CORRUPTION: Ever wonder how politicians get so rich? They funnel billions into NGOs where their families work and who pay them to speak and to serve on boards. The $24 billion California spent on the homeless crisis went almost exclusively to NGOs who rely on a steady stream of… pic.twitter.com/48g8WkO9Y0 — @amuse (@amuse) September 22, 2024 This is common. People make money advocating for the solution to a social problem. They don’t solve the problem, they advocate for a solution to the problem. If the problem were solved, their money stream would dry up. Perverse incentives, as the poster says. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Twitter
NBC: Trump Is Just Asking to Get Shot
So he was asking for it, according to NBC. Use fierce rhetoric, get shot. No mention of the possible effect of fierce rhetoric used *against* Trump.https://t.co/yPQEnLSujz — Paul Epps (@paulepps) September 16, 2024 Read more →
Another Instance When it Would Be Great to Have Functioning Media
If indeed this turns out to be true, which is looking increasingly likely, consider the character of the presidential candidate that would cheat in a debate, allowing her staff to negotiate the questions in advance, the camera angles, the required fact checking of her opponent,… https://t.co/RrmYoy151N — Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) September 15, 2024 I’d like to see CBS or NBC or some other news outlet look into this but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Everyone seems to be on the same team. Read more →
Political Suicide Averted
Gavin Newsom Slaps Down Democrats’ Attempt To Give Home Loans To Illegal Migrants https://t.co/NPkK9lDjDu via @dailycaller — Paul Epps (@paulepps) September 8, 2024 I heard Nancy Pelosi on Bill Maher’s show saying this bill was a great idea. Maher suggested that free houses for migrants is maybe not a great idea. “It’s not free housing,” Pelosi said. “It’s making the American dream available to more people.” HAHA. “It’s making the American dream available to people who are not Americans.” People who’ve lived and worked in the US their whole lives can’t afford to buy houses. Especially in California. Let’s say we did give free down payments to illegal immigrants. How are they going to make the payments? It’s illegal for them to hold a job. How are they going to pay for insurance, property tax, HOA, upkeep? To Newsom’s credit, he recognizes political suicide when he sees it. Read more →
Complacent Mental Laziness
I can’t find even one comment on this LinkedIn post from someone who went to X and did a search for “billie eilish donald trump” and discovered, as I did, that that video is all over the platform. It’s not deleted. Or forget the search. Even the phrasing is an obvious lie. How can you retweet something if it’s been banned? Complacent mental laziness is a national disease at this point. Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Pete Buttigieg, Lies and Crime Stats
Keeping it real here, Mayor Pete can't possibly know what Donald Trump or anyone else actually thinks about anything. More on this later …https://t.co/kmuyogVwFi — Paul Epps (@paulepps) July 30, 2024 My fellow Americans – What Mayor Pete is saying here is that even though Donald Trump has disavowed a national abortion ban, he — Mayor Pete — doesn’t believe him because “he lies all the time.” In my opinion, this is not the right moment in history for Democrats to take a holier-than-thou position vis-a-vis lying to the American people. If I were a Democrat, I would not show my face in public and if I did, it would not be to lecture anyone on the perils of lying to the public. We’ve just had 3-1/2 years of Democrats lying to us about the mental health of our president, Joe Biden. Anyone, during that period of time, could watch… Read more →
The J21 Coup
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024 For years now, you could go online every day and see new videos of Joe Biden falling down, mumbling incoherently, wandering around lost and confused. But if you said anything about this out loud, you’d be called a far-right MAGA propagandist (or something similar), accused of spreading disinformation. And by the way, according to Democrats and corporate media, those videos were fake. Then came the Trump-Biden debate. Why Biden would agree to stand next to Trump for 90 minutes and debate, I have no idea. My best guess is that,… Read more →
Last Words
It turns out that his last words — I am not kidding — were "Oh f—," which is what I guessed. Probably those are a lot of people's last words.https://t.co/3zvNVgmGIS via @people — Paul Epps (@paulepps) June 30, 2024 Read more →
The First 2024 Presidential Debate is in the Books
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 →
What We’re Shown May Not Be What’s Really Happening
Shouldn't they be studying for finals?https://t.co/DZoaKGLPWY — Paul Epps (@paulepps) April 25, 2024 During the time my son was at UC Berkeley, they had a fair number of campus protests. Usually the protests were about tuition hikes or something race-related. As a parent paying tuition, I was against tuition hikes, but I was also against my kid participating in protests when he should be studying. Whenever I heard about a Berkeley protest in progress, I’d check in with the boy to make sure he wasn’t participating, which he wasn’t. I got the impression from the way he talked about it that not only was he not participating, none of his friends were participating and no one with any sense was participating. I was at the Berkeley campus myself during one of the protests. There were 100 people, maybe less, blocking Sather Gate to protest a microaggression or something, but it… Read more →
