Warning! More rude trollish massively copy and pasting stuff from websites below:

9/11 Truth vs Denial vs Pseudo-truths and Other Lies

David Watts on the Backfire Effect:

“The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”

9/11 is a perfect example. Despite the mountain of contradictory evidence of the official story, most people’s belief that what they are being told by the authorities and media becomes even stronger. If people were able to assimilate the contradictory evidence, they would understand that 9/11 was a false flag operation.

“The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” — J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI director

“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” — Marshall McLuhan, Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar–a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist.

>> ^Skeeve:

I can see both sides of the argument pretty clearly and they both have a point (though I don't know what the Fox guy means by "richness of spirit").
I spent 2 years making less than $20,000 CDN annually and I did fine. I never missed a mortgage/utilities payment, kept a (shitty) car on the road, had a smartphone, high-speed internet and cable tv and ate fairly well. I was even able to go out for supper or out for a few drinks now and then.
It sucked and, obviously, I would have liked it if I had made more money, but I was never facing starvation or homelessness, etc. If I faced serious hardship there were any number of things I could do (eg. cancel cable), and things I could sell (XBox, TV), to make my money go further.
While the system may be flawed, there are bigger flaws in the obsession with possessions and the brains of people who have no money but spend frivolously.


Low-income Canadians = a family earnings less than $20,000 with two children. -wiki

Oopsie doopsie, looks like you were actually middle class that whole time...

>> ^robbersdog49:

This guy, however much you may hate fox pundits, is making a simple point that's uncomfortable but actually true. There are two different definitions of poor, the one that applies to first world countries, and the one that applies to third world countries, and they are about as different as different can be.
I think he's wrong about the spirit thing, there are plenty of reasons some people have more money than others and it rarely has much to do with the person's 'spirit'. However, it's undeniably true that the 'poor' of America and the UK and so on are very, very much better off than the 'poor' of India or Africa.
JiggaJonson, while your life may be harder than that of others around you it's a whole world apart from the poor of Africa. How far do you and your kids have to walk each day to collect enough contaminated water to survive? What? You get clean water piped right to your house? Yeah. Poor. I see.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be helping those less fortunate than ourselves in our own societies, but I also think those people should appreciate quite how lucky they were to be born where they were born...


Shame of shames! You people and your hyper relativistic moral compass. What a load of shit, I mean seriously!

You do realize that one can treat any matter of justice and equity with the extreme relativism that you just have? For instance, I could kill your family and respond to your concerns, "Hey, lets be reasonable, I could have bombed a nursery, It's not so bad in comparison...You've actually got it pretty good."

Do you understand why you do a disservice to the norms of justice and equity by way of your extreme moral relativism? (I qualify it with extreme because of course our physical reality and method of interpreting it demands that we compare or engage in relativism to a basic degree.)


You probably don't, anyhow, I urge to seek the truth regarding how our current economic and political structures are simply, unarguably, morally perverse.

"...the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped. "
~ Last Speech of Hubert H. Humphrey

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."
~ Mahatma Ghandi

[As a last point, I must add that I do not support in any way, the hyper-consumptive society, or the society stricken with affluenza, but such a phenomena is in no way an argument against a more just and equal society, but is in and of itself another issue all together.]

From the film:
NARRATOR (reading along with title card of Dr. Nicholas Patronas):
During this trial, one of the National Cancer Institute’s leading experts, Dr. Nicholas Patronas, a board-certified radiologist since 1973, professor of radiology at Georgetown University, and founder of the neuroradiology section of the National Cancer Institute [SOURCE: NIH Staff Pages]—recognized the absurdity of the Texas Medical Board’s case against Burzynski, put his own career on the line and flew himself to Texas to testify on Dr. Burzynski’s behalf. Dr. Patronas testified under oath his role at the National Cancer Institute.

NARRATOR (reading along with the official court transcript from the May 24, 1993 hearing): [SOURCE: Original complete court transcript of the entire testimony 1993]

Q (Jaffe): Basically, just in layman’s terms, you do all of the imaging work and interpretation for the National Cancer Institute’s testing of drugs?

A (Dr. Patronas): Exactly. That’s my job, to assess the effectiveness of the drugs that are given there.

Q (Jaffe): Did there come a time when you became aware of Dr. Burzynski?

A (Dr. Patronas): Yes, the National Cancer Institute asked me to join a group of other physicians and scientists, and come to Houston on a site visit to Dr. Burzynski’s Institute. I was called as an expert in assessing the images to evaluate the effectiveness of his treatment. The basic conclusion, was that in five of the patients with brain tumors, that were fairly large, the tumor resolved, disappeared.

