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Ken Holtzman was a left-handed starting pitcher for the Chicago Cubs beginning in 1965. Holtzman pitched two no-hitters with the Cubs, and later played on the Oakland Athletics’ teams that won three consecutive World Series championships between 1972 and 1974. Holtzman won 20 games for the A’s in 1973.
RIP Ken Holtzman
Joe Biden is not a serious person. He wants more gun laws but doesn’t enforce the gun laws we already have, like the ATF Form 4473, a federal form required to buy a gun in the United States.
Among other things, the form is intended to prevent crack addicts from buying guns. Lying on the 4473 — for example, saying you’re not a crack addict when you are, like your son Hunter did — carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years, but Hunter won’t be going to prison because he got a plea deal.
And the Democratic Party is not a serious party. I haven’t heard a single Democrat say the plea deal is a joke and Hunter should go to prison.
Yes I know the president doesn’t want his son to go to prison, even though he boasts about sending other people’s kids to prison for lying on a 4473. But if you’re going to continually advocate for more and more gun laws, which is what Democrats do, then you should goddamn well be enforcing the ones we already have.
Here’s Kamala Harris, the vice president, also not a serious person, also calling for more gun laws.
Doug and I send our prayers to the city of Baltimore. Two lives were lost and 28 others were injured, including children, during another mass shooting – this time at a block party.
Every person in our nation should have the right to go to a party or walk down the street without…— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 3, 2023
Baltimore, like every other city with a lot of gun violence — Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and others — is all Democrats. They have not elected a Republican to any political office probably in my lifetime.
Same in Los Angeles, where I live. The mayor is a Democrat, as is every member of the city council.
Democrats in these cities can pass any laws they want to with no Republican opposition. Baltimore already has “commonsense” gun laws, which don’t work.
If all you’ve got regarding gun violence is “More gun laws,” then you have no idea how to address gun violence.
SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. – Dickey Betts, a driving force behind the Allman Brothers Band that launched Southern rock and influenced the jam band scene, died Thursday at his Florida home
Betts was best known for his legendary guitar skills, but he also wrote the Allman Brothers Band’s only Top 10 hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”
During Bob Dylan’s Sept. 30, 1995, concert at the USF Sun Dome in Tampa. Florida, Betts joined Dylan on stage for several numbers including “Ramblin’ Man.” Betts told the story of how it came to be while seated at his Sarasota County home in 2014.
Dylan says, “Let’s do ‘Ramblin’ Man.’”
“All right, let me write the words down,” Betts tells him.
“I know the words,” Dylan says. “I should have wrote that song.”
Betts unleashed one of his warm, charming laughs.
“I said, ‘Bob, just sing whatever you want to.’ I didn’t think he knew the words. I figured he’d just make up some stuff,” Betts recalled. “He knew the song word for word. Man, it was such an honor. He sang it and I told him later that those words have never had so much feeling. The way he sings, he makes every word punchy. It really was beautiful. It really was.”
RIP Dickey Betts
Mordecai: What happens after?
The Stranger: Hmm?
Mordecai: What do we do when it’s over?
The Stranger: Then you live with it.
When they were shooting Casablanca . . . someone comes to [Humphrey Bogart] and says, “they want to play the ‘Marseillaise,’ what should we do? — the Nazis are here and we shouldn’t be playing the ‘Marseillaise.'” Humphrey Bogart just nods to the band, we cut to the band, and they start playing “bah-bah-bah-bah.”
Someone asked what he did to make that beautiful scene work. He says, “they called me in one day, Michael Curtiz, the director, said, ‘stand on that balcony over there, and when I say “action” take a beat and nod,'” which he did. That’s great acting. Why? What more could he possibly have done? He was required to nod, he nodded. There you have it. The audience is terribly moved by his simple restraint in an emotional situation — and this is the essence of good theater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as simply as possible. Contemporary playwriting, filmmaking, and acting tend to offer us the reverse — people performing mundane and predictable actions in an overblown way. The good actor performs his tasks as simple and as unemotionally as possible.
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) April 10, 2024
He’s exploring that? It’s a little late in the day to be exploring closing the border.
The first thing he did on taking office was to undo all of Trump’s executive orders related to closing the border. If he has the power to open the border, he has the power to close the border.
Or just close it. Assume you have the power and see if the courts say you don’t.
