And That’s the Truth: Smith College

 
Sojourner Truth

[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE]

Many of us participated in the Civil Rights Movement, fighting for equal treatment under the law, which included due process and the presumption of innocence. We didn’t march so that Americans of any race could be presumed guilty and punished for false accusations while the elite institution that employed them cowered in fear of a social media mob. We certainly didn’t march so that privileged Blacks could abuse working class whites based on ‘lived experience.’

Have you gathered any verifiable evidence of success from the ‘antibias’ training you forced your service employees to undergo as a condition of their employment? Please consider that many Black Americans find training that reduces us simply to a racial category profoundly condescending and dehumanizing.

And that’s the Truth!

What is the Likely Result of Overcharging the George Floyd Case?

 

Active law enforcement officers, by policy, can’t have a voice in America. They’re not allowed to speak their mind. They’re not allowed to say what they’re going through because of department, anti-social media policies. It’s down to the point now where if their wives or husband likes something, they’re being questioned over that.

So, I’m that voice. I don’t have the restrictions of having a department policy over me. And I have my ear to the law enforcement officers across the nation, what they’re going through amongst themselves with their supervision, with politicians, with the community. And I speak on that. And again, we get back to that false rhetoric, the narratives.

There’s 800,000 police officers, sworn law enforcement officers in America. There are 300 million police community contacts a year, 30 million criminal investigation contacts, 1.7 million violent felonies.

Police in 2019 shot under a thousand people and only 54 of those thousand people were unarmed. So, now you’re talking 5% of all shootings are the unarmed civilians.

And then when you break down the unarmed civilians, most of them are white people. So, it’s not that police are just indiscriminately shooting unarmed black people in the community.

If you listen to the false rhetoric out there, we’re gunning down black children all across America. I think there was a recent poll where they said they thought it was in thousands. . . . In 2019, do you know how many unarmed black children under the age of 18 that police officers shot and killed? [It] was one.

And it was an 18-year-old who was on drugs, naked, beating his girlfriend and her best friend who she called for help. When the police got there, he fled, they chased him, he started fighting with them, they tasered him twice, and he tried to remove the officer’s gun, so the partner shot him.

Now, it’s classified as an unarmed shooting because it started off unarmed, but once you grab that gun and once you’re in a fight with an armed police officer, you’re no longer unarmed, whoever wins that fight is armed. So, that’s the shooting and that’s the reality of it.

Things that happened like with George Floyd and the incidents that have sparked riots across the nation, let’s investigate. There’s not a police officer I know that didn’t see the George Floyd video and said that it wasn’t important. It was common ground.

We all thought it was disgusting. There’s avenues to investigate that, there’s avenues to punish that. But now you have prosecutors overcharging and trying to please the public to where in a year from now, or actually a couple of months now, when that goes to trial and they can’t live up to the charges that they’ve brought, we’re going to go through this all over again. Because, in my opinion, they did overcharge. They did rush to judgment, because they had to appease the public crowd.

That’s not what investigations are for. Investigations are to look at the facts and charge appropriately, not based on emotion, but the law.

Anyone who saw the video has emotional feelings on that and that’s fine to have, but I want to see the proper charges filed. I want to see the officer held accountable under those proper charges, not get acquitted and we have riots nationwide, which hurt hundreds of more police officers, arrest thousands of individuals, and we’re back to square one.

See You in Hell, Violent Idiots

 
Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]

Greetings mortals!

I was reading about the shootings that occurred in Atlanta last Tuesday. The author says, “Eight people were murdered. Six of them were Asian-American women. It seems impossible to feel this as anything other than anti-Asian and misogynistic violence.”

Here’s a tip: Whenever someone prefaces an opinion by saying “it’s impossible to feel differently about this than the way I feel about it,” the speaker is full of shit.

State your case. Hit me with some evidence.

If the shooter had opened fire in a supermarket like the violent idiot in Boulder, he could have killed anyone he wanted to. Had he killed mostly Asian women, then I’d say you’ve got a good case for anti-Asian, misogynistic violence.

But the guy in Atlanta shot up massage parlors. He blamed them for turning him into a sex addict.

You can’t swing a cat in a massage parlor without knocking down an Asian woman and if you open fire in a massage parlor, you’re going to hit a lot of Asian women because that’s who’s there.

See you in Hell!

P.S. The shooter in Boulder was initially thought to be a white guy. After about 750,000 “white supremacy” tweets, Twitter had to stand down when it turned out he’s Arabic.

Multiple “blue checks,” including the USA Today Race and Inclusion Editor and the niece of the vice president of the United States, along with the usual collection of idiots, then decided it would be in their best interest to delete one or more racially focused tweets, and in at least one case, to delete their entire account.