Q (Jaffe): And that’s part of what you do at the hospital, is to evaluate treatments on brain cancer patients? A: Well, since I am the neuroradiologist I see all brain tumors. And I see a large volume of them.

Q (Jaffe): You testified that five of the patients had their tumors resolved, they all...

A (Dr. Patronas): Disappeared.

Q (Jaffe): Disappeared? Can you give us some kind of context of that? How often does that happen? Just by spontaneous remission?

A (Dr. Patronas): I’m not aware that spontaneous remission occurs. The available treatments rarely produce results like that. The only medication, the only treatment, which I think is a last resort, is radiation therapy. Conventional chemotherapy is—provides very little, nothing, basically. So when this happens it is very rare. In these cases, all of the patients had already failed radiation.

Q (Jaffe): What happens with these patients, who failed radiation, with brain cancer?

A (Dr. Patronas): That’s it. They die.

Q (Jaffe): You are saying, that if someone has already failed radiation, there’s not much else?

A (Dr. Patronas): Nothing to offer, exactly.

Q (Jaffe): And there is nothing that you can do at the National Cancer Institute?

A (Dr. Patronas): Nothing we can do, not at this present time.

Q (Jaffe): What about these five patients? How come they lived?

A (Dr. Patronas): Well, it’s amazing, the fact that they are not handicapped from the side effects of any treatment, and the side effects of most aggressive treatments are worse than the tumor itself, so these particular individuals not only survived, but they didn’t have major side effects. So I think it’s impressive and unbelievable.

Q (Jaffe): How many times have you seen this in your experience? How often does this happen?

A (Dr. Patronas): I don’t. I have not seen it at any time.

Q (Jaffe): Now, let me ask you your opinion or advice. Based on what you have seen, what would happen, let’s say, for some reason Dr Burzynski’s brain tumor patients can’t get his medicine anymore, and have to go off treatment. What’s going to happen to them?

MR. HELMCAMP (prosecutor): Objection, Your Honor, not relevant.

MR. JAFFE (defense): I think it is relevant. That’s really the issue we are advocating in this case.

JUDGE: Overruled.

A (Dr. Patronas): I think these patients will die.

http://www.burzynskimovie.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=101&Itemid=83

>> ^pyloricvalve:

Thanks for the reply. There were things I really didn't understand about Krugman's Hangover Theory article, especially that very point that you quote. In fact I tried to ask in a post above about this but maybe you missed it. To me it seems only natural that there is no unemployment in the boom and there is some in the bust. Both are big reorganisations of labour, it is true. However, to start with the boom is much slower and longer so adaptation is easier. Also the booming industry can afford to pay slightly above average wages so will easily attract unemployed or 'loose' labour. As it is paying above average, there will be little resistance to people changing work to it. The boom is persistent enough that people will train and invest to enter the work created by it. The information for entering the boom industry is clear and the pay rise makes the work change smooth. I see no reason for unemployment.
The bust however is short and sudden. There is no other obvious work to return to. That information of what the worker should do is much less clear. The answer may involve taking a small pay cut or on giving up things in which people have invested time and money. Many people wait and resist doing this. They may well not know what to do or try to wait for opportunities to return. Thus there is plenty of reason for unemployment to be generated by the bust.
If I hire 100 people it can probably be done in a month or two. If I fire 100 people it may be a long time before they are all employed again. For me this difference seems so obvious I have a real trouble to understand Krugman's point. I know he's a very smart guy but I can't make head nor tail of his argument here. Can you explain it to me?


I'm trying to think how to connect what you're saying to the point Krugman's making (at least as I understand it).

At a minimum, he're Caplan making the same point in less space:

The Austrian theory also suffers from serious internal inconsistencies. If, as in the Austrian theory, initial consumption/investment preferences "re-assert themselves," why don't the consumption goods industries enjoy a huge boom during depressions? After all, if the prices of the capital goods factors are too high, are not the prices of the consumption goods factors too low? Wage workers in capital goods industries are unhappy when old time preferences re-assert themselves. But wage workers in consumer goods industries should be overjoyed. The Austrian theory predicts a decline in employment in some sectors, but an increase in others; thus, it does nothing to explain why unemployment is high during the "bust" and low during the "boom."

Krugman saying the same thing in more accessible language:

Here's the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?

And as a bonus, here's Brad DeLong making a similar case.

My real handicap here is that I'm not familiar enough with the fine details of the Austrian theory to say with authority what they believe. So if I misrepresent their position, it's out of ignorance.