Diesel or steam
You’re standing in the doorway after class
when Jimmy wants to know if you prefer
diesel or steam. You can’t simply say passand hope to leave. There’s no time to defer.
You have to say right now as if you knew
the answer. But what to say? The two things blurso which to choose? And why did he ask you?
Others are waiting. Nobody explains.
Their eyes are curious. Your answer’s duethough you know next to nothing about trains
and engines. So you vaguely plump for steam
and are approved. Now steam runs through your veinsyou’re of the party. Life becomes a dream
of existential choices. Jimmy’s gone.
Out in the playground where your classmates screamand tussle, odds are million to one
you’ll get them right but choices must be made
and loyalties defined. What’s done is done.Diesel is wrong! You have a barricade.
Prepare, Britannia, to face the foe!
Possess your weapons. Do not be afraidof where the trains divide and where they go.
I don’t think the jobs report was good. I don’t think the economy is good.
I just read a series of comments on the story linked above and commenters were euphoric. Why do we see one sunny report after another on jobs, unemployment and the economy while Forbes reports that 40% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and 29% are doing even worse, i.e., their income doesn’t cover their expenses? Why has the sentiment on LinkedIn been so dismal?
The jobs numbers are illusory. The jobs are all part time. Last month’s jobs were all part time. Full-time employment actually went down. We’ve added 6.2 million jobs since May 2022 and full-time employment has gone up by only 263,000. Number of jobs “created” has gone up much faster than number of people employed, I suspect because a single person working multiple jobs counts as multiple jobs.
The unemployment numbers are illusory. If you work 1 hour in a week, you are not unemployed. If you are marginally attached to the labor force, you are not unemployed. If you work part time for economic reasons, you are not unemployed. Look up the U-6 unemployment rate for what I’d say is a more realistic number.
I read a post today on LinkedIn that started out like this:
“Your salary increase will be 2%,” I told her. It was one of my worst moments as a people leader.
She was my star performer, my right hand person.
1000% business critical to our team. Yet 2% was the best our company would give her.
It was far beneath her value, and we both knew it, and I couldn’t do better for her.
The author goes on to say that he advised her to look for a new job that would pay what she’s worth, which she did. And the moral of the story is that you can’t complain when employees leave if you don’t give them reasons to stay.
Surprisingly to me, the poster got a lot of recognition and praise for his handling of this tale of woe.
I don’t like the story myself.
As I understand it, he offered his most valuable team member a 2% raise, knowing it was far below her value, placed the blame on “our company,” and advised her to find another job. I’m going to assume since he didn’t leave that he got more than 2%. It sounds like he got his raise and offered her 2%.
And he didn’t, as a people leader, say to whoever these things are said to, “If you make me offer my most valuable team member a 2% raise, I’m going back to my desk and start typing my resignation letter.”
If you see a problem, you own it. If you ignore a problem, you’ll see more of it.
What we saw last night was the president’s ‘let them eat cake’ moment. Millions of Americans are suffering because of the mismanagement of this economy. I say this frequently. We’re seeing record numbers of foreclosures, people are having their cars repossessed, we are seeing a silent job loss because the reports are now showing that the actual growth in employment is in part-time jobs, not in full-time jobs. It is totally and completely unseemly, in this economic environment, for our president to say that we’re going to try to set the record for the amount raised. No money to help people buy eggs and bacon. No money to make sure that people can afford gasoline.
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 29, 2024
Kahneman was a genius not only at formulating original insights into human behavior but at explaining them in a way that’s interesting and understandable to the non-expert.
I can’t recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow highly enough. It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.
RIP Daniel Kahneman
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 24, 2024
What Justice Jackson said to raise eyebrows was “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.”
Correct! One clear goal of the First Amendment is to hamstring the federal government from doing what it would like to do: control our speech. I would have expected a Supreme Court justice to have learned this in law school, not in on-the-job training.
Justice Jackson went on to say, “The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country . . . by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she said.
There’s always a euphemism handy for “information the government doesn’t want you to know,” e.g., “misinformation” “disinformation,” “harmful information,” etc. We can’t have freedom of speech! It’s too dangerous!
As a thought experiment, if you had to select one person to decide what you can or can’t read, who would that person be? They also get to decide, regarding information transmitted audibly, what you can or can’t hear. Any information this person deems to be inaccurate or harmful or dangerous will be inaccessible to you.