No Idea How to Address Gun Violence
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… Read more →
Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024
https://t.co/CZwiPjRrZ3 — 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 Read more →
Freedom of Speech is Too Dangerous
https://t.co/k770FhDgoE — 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,… Read more →
It All Depends on Who’s Slinging the Hash
‘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,… Read more →
Robert Reich, Regurgitator
Thanks to loopholes in the Trump tax cuts, the biggest companies in the country have been able to avoid more than $276 billion in federal taxes. This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged. — Robert Reich (@RBReich) March 2, 2024 A lot of professors use the X platform to thoughtfully engage with the issues of the day. This guy uses it to regurgitate DNC talking points in ways that don’t even make sense. And yet I actually feel embarrassed for him. Read more →
Gun Laws Don’t Work Even When They Do Work
Police Officer Paul ElmstrandPolice Officer Matthew RugeFirefighter Adam Finseth They were shot and kiIIed yesterday near Minneapolis. Another officer was injured. The alleged shooter is Shannon Gooden. Gooden applied for a gun in 2020 and was rejected due to his violent… pic.twitter.com/wV8eTbHa6F — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 19, 2024 Gun laws don’t work, even when they do work. The shooter in this case tried to buy a gun but was rejected because of his violent criminal history. Amazingly, he was still able to get his hands on a gun, despite the legal prohibition, and the victims are just as dead. I haven’t seen anything about this case except a mention in an X account. I can’t help thinking that if you flipped the script and a police officer shot a black man, there’d be a thousand times more media coverage than a black man shooting a police officer, or shooting… Read more →
Media Companies With Millions of X Followers?
pic.twitter.com/5W3ORwZTOh — Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) January 25, 2024 I’m posting the above tweet not for the content but because if you look at the @NBCNews profile on X, you’ll see that the account has (allegedly) 9.4 million followers, and the tweet, when I looked at it, had 65 likes. How can an account with 9.4 million followers be getting 65 likes on a tweet?! First of all, I’m not singling out NBC. There are many media accounts on X with (allegedly) millions of followers and almost no interaction. Second, I didn’t cherry-pick a tweet with just a few likes. The NBC account has some tweets with more likes, some tweets with fewer, but 65 is not abnormally low. I picked it because of the comment underneath the original tweet. It’s a drawing of the Frog of Shame, and reads “If the Frog of Shame gets more likes than… Read more →
An Alternative Approach to Student Loan Relief
The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's disastrous student loan forgiveness program. We have a bad habit in America of paying people to do the exact opposite of what we want them to do: more $$ to stay at home than to work, more $$ to be a single mother than married, more $$… pic.twitter.com/kexfAig09l — Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 30, 2023 I knew Biden wasn’t allowed to do this. Here’s the good news. You can just flip those signs over, write a new begging message on the back, and go stand on a freeway offramp. Read more →
If Your House Burns Down and You Rebuild It, Did You “Create” a New House?
Over 13 million new jobs created.More Americans are working than ever.Record number of small business applications. Bidenomics is growing our economy. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2023 I love these Biden tweets on job “creation.” ChatGPT tells me that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the loss of more than 22 million jobs in the United States. The 13 million jobs that Biden “created” are those lost jobs coming back. But he’s still 9 million short. What happened to those people? The unemployment rate is low, which suggests that people have left the labor force for some reason. If COVID didn’t kill them all, then they may have retired, given up (not everyone wants to work at fast-food restaurants), or cobbled together a welfare package they can live on. The labor force participation rate (shown below) has never come back to pre-pandemic level, and people who have left the labor force… Read more →
Billionaires
The average billionaire in America pays 8% in federal taxes. Teachers and firefighters pay more than that. That’s why I proposed a minimum tax for billionaires. Republicans are against it, but I’m going to keep fighting for it. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 26, 2023 Reading Joe Biden’s Twitter is exquisitely painful, like a sore tooth that you can’t stop pushing on with your tongue. How do these things even go together? Americans are not taxed on their net worth, they’re taxed on their income. At least that’s what I think he’s talking about. Income tax. Although there are a lot of other federal taxes: self-employment tax, gift tax, excise taxes, etc. Is he talking about taxing people’s net worth? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I’m not a billionaire myself because I don’t know how to make that happen. If someone has figured out how to do… Read more →