What I gather is that ultimately the Austrian theory of boom and bust is that central banks are messing with the "natural" balance of investment and consumption goods, with a boom happening when investment is being artificially stimulated (by low interest rates), and a bust happens when interest rates eventually go back up (due to inflation, or expectations thereof).

The response from people like Caplan and Krugman is to point out that since aggregate income has to equal aggregate expenditure (because everyone's income is someone else's expenditure, and vice versa), a fall in investment should mean a rise in consumption, and a rise in investment should mean a fall in consumption. Which means we should never see an overall boom or an overall bust, just periods of transition from a rise in consumer goods and a fall in investment, to a fall in consumer goods and a rise in investment. We should never see a situation where they both fall at the same time.

But we do see a fall in both during the bust. Why?

Keynes's answer was that it happens because people are hoarding cash. Either people are themselves stuffing mattresses with it, or more likely, banks start sitting on reserves and refusing to lend out, either out of a fear of their own solvency (Great Depression), or because a deflationary cycle with high unemployment makes sitting on cash look like a good, safe investment for them (Great Depression, and now). Put simply, depressions are the result of an excess demand for money. And since money is an arbitrary thing, it doesn't have to be a scarce resource, we can always just make more...

>> ^chilaxe:

What kinds of problems do we solve in life outside of career? However we would describe those problems, they're all simplistic compared to solving complex professional problems, like writing a 30 page technical specifications document for an innovative product that's going to make people's lives better, or planning and executing a business strategy to outcompete our undeserving competitors.
In my experience, people who don't invest themselves in their professional lives are boring to talk to because their not really engaged with the world and they're not meaningfully challenged by life so they don't develop their human potential.

These challenges are typically a distraction from our personal goals. It's axiomatic that if you spend all your time concentrating on professional expertise then you'll be less developed in other areas. My choice has been not to spend years on something that's just going to handicap me.

Advancing political philosophy makes people's lives better too. An idle lifestyle is necessary to that study in particular, but beneficial to intellectual growth generally.

ForgedReality: "and I don't like seeing 800lb humans get out of a giant car taking up two handicapped spots that could have been used for normal people"

Haha. How dare you!!

The ladies must be all over you.

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^MarineGunrock:
It's a good thing you have that marked as sarcastic, because you sure as fuck weren't just saying it to "help" someone. You give someone harsh criticism to help them in a friendly, reassuring way, not by making snide, rude remarks on the internet

>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
What's the difference between saying it to someone's face or over the internet? You DO know that person can (and has)read your nasty comments, right?>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
@ForgedReality: Are you sure that the only reason you're fine in society is because you're too much of a bitch so say stuff like this to a person's face?

I'm too compassionate to say that to a person's face. Get it right. I'm a really fucking nice guy! If that person were here in this room, I wouldn't say it to her face. But lord, almighty, you know she knows everyone in the room is thinking it, so it's really not necessary in the first place, now is it?


Honesty is the best policy.

Why spare someone's feelings when the truth stands a much greater chance of helping them in the long run?
It's like when your friend thinks they can draw really good artwork or make really good music. You let them show their talent and then realize they're really not that good, and it's actually kind of crappy, but you don't want to hurt their feelings so you praise them and tell them how great it is. Then they enter an art competition because they think they're so awesome because all their friends told them they were. Simon Cowell then tells them they suck and whoever told them they didn't was lying to them. Now they feel HORRIBLE because they just embarrassed themselves on national television, AND had their aspirations crushed AND they hate you for lying to them. GOOD GOIN, BUDDY!! You just ruined someone's life!
Wow you're a shitty person.


Okay let me rephrase my original message: "Sweetie, honey-bun, you're fucking huge, baby. And your fat rolls stink. Go on a fucking diet, because holy fucking shit you're pissing off the people on the bus because there's no motherfucking room to sit, and you and your kind are eating up the world's food supply while costing humanity millions in extra fuel for cars and planes to haul your fat ass from place to place, and I don't like seeing 800lb humans get out of a giant car taking up two handicapped spots that could have been used for normal people who know how to control their eating habits. So please, beautiful, drop the happy meal and eat a nice salad. I'll even make one for you, sweetie-bumpkins! "

>> ^MarineGunrock:

It's a good thing you have that marked as sarcastic, because you sure as fuck weren't just saying it to "help" someone. You give someone harsh criticism to help them in a friendly, reassuring way, not by making snide, rude remarks on the internet

>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
What's the difference between saying it to someone's face or over the internet? You DO know that person can (and has)read your nasty comments, right?>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
@ForgedReality: Are you sure that the only reason you're fine in society is because you're too much of a bitch so say stuff like this to a person's face?

