https://t.co/nNlT0xBJ3Z — Paul Epps (@paulepps) June 29, 2024 When the presidential debates were first announced, I said that there was no way Biden was going to do a debate, so now I have to admit that I was wrong. But also, you can probably understand why I said that. Biden is who he is. He’s mentally and physically enfeebled. As long as he doesn’t do something deranged, like challenge his opponent to a live debate, the media can continue to do their best to cover for him. For example: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s revisit this supercut from 12 days ago. Well done MSM! pic.twitter.com/pSrnmnoVMo — MAZE (@mazemoore) June 28, 2024 Here’s what Biden said the day after the debate: “I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Lies
Questions on the Hunter Biden Laptop
https://t.co/VdehI82LV1 — Paul Epps (@paulepps) June 15, 2024 Hunter Biden was convicted of multiple felonies this week, in part owing to the verified contents of his laptop, which the New York Post reported on before the 2020 election. A group of 51 former U.S. intelligence officials released an open letter on Oct. 19, 2020, regarding the Post’s Oct. 14 report about the discovery of the laptop, the contents of which included documentation of a series of ethically questionable business deals that the Biden family was pursuing in both Ukraine and China, with the very likely involvement of Joe Biden himself. The letter asserted that the laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” If you read the fine print, the letter does say that while the signatories had no “evidence of Russian involvement,” the laptop op “would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia… Read more →
True and False Statements About Trans People
Report: Trans People Seven Times More Likely Than Cisgender People to Experience Violence In California An annual report detailing how many Californians were the victims of violence over the past year finds a slight dip in reported violence among most populations, but a sharp increase in reported violence against transgender people. — sfist.com (emphasis added) Nothing I say here is intended to disparage trans people . . . I’m fine with adults doing what they want, dressing the way they want, acting the way they want, with a few minor restrictions — keep your hands to yourself, that sort of thing. I don’t really care about trans people. But I take exception to being lied to by people advancing an agenda. That said, the report mentioned in the article above is based on the fourth annual California Violence Experiences Survey, conducted by UC San Diego and Tulane University. If you… Read more →
Journalism 101 for Non-Journalists
Hunter Biden Sues Laptop Repair Shop Owner Citing Invasion of Privacy. — The Washington Post The lawsuit is an implicit admission that the laptop that was given to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani was in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop. The only way the laptop could be responsible for invading his privacy is if the material disseminated from it was in fact authentic. Pretty much everyone now knows and admits that the laptop is authentic, and pretty much everyone knew in October of 2020 that the laptop was authentic, including the corporate media and social media that were propagating a lie formulated by the CIA that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” What we know for sure is that the media lied [about the laptop] and it’s Journalism 101 that when you make a mistake, as you’re going to do as a journalist, even big ones, the first thing you do is… Read more →
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. Read more →
Lying Your Way to the Top
For more than a decade, I have been saying in all kinds of venues, in my written journalism, in speeches, and in interviews, that the most bizarre and surreal aspect of American journalism is that getting caught lying is no barrier to advancement and success. Specifically, I’ve long said, as long as you lie for the right people and causes mainly to advance the interest of neo-liberal global economic institutions, or do the bidding of the U.S. security state, then, I said, you can lie for as much as you want and it will not have any impact whatsoever on your career in corporate journalism. But that formulation that I’ve long endorsed is far too generous to the point of being misleading. Indeed, it’s actually untrue to say that getting caught blatantly lying has no effect on one’s career in corporate journalism. I was wrong about that. It does have… Read more →
The Employment Numbers WERE Wrong. Implications for Elections?