Do you trust anyone that much? I don’t.
That’s what the First Amendment says (among other things), that the federal government is not to be trusted to censor information or control the speech of the citizens.
This movie probably doesn’t deserve the whole five stars but I have a real affinity for characters like Emily (played by Aubrey Plaza), who, like the Mark Baum and Vinny characters in The Big Short, are people with a code of honor, a sense of awareness, not looking for trouble, but not willing to put up with insolence or nonsense.
To give you a sense of what I mean — and this may need a very minor spoiler alert — a group of criminals has stolen a significant amount from Emily’s boyfriend (also a criminal but less physical than the other criminals) and she’s making a case that they should go and get it back because, among other reasons, the boyfriend owes her a cut of what was stolen.
The boyfriend is against the idea. “These are very serious people,” he says.
Emily replies, “No, no, we’re serious people. Ok? Motherfuckers will just keep taking from you and taking from you until you make the goddamn rules yourself. That’s what this is about. Am I wrong? Am I wrong?”
I say no.
John Patton Ford, in a first-time writer-director effort, keeps things moving. And I like the L.A. locations for a sense of authenticity.
Rating: 
Emily the Criminal
Down on her luck and saddled with debt, Emily gets involved in a credit card scam that pulls her into the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, ultimately leading to deadly consequences.Director: John Patton Ford
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Bernardo Badillo
IMDb rating: 6.7 (66628 votes)
‘This Is Shocking’: Some Democrats Demand CNN Apologize, Denounce Alleged ‘Islamaphobia’ Made Against Ilhan Omar https://t.co/PkDdBuwt6f via @dailycaller
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 16, 2024
It is shocking! I haven’t been as shocked since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe.
I think Democrats really do believe that the role of corporate media in general and CNN in particular is to serve as a public relations arm of the Democratic party. A journalist taking an adversarial position vis-a-vis a Democratic representative should not be allowed to have a job.
What CNN commentator Scott Jennings said is that Ilhan Omar is a “public relations agent for Hamas living in the United States Congress.”
To me, that’s a pretty good one-liner, no better or worse than political barbs I read every day. All the people that I see complaining about the remark are people who’ve called Donald Trump Hitler, Satan, a fascist, a racist, a white supremacist, a dictator, etc., for the last eight years. If you want to dish it out, you’ve got to be able to take it.
You could make what I think is an excellent case that Jennings’ remark was not based on “Islamophobia” but on things that Rep. Omar has said, including that she is “Somali first, Muslim second” (where does “American” rank?) and that she is “here to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system.”
She also falsely pushed Hamas propaganda by claiming Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. The U.S. intelligence assessment was that the hospital was hit by a Hamas rocket. While she didn’t retract her original remarks, she did subsequently say that it’s important to ensure that information comes from credible sources.
I’m glad that neither Ilhan Omar, nor any of the people defending her, is my congressional representative. What a bunch of crybabies. I want a freedom fighter.
My connection with the events depicted in The Big Short is that I worked in the information technology department of a mortgage bank in the run-up to the 2007 implosion of the subprime mortgage market. Many of the big players in that market, like New Century and Countrywide, were based here in my backyard — in Orange County and Pasadena.
Given that it was fairly evident at the time that complicated financial instruments were being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it, it’s remarkable that very few people foresaw the catastrophe and that even fewer actually had the nerve to bet on it to happen.
Long story short, the major rating agencies — Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s — were incompetent in their rating of subprime mortgage bonds, giving investment-grade and, in some cases, triple-A ratings to high-risk instruments. A lot of people took the ratings — which implied that subprime mortgage derivatives were no riskier than U.S. Treasury bonds — at face value and acted accordingly.
What is amazing is not just that people are greedy and prone to engage in ethically questionable activities; the big lesson is how people can reach unimaginable positions of power and essentially be (a) incompetent, and (b) not willing to do even the most mundane and trivial parts of their job.
The only less-than-positive thing I can say about the movie is that the Christian Bale and Steve Carrell characters are so compelling that when neither of them is on screen and you’ve got either Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling — nothing against them personally but their characters aren’t interesting — the momentum flags.
The director is Adam McKay, best known as the director of a bunch of unfunny Will Ferrell movies (yes, that’s redundant), including Step Brothers, which Roger Ebert described as “a sign of the end of Western civilization.” How he was offered this movie I do not know but he does a capable job.