Then: “Kids in Cages”; Now: “Facilities Similar to Jail”

 

The number of unaccompanied teens and children in U.S. custody along the U.S.-Mexico border has reached record numbers, forcing children to stay longer in perilously overcrowded border facilities, many of which are similar to jail.

Unrelated thought: Didn’t President Biden campaign on amnesty and a halt to deportations?

An Underwhelming Correction

 

Here’s a pretty underwhelming correction:

As a journalist, either put a goddamn name on the source so we can verify the information, or verify it yourself before publishing, not two months later, after everyone’s already assimilated the original bullshit as truth.

Now a question: Why would anyone believe what they read or hear in the media anymore when “news” is attributed to anonymous “sources” and published without knowing, or apparently caring, whether or not it’s true?

Woke White Boy: Antifa Storming a Bank

 
Woke White Boy

Antifa, man, they just tried to storm a bank in Portland and got held off by ONE SECURITY GUARD!

Then they tried and failed again to get inside the federal courthouse.

That Trump mob got inside the fucking US CAPITOL in 5 minutes and Antifa’s been trying to get in that courthouse for MONTHS!

What a bunch of fucking pussies, man, I couldn’t be more disgusted right now.

— WWB

Antifa tries to storm a bank

Taylor Lorenz is More Privileged Than You Are

 

Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censors their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy. . . .

No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about [conservative women] . . . Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

Do You Know What They Call a Quarter-Pounder in Denmark?

 

Denmark doesn’t have a statutory minimum wage though.

Per-capita income in the US is about the same as in Denmark, even though we are a multi-cultural nation of around 330 million people that naturalizes another 900,000 people every year, many from poor nations, and that Denmark is a homogeneous country of fewer than 6 million citizens that, in recent years, has effectively shut down its borders to poor immigrants.

Also, in Denmark, everyone pays high taxes, not just the high earners.

A Danish fast-food employee at $22/hr (about $45,000/yr) pays around half their earnings to the government, plus a 25% value-added tax on most purchases. In return, it must be noted, Danes receive all kinds of government-provided services.

Ocasio-Cortez says, “when we keep the minimum wage artificially low, it’s at a huge cost to our government, . . . they’re essentially enormous subsidies to Walmart.”

She’s against subsidies?

Regarding McDonald’s, every one of their restaurants I’ve patronized recently has touch-screen self-service kiosks. Grocery stores have self-service checkouts. I also noticed today for the first time that CVS had installed a couple of self-service checkouts.

Minimum-wage workers are being replaced by robots.

Ocasio-Cortez is correct in saying that a minimum wage is artificial, but it’s just as artificial at $15 as it is at some lower number.

The Congressional Budget Office says that 1.4 million people would lose work due to a $15 national minimum wage. That would put them at the only non-artificial minimum wage: zero.

Alan Dershowitz: All Americans Need to Fight Cancel Culture

 

I hope all Americans wake up to this. I hope it’s not just the “shoe is on the other foot” test. Now, the conservatives are the victims of cancel culture so they’re big supporters of the Constitution and constitutional rights. During McCarthyism, it was the left that were the victims, and the right were the oppressors.

We need both the right, the left, and also the center to stand united against censorship, against cancel culture, and in favor of the marketplace of ideas.

We have the right to flip the channel if we don’t like what’s on Newsmax. Change the channel, but don’t tell the carriers, the satellite carriers, and the cable carriers, to deny us the right to watch Newsmax. That is wrong.

Ban Dr. Seuss Before It’s Too Late

 

In Baltimore, there are 13 public high schools where zero percent of students can do math at grade level. There are six other city high schools where only 1 percent of students can do math at grade level.

We must ban more Dr. Seuss books before these numbers get worse!

person drawing on white sketch pad
Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

A Positive Human Future?

 

If you were a farmer in Nebraska 100 years ago when the Titanic went down, you wouldn’t have known about that for about six months.

Today we’re bombarded with news, almost all of which is bad, and yet people wonder about the epidemic of depression and anxiety.

What is journalism’s vision of a positive human future? Where are the people who are being praised for bringing about a positive human future? Where is the news about virtue and heroism in the world?

This is the sign you've been looking for neon signage
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I’m Actually Old Enough to Remember Freedom of Speech

 

Poland Proposes $13.5 Million Fines for Tech Giants Engaging in Ideological CensorshipThe Epoch Times

Freedom of Speech

I’m actually old enough to remember when the USA, not Poland, carried the torch for freedom of speech.

We took it for granted I suppose, but Poland has much more recent experience with being told what they are not allowed to think, say or write, and they don’t like it.

