WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2025
Needs context, one newspaper says: In the aftermath of the president's joint address, the New York Times tried to conduct a fact check.
The lack of sophistication put on display was little short of amazing. Even at the highest levels, our journalists just aren't super sharp.
In fairness, let's be fair! Before you can score a statement as True or False, you have to be able to discern what the speaker in question has said.
Inevitably, many of the statements fact-checked by the Times were so fuzzy that it's hard to get clear on just what the commander was saying. The fact-checkers betrayed little awareness of this problem, and their work spiraled downward from there.
For today, let's look at one of the president's most striking presentations. In her fact check for the Times, Linda Qiu whittled a much longer presentation down to this:
“1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.”
As presented, that cherry-picked jumble of words barely qualifies as a statement.
Within the context of Trump's longer presentation, it's fairly clear what the commander was trying to say or suggest. But the tiny fragment selected by Qiu makes no discernible sense on its own.
At any rate, according to Qiu rates Trump's statement in a peculiar way. She says his statement "Needs context."
She goes on to offer her own jumble of statements about the Social Security program. Her statements are almost as hard to sort out as was the fragmentary claim she fact checked.
The commander's full presentation is truly one for the ages. What was the president saying and why did the president say it? This was his full presentation:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (3/4/25): The Government Accountability Office, the federal government office, has estimated annual fraud of over $500 billion in our nation. And we are working very hard to stop it. We’re going to.
We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors, and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.
Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.
I don’t know any of them. I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly.
3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.
In fact, Pam [Bondi], good luck. Good luck. You’re going to find it.
But a lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid and nobody does—and it really hurts Social Security, it hurts our country.
1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby [Kennedy].
Including, to finish:
1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229. One person between the age of 240 and 249—and one person is listed at 360 years of age. More than 100 years—more than 100 years older than our country.
But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. By slashing all of the fraud, waste and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families.
It's easy to see what's being suggested. The commander says, three separate times, that "money" or "a lot of money" is being paid to millions of people who are impossibly old.
"According to government databases," Trump suggests that checks may be going to people who range from 100 years old all the way up to 360! Adding his population numbers, he seems to be suggesting that more than 20 million "Social Security members" are somehow involved in this matter.
The commander says his team has been "identifying shocking levels of probable fraud in the Social Security program." Quite a few weasel words are involved in his presentation, but it's abundantly clear what this man is suggesting.
As for the weasel words, let's get started with this:
What exactly is a "Social Security member?" For the record, the term was not in widespread use until the commander started using it in recent years.
That said, what is "a Social Security member?" Presumably, it's not the same thing as a Social Security recipient, or the commander would have used that term. But the use of that slippery, amorphous term is where this fellow started.
Clearly, the commander was suggesting that Social Security is riddled with a giant amount of fraud. In the picture he was painting, checks are apparently being sent to tens of millions of people who are no longer alive.
Presumably, this means that the money is being received by some other used. "Money is being paid to many of" these long-deceased people, we're rather murkily told.
("Many" is a highly imprecise term.)
Question! Is the Social Security Administration really sending monthly checks to tens of millions of such deceased people? Our answer to your question is this:
In theory, everything is possible. In reality, most things aren't.
What kind of term should come into play when a public official stands before the American nation and gives voice to a clown show like this? With incompetence that is hard to believe, the New York Times is telling readers today that the commander's ridiculous presentation "Needs context."
In truth, a serious journalist would have to invent new fact-check language to come to terms with a gong-show so vast. The New York Times seems to be eager to run from that that difficult challenge.
With that, we'll send you to CNN. For Daniel Dale's fact check of this presentation, you can start by clicking here.
Simply put, we Blues just aren't up to the challenge! Our tribunes have frequently gone to the finest schools, but we're not always sure what they did there.
One last minor irony:
Twenty-five years ago, the New York Time spent two years pretending that a Democratic presidential nominee was making crazily inaccurate statements on a regular basis. Now, a president is doing that very thing—and the Times refuses to say so!
This is the shape of one long-standing problem—a new "problem we all live with."
And the transgender mice?
ReplyDelete"Intersex mice can have a variety of conditions that cause a discordance between their genetic, gonadal, and/or phenotypic sex. These conditions include true hermaphroditism, pseudo-hermaphroditism, and sex chimerism. "
DeleteTo the extent that mice do not have "culture" it makes little sense to distinguish between gender and sex in mice, but how do you classify the mice that don't fit in either category, male or female? Mice may not worry about it much, but someone here is concerned, based on the above comment.