A couple of important points that I think were brought out better in Michael Lewis’s book:
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they can get rich making dumb decisions?
Rating: 
The Big Short
In 2006-2007 a group of investors bet against the United States mortgage market. In their research, they discover how flawed and corrupt the market is.Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling
IMDb rating: 7.6 (532875 votes)
Biden Expresses Regret for Calling Laken Riley’s Alleged Killer ‘an Illegal’ https://t.co/McWvsZB68h
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 11, 2024
There’s so much about this that I don’t like. He doesn’t express regret for an immigration policy that allows people to enter the country illegally and to stay in the country even after being arrested for multiple crimes. He doesn’t express regret for a young woman being murdered as a result of that policy. There’s no moral equivalence between word games and murder. It’s beyond contemptible.
Anyone who thinks it’s important to tell people how to speak, what words they can and can’t use, is a person to be ignored and shunned. As a free citizen, I’ll speak the way I want to.
Biden was given a secure border and instructions on how to keep it secure. He issued close to 100 executive orders undoing everything the previous administration had done. I can’t say this for sure, but under the policies in place when Biden took office, I don’t believe the alleged killer would have been in the country, and Laken Riley would be alive.
A person who ignores a murder while apologizing for maybe hurting the murderer’s feelings by calling him what he is. . . it’s hard to marshal enough contempt for someone like that.
Happy International Women’s Day 2024! (Belated — I meant to post this yesterday.)
So many girls and women who’ve been a joy to work with as students, colleagues, teachers, mentors. I wish I could relive every moment with you. If you think you may be in that group, you probably are. If you’re not sure, message me and I’ll tell you. 🙂
I think I remember women better because there haven’t been as many of them. I work in software engineering. Women are underrepresented in software engineering. You may have heard.
Women and men are different so it doesn’t seem surprising that they choose to do different things with their lives.
Software engineering has been a good career for me because I like solving problems and building things, so I’ve been able to make a living doing, for the most part, things that I like and things that (I think) I’m good at.
On the flip side, I’ve also spent most of my life sitting alone in a room or cubicle staring at a computer screen. Not everyone wants to do that. So there are pros and cons just like any other job.
Having said this, if you’re a woman and you want to be a software engineer, do it! Do it because you love it! You may have heard that software engineering is not a welcoming profession for women. That is false. It’s a knowledge-based profession. If you know more than the other person and you can solve problems that they can’t solve, you are the queen of the programming jungle.
And as Holden Caulfield used to say, “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while.”
You may have heard that male software engineers behave boorishly. In what profession do men not behave boorishly? Yes, I’ve seen bad things happen to female engineers: missing out on raises or promotions, not getting the project they really wanted, losing their job. All that stuff happens to men too. It’s happened to me. I’ve been out of work plenty of times and I’m as manly as you can get.
Enjoy your day. Follow your dreams.
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 10, 2024
I took a digital SAT recently. I’ve got a BA in Journalism and an MS in Computer Science, so I’m very well-rounded, like a sphere. I eat standardized tests for breakfast.
The English portion, or Reading or whatever they call it now, seems much easier to me. I got 800 (out of 800) on that. There’s no more “read a column and a half of text, then answer 10 questions about it.” You read a paragraph, answer one question and move on.
There are no more analogies. There are no obscure vocabulary words.
Math is still math, although as noted in the story, if you’re getting a lot of answers right, then they start serving you harder questions. I got 780 on the Math portion.
TL;DR: It’s an easy test. I got an almost perfect score and believe me, kids, I’ve been out of high school a long time.
Paid tutoring available on request. Maybe free if I like you.
You probably haven’t seen this. Or heard of it. It was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, released on iTunes, then later on Netflix.
The synopsis should note that it’s a neo-noir. Some of the marketing materials make it look like a Murder, She Wrote crime caper. It isn’t. It’s dark.
I just sat staring at the screen for several minutes after it ended.
Rating:
Man from Reno
A mystery outside of San Francisco brings together small-town sheriff Paul Del Moral, Japanese author Aki Akahori, and a traveler from Reno who soon disappears, leaving behind his suitcase and a trail of questions.
Director: Dave Boyle
Cast: Ayako Fujitani, Pepe Serna, Kazuki Kitamura
IMDb rating: 6.6 (2279 votes)