Na Zdrowie, Polska!

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote the following:

I was born and raised among people for whom freedom was the most precious of values. In Poland we are so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it.

For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how we are meant to live and what we are meant to feel, and what we are not allowed to think, say or write. That is why we are so concerned with any attempt to limit freedom.

One of the synonyms of freedom for us Poles has always been the internet. It is the most democratic medium in history, a forum on which everyone can have a voice. It is a tool which gives everyone the opportunity to have an impact, in a way which was unknown to us even a dozen or so years ago.

The freedoms that came with the lack of regulation of the internet had numerous positive aspects. But there are also negative consequences: with time, it became dominated by huge, international corporations, wealthier and more powerful than many nations. These corporations treat our online activity merely as a source of revenue and a tool to increase their global domination. They have also introduced their own standards of political correctness, and they fight those who oppose them.

We are now increasingly faced with practices we believed were left in the past. The censoring of free speech, once the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now back, but in a new form, run by corporations, who silence those who think differently.

Discussion consists in the exchange of views, not in silencing people. We do not have to agree with what our opponents write, but we cannot forbid anyone from expressing views that do not contravene the law.

Everything which is not forbidden is allowed. Also on the internet, there is no tolerance for censorship, nor can there ever be. No tolerance for state censorship, such as the one Poland faced under communism, or the private type, which we are seeing today. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy – that is why we must defend it. It is not up to algorithms or the owners of huge corporations to decide what opinions are correct and which aren’t.

Poland will always stand at the guard of democratic values, including freedom of speech. The owners of social media networks cannot operate above the law. That is why we will do everything to define the frame of operations of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other similar platforms. In Poland we will regulate with appropriate national regulation. We will also suggest similar laws be passed in all of the EU.

Social media platforms have to serve us, and not the interests of their powerful owners. Everyone has the right to freedom of speech. Poland will defend that right.

Nobody Believes in Anything. Problem?

 

I get a daily email newsletter from the New York Times, in which one of this week’s entries was a conversation with John Schwartz, a Times reporter who focuses on the climate. If Schwartz has any qualifications on the subject of climate science like, say, a relevant degree or something, he modestly omits it from his Times bio.

Much of the Pacific Northwest is blanketed in snow. Texas continues to endure frigid weather and electricity outages. Another winter storm is spreading across much of the country.

How is this consistent with global warming? Well, as Schwartz “explains” it, when temperatures go up, that’s a sign of global warming, and when temperatures go down, that’s also a sign of global warming.

He adds, “We’ve always had floods, fires and storms, but climate change adds oomph to many weather events.”

“Oomph”!? Follow the science!

 

Nobody believes anything from the media anymore, probably because almost everything we get from the media is either made-up fairy tale bullshit, or opinions on subjects for which the person giving the opinion has only a fraction of the knowledge they would need to offer a more informed opinion than any random drunk on a barstool.

A Cal Tech physicist, I forget which one — it might have been Murray Gell-Mann — once observed that whenever he heard or read something in the media regarding a topic he knew about, the information was almost always wrong. And he concluded from that, not unreasonably, that information from the media was almost always wrong on all other topics as well.

I’ve observed the same thing, that the media are almost always wrong on topics I know about. Is there any reason to think they’d be accurate on all other topics?

See You in Hell, John Kerry

 
Satan
Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]

He also has a dozen cars, a couple of yachts and about 5 other houses as well. He has the carbon footprint of a medium-size town. Maybe some personal restraint would buy the rest of you fools 10 years instead of just 9.

No, actually it wouldn’t because the Paris Accords that he’s so anxious to get back into ensure that even if the one country that Kerry may actually have some control over went to zero emissions tomorrow, it doesn’t solve the global problem because the Paris Accords give China the right to keep spewing crap into the air for at least another 40 years. It’s true, Lurch! Get a copy and read it.

China is by far the world’s biggest polluter, more emissions than the US and EU combined (and rising), they have an enormous population and a heavy reliance on coal.

The Paris Accords require very little from China and the commies aren’t even going to do that if they don’t feel like it.

Nine years till doomsday!

See you in Hell, Frankenstein!

How Many Synonyms Can There Be For the Word “Lies”?

 
book lot on black wooden shelf

I’m hearing from the media that whereas President Trump provided “a torrent of lies,” President Biden has “missteps,” “characteristic stumbles” and “false statistical interpretations.”

But not lies. 🙂

I’m envisioning media gnomes wearing out their thesauruses for the next four years trying to come up with synonyms for the word “lies.”

A couple of things I don’t like:

  1. Being treated like an imbecile who doesn’t grasp nuances of the English language and doesn’t know when he’s being brainwashed.
  2. The absence in our country of an honest free press. This would really solve a lot of problems. A lot.