From Jeff Tiedrich:
Delete"get ready for the stupidest fucking thing ever to have been said by a United States President.
“eight million dollars for making mice transgender. this is real.”
no, no, no, no. nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. you low-wattage dolt. the word is transgenic.
let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice.
nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.
reading comprehension, how does it work? how clownfuckingly illiterate do you have to be to screw that up? and how hot do you have to be to demonize people that every time you see trans at the beginning of a word, your brain goes fuckity-bye and visions of entire teams of boy mice playing against girl mice in mouse schools across the nation dance in your head?"
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/what-the-fuck-was-that
Cont.
Delete"think about this: Donny didn’t misread that study all by himself. some micro-brain DOGE incel found this line-item in some agency’s thousand-page budget, then sent it all the way up the pipeline until it finally landed on the desk of whoever wrote Donny’s speech for him — and all along the way, not one person was bright enough to point out that ‘it’s transgenic, you morons.’
we’re being governed by imbeciles."
Or more likely the explanation is that they assume their followers are imbeciles and won't know the word transgenic, so they can repeat that tidbit of misinformation over and over without contradiction because the people who don't know will find it scandalous and the people who do know what the word means are happy to deceive the others. And Democratic corrections of such misinformation will never reach Trump's mass of cultists.
So the lies go on and on, and new ones spring up too fast to knock them down. People are going to have to lose faith in Trump some other way, maybe when they lose their own jobs and savings, because correcting misinformation just doesn't work.
Yeah it’s hard to fathom how fucking stupid these people are.
DeleteSocial Security is being defrauded by recipients of checks designated for people who are long dead. Most of us have read many such stories of many such criminals.
ReplyDeleteThat's for those of you with a sub-80 IQ who can't seem to figure out a humorous presentation of an issue.
"Social Security is being defrauded by recipients of checks designated for people who are long dead."
DeleteActually, the charge is that lots of SS money is going to millions of dead people, but there is not a scrap of evidence supporting this charge. But believe it if it makes you feel better.
Is humor something that needs to be figured out?
DeleteIf you are reading "many" such stories, you are listening to too much anti-SS propaganda. The actual incidence of such occurrences is tiny because the SS used to have investigators who prevented such fraud, an prosecutors to punish those who attempted it. There exist cross-checks that prevent dead people from getting payments. I know this because I went through the process when my husband died of covid. SS not only stops sending checks after a death, but they clawback the payment made during the month of death (since the person didn't live that entire month). In this face of such experience, the idea that there is massive fraud of this kind is ludicrous.
DeleteIt does seem likely that because Musk and Trump have fired the Inspector Generals and the AGs and the staff available to do checks of eligibility, there will be more opportunity for ongoing fraud, not less. Why this is a good thing is beyond me.
Death of old people is not funny. We all die eventually. Caring people try to make that experience as painless and dignified as possible. That obviously doesn't include right wingers, but fortunately public servants (govt employees) are more likely to be Democrats because the notion of public service is part of liberal values, inconsistent with Republican greed.
I was very sad for quite a while after my husband died. I hope Cecelia will have someone who grieves for her, when her time comes. But we reap the seeds we sowed in life, as Jacob Marley said. (Or Galatians if you prefer.)
"Most of us have read many such stories"
DeleteYes you have and you seem to have decided to believe the stories because it gives you pleasure to do so.
Next time try to be more discerning.
The idea that a Right-winger can read, might be the stupidest thing on the internet today.
DeleteHahaha. The president is lying to the American people about a program a lot of people rely on to survive in their old age. Let's stir the shit and bamboozle everyone that the program is rife with fraud. So funny. Ha ha ha.
ReplyDeleteJokes about 360-year-old people are funny. Democrats are humorless boomer scolds.
DeleteHe wasn't joking, you fucking freak, and he knew the explanation, but his goal was to sow distrust in the system. So go fuck yourself.
DeleteNothing funnier than people who are afraid of drag queens, thinking they can protect the nation from terrorists.
DeleteWe call our leader the President and not Commander or Dictator or King or His Excellency or even Dear Leader, because he is a public servant working on behalf of the people who elected him, not in his own self-interest or as a military figure (Commander is a military officer). Yes, the President commands the troops but the military is separate and distinct from our civilian elected executive figure.
ReplyDeleteSomerby seems to love calling Trump "Commander". Perhaps he intends it to be ironic, but if so, Somerby is displaying his own ignorance about who and what the president is.
