Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2013

Bitter reality scheduled to return on September 22nd

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Here’s an unpleasant idea to disturb your narrative of economic recovery:

You may have noticed the small blurb recently that the ECB had eased the rules for asset backed securitizations. You may have read this snippet and thinking nothing of it you moved on. This would have been a mistake because just here you would have noticed the cracks of a crumbling empire.

The French banks, the Spanish banks, the Portuguese banks are all engaged in an ongoing charade so they do not need to ask the EU for help. They all are taking their Real Estate loans, the properties that they have confiscated, the commercial loans that are no longer paying and they have put them into massive securitizations that are pledged at the ECB as they are given cash for the collateral. The collateral, as you may suppose, has all of the value of cents on the Dollar but they are given money at par while the ECB carries them on their books at par. It is a fraudulent scheme jam packed with money created out of nothing but it is judged to be a better plan that to have to admit to accurate financials and have the banks of Europe default all across the Continent.

[. . .]

There will be nothing but lying until September 22, 2013 which is the date of the German elections. This is the drop dead date that I have been asked about for so long. Then, as soon as the celebration is over that Ms. Merkel is to remain in power, the world will turn on its axis. The status quo will disappear and there will be a “shock and horror” campaign as the Southern nations of Europe demand more help and Germany squirms and then refuses to provide it because it does not have the assets to do so.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and even Italy are all going to line up at the trough only to discover that the promise of water was just that, a promise, and does not exist. A Biblical drought will be upon the Continent and from the political battles will emerge new alliances and new screams calling the traitors by name. The twin towers upon which the markets rest, money from nothing and fairy tale financials, will decompose in the light of this new sun and our old friend, Fear, will return to haunt us.

Sleep well.

Blaming the bankers and absolving the politicians

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

Daniel Ben-Ami points out that current campaigns to vilify bankers (“banksters”) over their role in the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 conveniently ignores the politicians’ dirty hands:

There is at least one area where mainstream politicians can legitimately claim considerable success: they have offloaded much of the blame for the economic crisis from themselves and on to banks and other financial institutions.

Much of the public has accepted the premise that greedy bankers were largely responsible for the economic turmoil that emerged in 2007-8. There is little discussion of the government’s role in creating the conditions for the financial crash, let alone any examination of the economy’s underlying weaknesses.

Criticism of the government’s economic policy is usually confined to it being heartless or ill thought out. Often the two are combined, in the accusation that the government is obeying the diktat of its banker friends by imposing cuts. Campaigners also often allege that a shady global financial network is the real power in the world. In this conspiratorial worldview, a labyrinth of offshore tax havens helps the rootless rich evade the power of national authorities.

[. . .]

But in truth, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic bear a large share of the blame for the crisis. To understand their culpability, it is necessary to go back at least to the early 1980s rather than just to 2007. For decades it was clear that investment and innovation were insufficient. Yet rather than tackle these underlying problems, the authorities pursued policies that ended up creating a credit bubble.

Public spending was kept high and interest rates artificially low. Often, governments also used additional measures to ease the supply of credit, such as reforming the financial markets. The hope was that such moves would keep the market ticking over in the short term and the economy would somehow correct itself in the longer term.

This was the backdrop to the financial crisis that emerged in 2007-8. Bankers certainly played a role, but governments created the conditions for the credit bubble to emerge. Underlying this development was the failure of politicians to tackle or even recognise structural economic weaknesses.

[. . .]

Underlying anti-banking campaigns is the common assumption that financial institutions are part of a giant global conspiracy to undermine nation states.

This view was most vividly put forward by Matt Taibbi, a campaigning American journalist, in a 2009 article in Rolling Stone magazine and in a subsequent book. He famously condemned Goldman Sachs, a top Wall Street investment bank, as ‘a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. In the UK, the New Economics Foundation, a think tank, adopted the image with a short video entitled Taming the Vampire Squid: Take Back Our Banks.

There are several reasons to object to such imagery and the conspiratorial worldview that underlies it. For one thing it is strongly reminiscent of Nazi imagery of Jews as central to an international financial conspiracy. For example, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler talked of Jews as being ‘like leeches… they were slowly sucking the blood from the pores of the national body’.

July 15, 2013

If you’re bored with the Stratfordians versus Oxfordians, here’s a new debate

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In the Guardian, Saul Frampton looks at the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works:

Sometime in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies — what we now know as the First Folio. It was the literary event of the century, recording for all time the sound of Shakespeare’s English and the sweep of his imagination: Elsinore, Egypt and the Forest of Arden; a balcony, a spotted handkerchief and a skull.

Yet despite this shrine to Shakespeare’s memory, erected by those who knew him, sceptics have continued to doubt his authorship of the plays. He was, they insist, inadequately educated, insufficiently travelled, and didn’t know how to spell his own name. A range of alternative candidates have come and gone over the centuries, including Anne Hathaway, the Jesuits, and more recently Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the subject of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous. As always, conspiracy is more fun than consensus, and the doubters have the internet on their side. Shakespeare has thus become the focus of a global conspiracy industry, joining company with reptilian elites, self-destructing lightbulbs and skeletons on the moon.

Scholars have recently fought back against this scepticism, however. Books such as James Shapiro’s Contested Will and Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marshal facts, allusions and funeral monuments to prove that Shakespeare did indeed write the plays and poems attributed to him. Or as Iago says at the end of Othello: “what you know, you know.”

So Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare”. The printing of the First Folio, however, raises another, ultimately more interesting, question. Without the Folio, Shakespeare’s plays — scattered around in playscripts or in smaller quarto editions — might have been lost to posterity. But did Heminges and Condell edit the text?