I'm too compassionate to say that to a person's face. Get it right. I'm a really fucking nice guy! If that person were here in this room, I wouldn't say it to her face. But lord, almighty, you know she knows everyone in the room is thinking it, so it's really not necessary in the first place, now is it?


Honesty is the best policy.

Why spare someone's feelings when the truth stands a much greater chance of helping them in the long run?
It's like when your friend thinks they can draw really good artwork or make really good music. You let them show their talent and then realize they're really not that good, and it's actually kind of crappy, but you don't want to hurt their feelings so you praise them and tell them how great it is. Then they enter an art competition because they think they're so awesome because all their friends told them they were. Simon Cowell then tells them they suck and whoever told them they didn't was lying to them. Now they feel HORRIBLE because they just embarrassed themselves on national television, AND had their aspirations crushed AND they hate you for lying to them. GOOD GOIN, BUDDY!! You just ruined someone's life!
Wow you're a shitty person.


Okay let me rephrase my original message: "Sweetie, honey-bun, you're fucking huge, baby. And your fat rolls stink. Go on a fucking diet, because holy fucking shit you're pissing off the people on the bus because there's no motherfucking room to sit, and you and your kind are eating up the world's food supply while costing humanity millions in extra fuel for cars and planes to haul your fat ass from place to place, and I don't like seeing 800lb humans get out of a giant car taking up two handicapped spots that could have been used for normal people who know how to control their eating habits. So please, beautiful, drop the happy meal and eat a nice salad. I'll even make one for you, sweetie-bumpkins! "

Oh my god, you're going to make me walk 100 extra feet just because I'm not handicap? There is no justice in the world!

(Also, it's no fun to use the sarcasm flag.)

This really grinds my gears.
The only person I feel sympathy for was the mom with the disabled daughter. If her mom is putting in extra effort to help out her kid, like you do when your child is handicapped, I can see how she would feel entitled/deserving of special parking. Not that it makes it right - those spots belong to people who actually need them. But at least she's contributing to the care of handicapped people - unlike folks who just borrow a handicapped friends' car or something.

At $1,870 a pop there is no way in hell they will slack off. Fighting high crime is a lower priority because it does not generate revenue. Walk away from a meter to get some change for even 30 seconds and parking enforcement is Johnny-On-The-Spot.

Come home to a ransacked house and your lucky if the cops show up within an hour.>> ^VoodooV:

Here's the problem though. You know damned well that at some point, they'll slack off on enforcing the law again since mis-using a handicapped spot isn't exactly high crime and we'll go back to square one again.

It's great that they are finally enforcing the law.

At the same time though. I kinda wish they'd just abolish handicapped parking all together.

We hear it all the time, handicapped people are able to do everything non-handicapped people can do. They obviously can get around enough to get into their cars and go everywhere else. mobility technology is improving every day. So why is that distance from the store entrance to the handicapped lots so sacred?

And even if you can convince me that handicapped parking is still necessary. You have to acknowledge that SOME DAY mobility technology is going to advance to the point that special parking spots are no longer necessary. And once you give a perk to someone, it's harder than hell to take it back, necessary or not.

Here's the problem though. You know damned well that at some point, they'll slack off on enforcing the law again since mis-using a handicapped spot isn't exactly high crime and we'll go back to square one again.

These people are going to a baseball game. They have some disposable income. I love how people become stupid liars when they get caught sometimes.

"I forgot it was there, but I was going to park in the handicap parking spot because I forgot it was there"

>> ^deathcow:

How about when my parents (who have legal placards) drive to the airport and park handicapped and then fly out of state? I go there and pick their car up. I hop into the car in the blue zone. I drive off with their placard hanging. How would that go down?


a ballpark is not an airport.

As with everyone else, I feel no empathy for these people. They chose to do something illegal and got caught. I also agree that if you are at a ballpark get out and walk. It is a nice day. Enjoy the fact that you have working legs.

I'm usually a bit peeved at the amount of handicapped spaces that have to be mandated for use though. At a ballpark it is pretty appropriate. At my work it drives me nuts. Working at a large company with about 3000 at our location we have 2 parking lots and 3 surface lots. Nearly the entire bottom floor of each parking lot is reserved for handicapped spaces. Large sections of each parking lot are also reserved. In the entire company I've never seen more than 5 of these occupied at one time.

It just irks me that so much space is wasted here. And, it costs money to build each spot. I hate seeing anything like that go to waste.