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. Read more →
I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy
I’m getting a little tired of presidents of the United States repeating things that could only be spoken by an idiot or a liar, and then trying to intimidate people out of contradicting them. The latest (though of course not the most egregious) offender is one Joseph R. Biden, who told the country today that he can raise corporate income taxes without imposing any additional tax burden on anyone who earns less than $400,000 a year. Because in the United States of America, nobody with an income under $400,000 owns any stocks or mutual funds. And if you disagree, he’ll stare you in the face and repeat himself. — Steven Landsburg Joe Manchin has also taken up the banner on this. I don’t know enough about Manchin to say whether he’s economically illiterate or a liar or both. (I don’t think Biden is an idiot, though he’s obviously cognitively dysfunctional.)… Read more →
5 Reasons We’re Not Helped by More Gun Laws
The most common statistical sleight of hand when it comes to showing charts of gun murder rates per capita by country, with the United States always in the lead, is that these charts, somewhere in the fine print, and sometimes not at all, note that they’re only charting so-called “developed” countries, meaning that the U.S. is being compared to countries like Japan and France, but that Latin American countries and African countries, among others, are left out. So — 50+ people shot to death in a Nigerian church? Doesn’t count because Nigeria is not a “developed” country. And so on. (The other thing you have to pay attention to is whether a chart is showing gun murders or gun deaths. The U.S. has a very high suicide rate compared to most other countries — more than 60 percent of our gun deaths are suicides — so rolling the suicides in… Read more →
Bernie Madoff and Barack Obama
The death of Bernie Madoff reminds me that I never understood why he was so vilified. He ran a Ponzi scheme. All of his investors knew it was a Ponzi scheme. They chose to get in, and gambled that they could time their exits just right. Some succeeded, some failed. . . . The fact that he not only claimed to return 10% in every kind of market condition but actually did so constituted something like proof positive that he was running a Ponzi scheme, for anyone who cared to take notice. So I think Madoff’s “lies” go into the same category as the alleged “lies” of Barack Obama when he said that under Obamacare, anybody who liked his/her old health insurance policy would be able to keep it. Nobody capable of arithmetic could have believed such an outlandish statement — unless they gave it no thought whatsoever, in which… Read more →
How Many Synonyms Can There Be For the Word “Lies”?
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: Being treated like an imbecile who doesn’t grasp nuances of the English language and doesn’t know when he’s being brainwashed. The absence in our country of an honest free press. This would really solve a lot of problems. A lot. Read more →
Read My Lips: No New Frackses
My fellow Americans – This Biden fellow is the biggest liar on two feet. I heard him on last night’s debate saying “I never said I oppose fracking.” “You said it on tape,” President Trump replied. “Show the tape!” Biden said angrily. “Put it on your website!” OK, first of all, here’s the tape: View this post on Instagram A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Oct 22, 2020 at 10:59pm PDT Second, Biden knows he said it, he knows he said it on tape . . . I’d seen the tapes many times myself. Why on God’s green earth would he stand there and not only lie about it but insist that his opponent produce a tape of him lying about it? It’s the most shameless thing I’ve ever seen! Given the audacity of it, do I believe he’s taken millions of dollars from foreign entities?… Read more →
Steve Scully: Ex-Debate Moderator
No, Not Trump, Not Ever https://t.co/PFvHTeQSZu — Steve Scully (@SteveScully) March 18, 2016 Steve Scully was going to be the moderator of tonight’s now-cancelled presidential debate. I know a lot of people who think President Trump’s “fake news” feud with the media is based largely on his own paranoid imagination. But is a guy who has publicly stated that Donald Trump should never be president really a good choice to moderate a presidential debate in which one of the participants is Donald Trump? There wasn’t anyone a bit more impartial available? Wait, it gets better. While in college, Scully served as an intern for — wait for it — Sen. Joe Biden. OK, now for the coup de grâce! Today, C-SPAN suspended Scully indefinitely after he admitted to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked when he was confronted about a questionable exchange with former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci. Read more →
“You’re Too Hard on Yourself”
“He has suffered enough” meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too. A sufficiency of suffering, in public life, consisted in a loss of face perhaps, or office, or, earlier, in getting caught, or in committing crimes, or having wanted to commit them. And if the real sufferer was the public man in violation of the criminal law, and a sufficiency of suffering lay in his various states of mind, then it was perhaps everyone else who got off too easily. . . . Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn’t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so… Read more →