Why I Can’t Be a Liberal

 

I saw a couple of things trending on Twitter today . . . one was the death of Rush Limbaugh, and the other was “Rest in Piss,” a vulgarism that a lot of people were using to celebrate Limbaugh’s death.

My own political views aren’t based on left or right, Democrat or Republican. They’re based mainly on freedom and self-reliance. If you can mind your own business, keep your hands to yourself and you’re not defrauding anyone, you can do anything you like, I don’t care.

For example, if you want to have an abortion, if you want to marry someone of the same sex, go ahead. These views would align me with people on the left of the political spectrum.

I’m also disgusted by the right-wing penchant to inject religion into politics.

But I would never, never, never identify myself as liberal, as progressive . . . liberals are everything they pretend to hate and they’re too dumb to see it. They proclaim themselves as beacons of tolerance and inclusion but they are always the most hateful, violent bigots I ever meet.

Imagine if Donald Trump died! We’d get the Limbaugh celebration to the nth power. We would drown in the vulgarity of it. I mean Limbaugh was just a guy who did a midday radio show, long past his peak of influence.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Pick some prominent left-wing pundit, like Chris Cuomo or Larry O’Donnell. Or pick your own favorite. If one of them got sick and died, would that trigger a vulgar celebration of their death to trend on Twitter? I don’t think it would.

Celebrating a person’s death, except maybe a mass murderer, is abhorrent. I don’t know what else to say . . .

Newsom Recall and Signature Matching

 

Our governor here in California, Gavin Newsom, once considered a rising superstar in the Democratic Party, is suddenly facing a serious effort to get him removed from power.

The petition “Rescue California” has gathered over 1.5 million signatures, enough to qualify to put his recall up for a vote; but the State of California is poised to go into overdrive to throw out signatures that do not match exactly.

man in blue suit jacket holding white printer paper
Photo by Jorge Maya on Unsplash

The state of California is controlled by a whole bunch of Democrats. One-party rule. They are going to go through every single signature and throw out ones they don’t like.

California’s suddenly renewed interest in strict signature-matching when it comes to the Newsom recall petition contrasts with its comparatively low 0.6% ballot rejection rate in the 2020 election, a rejection rate notably lower than the March primary even though more than twice as many people voted.

Donald Trump, of course, would not be able to win California under any set of circumstances, but the lack of strict signature-matching in 2020 elections in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, leading to lower ballot rejection rates, was a key complaint by Trump’s re-election campaign.

Ballot rejection rates across most swing states plummeted in the 2020 election, as compared to prior general elections in mid-term and presidential election years.

Georgia’s ballot rejection rate dropped from 6.42% in 2016 to 0.35% in 2020, according to Ballotpedia. Pennsylvania’s dropped from 1% to 0.03%, and Michigan’s from 0.5% to 0.1%.

The consistent enforcement of signature-matching standards would hypothetically have led to fewer votes for Joe Biden, since the mail-in and absentee ballots broke so dramatically in his direction.

Meanwhile, in California, reports indicate that signature-matching is going into overdrive in a bid to protect Newsom.

Newsom is quickly falling from grace, even among Democratic voters. He went back and forth over the legislature’s proposed vaccination rules and has struggled to convince teachers and administrators to reopen schools. California has also changed its vaccine distribution plan several times since vaccines became available, catching some providers unprepared, and currently ranks 39th among the 50 states in terms of percentage of doses administered. And his policy on lockdowns has pleased no one: Conservatives have accused him of strangling the economy with restrictions on businesses, while public-health experts have criticized his decision last month to lift regional stay-at-home orders as premature.

But President Joe Biden seems to be willing to back the California governor publicly. Biden has opposed the Newsom recall effort. No word on if he also opposes the state’s sudden push for strict signature-matching.

EppsNet at the Movies: Happy Old Year

 

Happy Old Year is a Thai movie about letting go of the past, holding on to the past, self-awareness (or lack thereof). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry . . . I had to take off a star because, and I’m not spoiling anything here, the male lead has two girlfriends, not really at the same time, and I can’t imagine what either of them sees in this selfish putz.

I’d give the star back if the lead actress took her clothes off but she doesn’t. 🙁

Rating: 4-stars

Happy Old Year

A woman wants to reorganize her house and convert it into a home office. She will throw away anything that has been lying around unused. However, she faces a great challenge when she comes across some items that belonged to her ex...

Director: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
Cast: Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying, Sunny Suwanmethanont, Sarika Sartsilpsupa

IMDb rating: 7.2 (2950 votes)