Words matter. Not only that, they betray underlying attitudes and beliefs. That is because words are chosen from among alternatives that have slightly different shades of meaning. It doesn't matter how often Somerby says he is a liberal, his word choice, repeated so often, suggests he has a different understanding of Trump's role than liberals (and many conservatives) hold, one more akin to Trump's own grandiosity and the desires of his cult following. Irony in our current desperate situation is inappropriate and shows a callousness that pops up most often on the right, not the left.
Somerby needs to cut this shit out. The time for playing is over. My own preference is to refer to Trump as the Traitor-in-Chief or Putin's Puppet or the demented asshole who can only play golf and follow Musk's instructions. YMMV
"Irony in our current desperate situation is inappropriate."
DeleteSo speaketh the irony police.
Policing is not a bad thing.
DeleteDepends on whose policing and how. Bob's calling Trump the Commander is clearly ironic when viewed in the context of his oeuvre.
DeleteIrony is in poor taste right now. Does Somerby not understand what is happening?
DeleteIrony is never in poor taste.
DeleteIrony is for vacuous college sophomores. Adults use their words.
DeleteIt seems fairly predictable that out of all those fact-checkers, Somerby would have focused on Linda Qiu, a female journalist and perhaps Asian American.
ReplyDelete“Linda” is a Spanish word, meaning “pretty”.
Delete"Qiu is an East Asian surname (Chinese: 丘/邱; pinyin: Qiū; Wade–Giles: Ch'iu1; Jyutping: Jau1; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Khu). This surname is common in Mainland China, and is also one of the most influential surnames in Taiwan, as well as the Sichuan and Fujian provinces in the South China region."
DeleteMany Asian-American students change their Asian names to an American version that sounds similar to their names assigned at birth by their parents. They do that because they get tired of teachers mispronouncing their actual names and to better assimilate and make friends among students with American first names.
Many Spanish names and other words have entered widespread use by English-only speakers because they are so widely used in the USA, especially in the states that were originally part of Mexico/Spain but where Spanish still widely spoken.
Do you expect that Trump will outlaw all foreign sounding names or will he rely on oafs like Somerby to target and harrass those with such names (especially women)? After all, Republicans never could learn to say Kamala.
"Our answer to your question is this:
ReplyDeleteIn theory, everything is possible. In reality, most things aren't."
This is progress for Somerby. Just a month ago, he would have stopped after saying "anything is possible" but now he has changed to "everything" is possible and is recognizing the high likelihood that not everything happens in real life. We have been saying all along that people reason probabilistically, and that the probability of an event matters more than its possibility. Somerby seems to have accidentally acknowledged that, because it fits his overall point, which is that it isn't at all likely that any of those checks are being cashed by the actual member. Somerby doesn't quite say that Trump and his people either didn't check or don't want to tell followers what number of checks were mailed to such old old people, much less cashed. They want to imply that there is massive fraud, as they have been explicitly claiming all along. It is Somerby questioning their implication (instead of making his own) and that is progress for Somerby.
He needs to acknowledge this in order to castigate Qiu, who was merely saying that Trump's remark as phrased could have been "true" in the context of additional info about why there are so many very old people still in the Social Security database.
DeleteThe quote Qiu chose is entirely clear and literally true, but it’s misleading. There is a SS data base. It does contain people shown as living at those crazy ages. But there are good reasons to believe that these people are not getting SS benefits.
DeleteAnother true but misleading statement concerns the amount of wrongful payments. It is true that official reports estimate a large amount of wrongful payments. But, the cause is not the age errors in the database.
David, as has been explained before, they are not shown as living. They have a date of birth that gives them an age of 150+, but their age calculated from that date of birth is not causing them to receive payments, nor are they being shown as eligible in other data fields in the SS database. That FACT is being concealed from the public in order to manufacture Trump/Musk's fantasy that there is such widespread fraud.
DeleteImagine a spreadsheet with lots of data columns. If one of them shows that someone once received payments but another shows they are deceased, can you claim that they are still receiving payments based on only that one field, while another column has data that contradicts that info? That is essentially what Trump is doing and it is a deliberate lie.
IMO SS deserves to be mocked for errors like this, even if the errors may have no financial effect.
DeleteThe "errors" are not actually errors. They are a work-around in an old COBOL system that would be too costly to fix and doesn't really need to be fixed because it isn't causing any problems.
