It's nice of our governor to take a short break from forcing people to wear masks, stay inside, and get vaccinated in order to lecture us about bodily autonomy. https://t.co/j3VDr7aacf
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) May 15, 2022
Chess Game of the Day: 8-Move King’s Pawn Game
One of my online chess games. Some annotations below . . .
2. g3 This opening move doesn’t have a name as far as I know.
4. Bxe4? There’s no way I can see for Black to save the pawn after 4. Nc3 so why put the bishop out there as a target?
6. b3? 6. h3 would prevent Black’s follow-up move.
7. Ng2? 7. Bxc6+ knocks out a valuable Black piece.
8. Bf1?? White’s game is probably lost already so instead of prolonging with something like 8. Nc3, why not just commit suicide?
EppsNet at the Movies: Dark Waters
The system is rigged. They want us to believe that it’ll protect us, but that’s a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies, not the scientists, not the government. Us.
I’ll tell you how the movie ends but without a spoiler. It ends with the closing credits, over which we hear Johnny Cash singing “I Won’t Back Down,” the Tom Petty song, which perfectly summarizes the Mark Ruffalo character, who won’t back down, not as an act of defiance but just as a quiet refusal to give up.
Whether or not that strategy works for him, I will not reveal here.
Because the movie is based on real-life events, it’s also a good watch for anyone who believes that government agencies will protect us from all of the bad things in life, and that anyone who thinks otherwise must be crazy.
Rating: 
Dark Waters
A corporate defense attorney takes on an environmental lawsuit against a chemical company that exposes a lengthy history of pollution.Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins
IMDb rating: 7.6 (120393 votes)
Percentage of Fake Accounts on Twitter?
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
I’d have to say that fake accounts are waaay over 5 percent. Example: NYT and CNN claim 50-60 million followers and get retweets in the lower double digits, whereas accounts with far fewer real followers can get thousands of retweets with a banana emoji and a photo of Estelle Getty.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) April 27, 2022
And That’s The Truth: You Can Get It If You Really Want
[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth — PE]
I just seen a couple things. One is Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson, and his white wife gettin their kids kicked outta school.
Dependin who you listen to, the Robinsons was either providin helpful feedback to the school on assignments and teaching practices, or they was harassin and disrespectin the teachers and administrators to where the school had enough and kicked em out.
How many kids at this school? A thousand? You gonna have a thousand sets of parents tellin the school how it’s gotta be run to their satisfaction? Or these two fools thinkin “Our brother-in-law was president of the U-nited States! We are people of unusual importance and you gonna do it the way we tell you to do it.”
Just talk to your kids about the lessons at home. You really don’t like the school, find another one. Or homeschool the kids.
Poor black kids can’t get a good education and rich black kids can’t get a good education cause everybody’s lookin backwards, backwards, backwards. The past is gone. It’s dead.
Here’s another thing I seen: An Asian woman on Twitter says
in class, professor tell me im “oppressed” because i’m women and asian. I say who cares. Teach Engineering. I pay much money to learn good education. stop wasting time to be stupid. I pay money to learn math, not penis this, vagina that, oppressed this, victim that
Two things I know about the history of Asians in America: 1) It’s bad; 2) It ain’t taught in school.
Black history is bad but everyone learns in school about slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, segregation, racism. Nobody learns how or why anonymous Asian bones got scattered all over the American West.
Asians got plenty to complain about if they want to but they lookin forwards not backwards. Lookin forwards to gettin a good education. Like this woman says, stop wastin time bein stupid.
And that’s the Truth!
Status
Yeah but here’s the saddest part
I don’t even care
Status
And there’s nothin you can do, it’s gonna happen
Sit down and drink a beer with Father Time
People of All Genders Need Abortions?
I've been trying to get pregnant just so I can get an abortion but so far, no luck. https://t.co/G6SzTy5gb8
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) May 7, 2022
Menstrual Equity
I'm not a doctor but I know enough about male paraphernalia to say that if a man is expelling blood through his genitals, a tampon is not going to help. https://t.co/tkaQkuCek3
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) May 5, 2022
Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that! ~ Rocky Balboa
What’s Wrong With the SAT?
According to the LA Times, the chronic absence rate in LAUSD for black students is 57 percent. For Latinos, it is 49 percent.
And poor performance by these groups on standardized tests like the SAT is due to the fact that the tests are racist, not because the students don’t show up for school.
I’m the Damn Paterfamilias!
He couldn’t have just turned off the set?
Gilbert Gottfried, 1955-2022
One of my favorite comedians. We saw him do a show at the Improv in Irvine. I lived in Irvine for many years but didn’t go to the Improv much because comedians of any stature rarely show up there. I don’t know why. They do the Hollywood Improv, you’d think they could just drive up the road a piece, do a set in Irvine and pick up another check.
I also heard Gilbert interviewed many times and I think he was even funnier conversationally than he was in his act, and his act was very funny.
RIP Gilbert Gottfried
Have we reached the ultimate state of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today? — Thomas Sowell
Status
Sometimes when I taste the delicious acai berry, I put down my gun and give thanks to a nonexistent God.
A Celebration of Ignorance
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
If a man does his best, what else is there? — George S. Patton
How Lonely Can It Get?
I asked Hank Williams, “How lonely can it get?”
Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet.
But I can hear him coughing all night long.
A hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.
The Ballad of Joking Jesus
Goodbye goodbye
write down all I said
Tell Tom Dick and Harry
I rose from the dead
What’s bred in the bone
cannot fail me to fly
and all of it’s breezy
goodbye now goodbye
This Would Have Never Happened to Donald Trump
I don’t have any regard for Trevor Noah but if Biden’s lost Trevor Noah, he’s lost America. It doesn’t seem real.
Noah is right though. If a Middle Eastern country didn’t take a call from Donald Trump, who knows what Trump would do? Start bombing mosques in descending order of holiness?
You don’t know. So you answer the call. Preferably on the first ring.