroom, I can see how that might create a situation, but that’s on you to handle, it’s not on ninth-grade girls getting anally raped.

My Boyhood Sports Icons are Dying: Franco Harris

by Paul Epps on 21 Dec 2022

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

Labels, Concepts, Division, Polarization

by Paul Epps on 20 Dec 2022

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.

A whole series of boxes might be imagined, each with its own label. As each item came along it would be put into whichever box had the most appropriate label. It would not matter if this most appropriate label was not really very appropriate. There is a shift to fit in with whatever labels are available. Once the shift has been made then it is impossible to tell the item in the box is any different from the other items in the box.

Similarly when there is an established label a new item is either pushed right under that label or else pushed right out. In a community that is sharply divided into “us” and “them” any stranger who happens along is assessed as to whether he is “one of us” or “one of them.”

Probably the stranger has a mix of characteristics which would make hm fit either group. But whichever way the decision goes his characteristics are at once assumed to have changed so that they match exactly the characteristics of the label. . . .

From a practical point of view this polarizing system is very effective. What it means is that one can establish a few major categories and then push everything into one or the other of them. Instead of having to assess everything in detail and then decide how one is going to react one merely assesses whether it fits into one category or another. This is not even a matter of exact fit but of pushing it one way or another. Once the thing has been pushed into a category then reaction is easy since the categories are established and so is the reaction to them.

New categories

At what point does a new category arise? At what point does one decide that the new item will not fit into any of the boxes and so create a new box? At what point does one decide that grey ping-pong balls would go in a special box marked “grey”? At what point is it decided that the stranger is neither “we” nor “they” but something else? The danger of polarization is that things can be shifted around so much that there never comes a point where a new category has to be created. Nor is there any indication as to how many established categories there should be.

One can get by with very few categories.

The dangers of the polarizing tendency may now be summarized:

Once established the categories become permanent.

New information is altered so it fits an established category. Once it has done so there is no indication that it is any different from anything else under that category.

At no point is it essential to create new categories. One can get by with very few categories.

The fewer the categories the greater the degree of shift.

Lateral thinking

In order to escape from these labels one can do three things:

Challenge the labels.

Try and do without them.

Establish new labels.

Challenge the labels

Why am I using this label?

What does it really mean?

Is it essential?

Am I just using it as a convenient cliché?

Why do I have to accept that label used by other people?

As it implies challenging a label means a direct challenge to the use of a label, a word, or a name. It does not mean that one disagrees with its use or that one has any better alternative. It just means that one is not prepared to accept the cliché label without challenging it.

Trying to do without labels

Using the label “mob” it is easy to develop a certain line of thought but if one has to do without the label then one might be able to look at the situation in a diffferent way. One tries to see things as they actually are and not in terms of labels.

Establishing new labels

The fewer the categories the greater the shift and distortion. By establishing a new category one can accept information with less distortion. So one establishes a new label in order to protect incoming information from the polarizing effect of already established labels.

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I Got a Bonus

by The Programmer on 20 Dec 2022

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 full bonus, but if I’d known it was based in part on student feedback, I might have been a little nicer to people.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

COVID Vaccine Side Effects

by Paul Epps on 19 Dec 2022

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 production and hope for the best.

Have the vaccines killed anybody? I’d say if drugs with years of trials and a possible side effect of death can get FDA approval, then yes, the vaccines have killed some people and done serious health damage to others.

I did decide myself to get COVID vaccinations and boosters. I don’t know if they did me any good or not. There’s no question at this point that vaccines didn’t stop or slow the spread of COVID. The CEO of Pfizer is on record saying they didn’t even test for that.

Vaccines do seem to reduce the likelihood that you’ll wind up in a hospital or dead. They did allow me to do a few things over the past couple of years that I wouldn’t have been able to do without proof of vaccination.

All drugs have potentially serious side effects, and the more I think about forcing people to take a drug that they don’t want to take, the more it seems borderline criminal.

Sam Brinton: History-Making Government Official or Mental Case?

by Hostile Witness on 19 Dec 2022

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:

Sam Brinton

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 guilty, but we’ve all seen videos of him stealing the luggage.)

Luggage theft

And to think that some bigots will not treat all trans people with dignity.

Why Is a Same-Sex Marriage Bill Historic When It’s Already Legal in Every State?

by Paul Epps on 18 Dec 2022

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?

The Employment Numbers WERE Wrong. Implications for Elections?

by Paul Epps on 18 Dec 2022

It looks like I was right about the employment numbers not making sense, which is maybe not such a good thing, in that everyone could see the same things I saw and yet I didn’t notice anyone (including “reporters”) asking “Why am I being told things that do not match up with reality?”

Thank god I’ve been assured by powerful people that there is no possible way our government could propagate these same kinds of mistakes (lies?) with regard to election results.

What Does “Woke” Mean?

by Paul Epps on 17 Dec 2022

Man Wearing a Hat Holding a Placard with a Text Stay Woke

Recently I’ve heard “woke” defined as being awake to injustice, particularly racial injustice.

That takes the edge off it. It makes it sound like a good thing, except to the extent that it propagates untrue ideas like racism is everywhere, or anything you don’t like is racist.

Having an awareness of injustice is universal though, isn’t it? Although people have very different ideas about what’s just or unjust, everyone has their own sense of it. It doesn’t require a new word. We have words like “compassionate” and “empathetic” that seem to mean the same thing.

I don’t think even the person or persons who coined the word “woke” meant it to be as inoffensive as “being awake to injustice.” I think it was intended to be confrontational.

Here’s another possible definition: Making sweeping, prejudicial generalizations about race, gender and sexual orientation.

I like that definition better. I think it’s useful to have a single word for that concept.