Those buildings would never have falled straight down like that. RAMPAGE was an inside job, WAKE UP SHEEPLE

@Doc_M, I noticed you didn't take on my central point about loyalty. What you're talking about is actually something I have always believed -- there aren't really independents who are truly independent in any large number in America. Left-leaning independents vote for Democrats as often as self-identified Democrats, and right-leaning independents vote for Republicans as often as self-identified Republicans, and true independents make up a very small share of the electorate. There's actually data to back that up.

But I'm talking about something much deeper than voting patterns -- I'm talking about "epistemic closure." I'm referring to the way conservatives get all their "facts" these days only from a select number of outlets that distort, misrepresent, or outright fabricate facts to vindicate their ideology, and treat all sources with different views as "liberal", and therefore "ideological", and therefore equivalent enough to say "opinions on the shape of earth differ," when in truth the "facts" cooked up by the right-wing media empire often have little or no connection to reality.

My example was "tax cuts increase tax revenue." That has zero basis in fact. Zero. It's not "that's too complicated an issue for us to know who's really right and wrong", it's just plainly, demonstrably false. If you cut taxes, it adds to the deficit. It can produce a small stimulative effect on the economy as a whole, which makes them slightly less expensive than a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation would indicate, but it never raises growth so much that the net effect is an increase in revenue.

Not to cross too much into your back & forth with rougy, but I would definitely say that there is no left wing equivalent of the "far right" -- at best, there is an actual American Socialist party, but they don't really have a voice in the mainstream liberal movement, and they certainly don't have 1-hour opinion shows on cable news networks, and hundreds of radio shows across the country. The real problem the left has is that 90% of the Democratic party seems to be to the right of their base. People who're in line with the Democratic base (e.g. Sherrod Brown, Anthony Weiner) are perpetually labeled "far left", not just by Republicans, but by Democratic leadership.

As for the 9/11 thing, again, it's a big difference. You don't have Democratic politicians saying "9/11 was an inside job", you don't have left-wing columnists continuing to speculate publicly that 9/11 was an inside job, and certainly you don't see left-wing people who say that getting invited on Sunday talk shows to talk about foreign policy.

Our conspiracy theorists get systematically frozen out, while the Republicans are happy to repeat every crackpot conspiracy theory on the floor of Congress, including trivially disproven stuff like "Obama was really born in Kenya."

1a) I've met tons of republicans who claim to be moderate, but the more you talk to them and learn about their politics, the clearer it is that they are only less vocal examples of the Tea Party.
2a) Point taken. I happen to be one of the far-left as defined by the left. They call me far-left because they don't think I'm reasonable. They don't think I'm reasonable because I'd rather vote for a candidate who represents my political beliefs rather than give my vote to their candidate without so much as a thanks for my effort.
3a) No prob. Lots of Libertarians think that 9/11 was an inside job, same as me.
4a) I think there's a difference between understanding every nuance of what happened to bring about the near total, catastrophic (and possibly still pending) collapse of our economy, and the general cause of that collapse. You don't have to understand derivatives in order to understand that they are the result of the financial deregulation lauded and birthed by the rightwing over the course of the past two decades.

>> ^Psychologic:

This one?
>> ^lucky760:
For the second demo did anyone else think "JENGA!" ?



now this is a more impressive demo. they simulation friction of those sticks and even internal mass and air resistance since you can see balls falling faster than wooding sticks.

also this video proves it, 9/11 was an inside job.

Meh, no explosion at 0:20... it was obviously an inside job as no planes even crashed into that building!
It's a conspiracy! I say to you: Conspiracy it is!

We don't. But I prefer that Hackers did it. Hackers like Angelina Jolie.>> ^ant:

How do we know it is not an inside job?

How do we know it is not an inside job?

1- One of the main wireless network engineers

2- So one of the main wireless network engineers can test the unit in real world conditions (see dags response)

3- The name of the person who found it was not given. I'm guessing since he lives in Silicon Valley, he's quite probably a tech geek, thought the phone looked odd, and wanted to take it apart to see why

4- Yes. Using mobile me, you can easily turn the phone off, lock it down, and get GPS coordinates for where it is, all through mobileme's easy web interface. Apple did lock it. It was locked the next morning.

5- I understand what you're saying, but this phone is to be released in the next 3-4 months. Apple would be doing a great disservice to themselves and AT&T with a stunt like this, causing tens of thousands of units to sit on shelves, and untold number of new AT&T customers to wait to sign up. It's not practical by any means.

6- WTC7 was an inside job.


I also called around to my Apple friends, and all of them said there was a giant shitstorm brewing, noone knew what it was about until the Gizmodo article came out. Then shit sincerely hit the fan. One of my friends was on the original iPhone team, and had a working one that he carried around, months before the official release. He couldn't even show his wife.

When you are one of these lucky duckies, not only are you on über strict NDA, but you are also a very very loyal Apple employee who loves the products, loves the company, and really loves their job and wouldn't do anything to sacrifice it.


>> ^blankfist:

Why is this staged? Here are my thoughts.
1. This is obviously not a random guy's phone who works at Apple. Who would have access to carry one of these?
2. Knowing how fanatical Apple is about security, why would they allow someone to take the brand new top secret iPhone out to a bar?
3. Who was the person who found it? And why did he have an interest in disassembling the phone as opposed to just returning it?
4. Did the person who lost it try to call the phone to get it back?
5. There are a number of new smartphones, and a lot are marketing themselves as better than the iPhone. And being that the new Apple 4G phone won't be on the market for a while, a stunt like this may keep new customers from signing a new 2 year phone contract and purchasing a different smartphone if they know Apple's is coming and it will be bad ass.
6. What about WTC 7?

I hope the media will listen to Jon Stewart and stop doing these stupid analogies. The financial melt-down is complicated and you can't make it simple by talking about used cars or poisoned sandwiches. If you want to know more (without having to be an econ major, yet without being talked down to) go here: http://www.propublica.org/feature/all-the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble
or listen to the highlights of the story on "This American Life:" http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job

I can't believe Jon Stewart didn't take the opportunity to make fun of the name "Magnetar!"

Soccer is an offside sport.
>> ^volumptuous:

Football is an inside job.

Football is an inside job.

^that and a ten year old could defeat that chain with one swift kick to the door.
What I want to see is a method to Lock the chain from the outside. That might be more useful for making a cookie theft look like an inside job, or for pulling a prank on you dick landlord.

And another thing why an "inside job" makes so much more sense than the "terrorist conspiracy" - Bush & Cheney blocked the 9/11 investigation every step of the way.

From day one.

And all of the people involved in the so-called glitches in the system were protected and promoted.

And as a result of the war, Boeing and all of the other defense contractors like KBR started making money hand over fist again.

And the Pentagon was about to be investigated for 2.3 trillion dollars that it couldn't account for, and I believe the investigation was subsequently dropped after the attack.

I'm sorry, but there are just too many aspects of this event that don't make sense.

Don't you get it? It was all an elaborate ploy to take down Austin Building 7 in a planned demolition. Also the plane was actually a cruise missile obscured in TV broadcasts, but planned demolition charges were also used just in case.

>> ^EmptyFriend:
2/18 was an inside job!!!!!!!

2/18 was an inside job!!!!!!!