DeleteThis was found by Musk's crew, who looked at code but didn't understand what was happening. It wouldn't have become public in any way if Trump hadn't decided to pretend there are millions of 150 year old people on earth (hint: not even one) in order to cry fraud. This is deliberate deception and it is troubling that you, a supposed actuary and accountant, don't know what a dummy field is in programming. I teach that in my stats classes.
So that makes it seem like you are being disingenuous (or stupid) yourself, given that you have presented this as a real problem, even after having it explained to you. This is how people know you are a troll and not just some random buffoon.
@5:32 How do you know that the errors aren't causing any problems? You don't even know what the database is used for. It isn't used for SS payouts, but it might have other uses. Or, if isn't used, why does SS go the trouble and expense of maintaining a database that's full of errors and not used for anything?
DeleteThe database is most likely used for payouts. But that doesn't mean record in the database generates a payment. Filtering criteria is applied.
DeleteThe way we know the errors aren't causing faulty payouts is that no one in DOGE or anywhere else has provided a specific example of a faulty payout to any of these 150-year old people.
The oldest person on earth is a 116 year old nun in Brazil. There are no 150 year olds receiving checks.
DeleteHector -- Here's another guess: the database may not be used for any purpose. Data bases have been highly promoted. I can imagine SS setting up a data base just because it's the thing to do. That came close to happening at my company.
DeleteThe reasons I suspect it may not be used are
1. There's been a lot of publicity about this database, but AFAIK nobody publicly identified a use.
2. If they were really using the data base, they would have taken the effort to clean up the errors.
Well, these are just wild guesses
Why are you guessing? SS was doing its job and there is no evidence to the contrary. You have too little info to say otherwise and Trump/Musk are saying things that make no sense. Professionals deserve the benefit of any doubt, esp given Trump’s political motives. It is idiotic to think SS has no database for making payments.
DeletePretty wild, DiC. A database simplifies the task of analyzing and reporting data.
DeleteHow do you think they understand their data without it being in a database?
"IMO SS deserves to be mocked for errors like this, even if the errors may have no financial effect."
DeleteFair's fair. I've been mocking David because of his ridiculous errors for years.
He's okay with that, but when I agree with him, his crying really comes out.
Good point, Hector. My guess is probably wrong.
Delete@9:10 SS was NOT using the data base to make payments. Thank goodness! That's why the errors in the data base did not cause errors in the payments.
David, here’s more about the deputy press secretary at the Pentagon:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/kingsley-cortes-wilson-defense-department/
Thanks for the link @ 4:47. The article could be summarized as “if you write something I disagree with or something taboo, then you’re a racist.”
DeleteShe says Leo Frank was guilty.
DeleteWhether you agree with David in Cal, or not, you still have to admit he's an inveterate racist.
DeleteDavid in Cal,
DeleteIn your opinion, what is Putin trying to achieve with Trump's tariffs?
This 26 year old has lent her support to the AfD, the far right wing German group with "...a long list of connections to the neo Nazis" according to Spiegel International. And why would a 26 year old feel compelled to assert the guilt of a Jew who was lynched 110 years ago and ultimately judged wrongly accused of rape? Bizarre. Mother Jones lays bare a number of her public assertions, some of which she herself has removed from the internet. Anyone can feel free to judge who she is based upon her multiple public statements. DiC gives her a pass, and so do I. In that spirit , I say that students aligned with neoNazis on college campuses should have their say and if I call them racist DiC can feel free to scold me for it.
Delete“ WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what is being called a historic performance, on Tuesday night Donald J. Trump set a new world record for delivering the longest speech that did not include a single fact.
ReplyDeleteCongressional Republicans were awestruck by their leader’s ability, at the age of 78, to give such a sustained fact-free oration.
“To stand up there for 99 minutes and not accidentally slip up even once by saying something true?” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. “He’s still got it.”
Republicans contrasted Trump’s address favorably with the Democratic response of Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who spoke only briefly but whose remarks were riddled with facts.”
They are shameless and they will say anything:
ReplyDelete“ White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed on Wednesday that Canada had “been taken over by Mexican cartels” during an appearance on Fox News’s Special Report.”
Haitian immigrants are starving to death, because they eat Republicans brains.
DeleteThe constant and incessant barrage of lies propagated by Trump, Musk and their allies is impressive. Fox's role as a conduit for this bullshit should be highlighted in the Canadian press. In a world in which the truth matters, there would be penalties for disseminating harmful propaganda.
DeleteEverywhere I go nowadays, all I hear is people talking about how the Republican Party is nothing but a shit pile of bigots.
ReplyDeleteSlow on the uptake, but the uptake nonetheless.