H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.

July 8, 2013

Restore Pluto!

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:01

A letter from L. Neil Smith to this week’s Libertarian Enterprise:

Here’s a matter that may reveal more about psychology or politics than it does about astronomy. You’ll recall, a couple of years ago, the flap over the “demotion” of Pluto, theretofore the tenth planet of the Solar System, to the mean and niggardly status of “dwarf planet”.

I have always believed that an international conspiracy, possibly composed of those who hate our freedom, carried out this astronomical assassination because Pluto is the only planet discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh.

However, given the fact that Pluto, whatever its size, is an independent body circling the same primary we do (unlike the Asteroids of the Belt or those found at various Trojan positions around the System, or parked in orbit around Mars) and the pathetic and petty way this demotion was carried out, many people, including yours truly, objected to it as unnecessary, inaccurate, and stupid.

Now we learn (because we don’t always keep up on these things) that in addition to the moon Charon, which we’ve known about for a long while, Pluto possesses four other moons, Nix, Hydra, and more recently, Styx and Kerberos, all named for various underworld-related entities in Greek mythology.

The System’s “gas giants”, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and the one whose pronunciation mysteriously changes whenever it’s mentioned on TV, all have more moons than we can properly keep track of. Mars, Earth, and Venus, which are also full-blown planets in good standing, possess, respectively, two, one, and zero moons.

And yet Pluto, the little world that has been ignominiously stripped of its rank, and its sword ceremonially broken, has five moons. Count ’em: five whole moons! I maintain that this confirms its proper dignity as a first-class planet, and to the list of historic phrases like “Carthage must be destroyed!” “Remember the Alamo”, and “Hillary wears army boots!”, we should now add “Restore Pluto!”

Scientifically yours,

L. Neil Smith

June 30, 2013

The Observer has an embarrassing day

Filed under: Britain, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall gleefully recounts the steps in a publishing cock-up by The Observer:

It looks like The Guardian/Observer* has managed to get itself mightily stung over a revelation about PRISM and the NSA. Which is all very amusing given the paper’s part in the Glenn Greenwald/Edward Snowden revelations. But what turns it into an absolute joy is that, while the news originally came from someone with, hmm, rather “out there” views, the actual information itself seems to be roughly true. And yet they’ve still taken the piece down.

The story starts here, at a site called The Privacy Surgeon. The site does an interview with an ex-NSA guy called Wayne Madsen. In which he claims that there are various European and other countries that cooperate with the NSA in the collection and then dissemination of information picked up from the monitoring of communications.

[. . .]

So, The Guardian/Observer has published a piece using allegations made by someone we’d already be predisposed to think of as being less than entirely correct in his descriptions of the real world. And, as a result, they’ve taken the piece down:

    This article has been taken down pending an investigation.

So far so good, just as in any other walk of life you think you’ve made a mistake you try to correct it. Just as Mother always told you you should. The slightly unfortunate thing is that the Sunday papers in the UK print quite early on the Saturday evening. Thus we get this front page of the physical paper:

Observer front page 20130630

The paper is now running as its front page a story that it has already retracted online. This is something of an “Ooops!” moment and as such one to be treasured as an example of the fallibility of both human beings and organisations that contain them.

However, the story really gets even better than this.

June 20, 2013

Colby Cosh on re-visiting the TWA 800 crash investigation

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

I remember there were lots of “shoot-down” speculations about the loss of TWA flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, and that the formal investigation seemed unusually inconclusive, but I didn’t know that the National Transportation Safety Board was considering re-opening the investigation after all this time:

Many witnesses insisted they had seen a streak of light ascend toward the plane before it exploded, creating an initial suspicion that TWA 800 had been brought down by a missile. That is the theory favoured by the “Independent Researchers.” Although they are very careful about referring to “an external explosion” as their pet alternative to the official story — which is that an electrical short circuit blew up a fuel tank — it is clear enough that they are thinking “missile”. And it is clear enough that they suspect the investigation was obfuscated at the behest of powerful forces in the government, either because terrorists had succeeded in embarrassing its intelligence-gathering or because the explosion was actually the result of a military accident. Much is made of the radar signature of a mysterious craft that appeared on the surface of the water briefly at around the time of the disaster.

It makes for a wonderful case study in the way conspiracy theories arise. The FBI was permitted to horn in on the NTSB investigation precisely because, and only because, there were so many witnesses offering contradictory accounts of the explosion. That, in turn, allows the Independent Researchers to hang upon the FBI every error, imperfection, and bit of official superciliousness perpetrated in the course of the investigation. The bureaucracy’s sincere desire to rule out a crime if no crime took place becomes, in the eyes of skeptics, circumstantial evidence of a crime concealed.

[. . .]

The NTSB’s respectful response to the Independent Researcher petition raises the question of whether there might exist a “Snowden Effect” resulting from the revelations recently made by a certain four-eyed former tech contractor for the National Security Agency. The TWA 800 conspiracists/countertheorists have been hard at work almost since the evening of the accident/incident. They have a filmed documentary in the works — which is, incidentally, a sizable point against them in my personal ledger: I observe an increasingly unshakeable rule of thumb that all documentaries are, if not lies, then practically indistinguishable from lies. (If you wish to disagree, I ask only that you send me a five-minute video clip of you doing or saying absolutely anything, and allow me to apply the composition, colour and film-grain effects, editing, and music of my choice.) Obviously they are not taking advantage, per se, of the climate of hostility and paranoia created by Edward Snowden’s account of the American security state. They were already hostile and paranoid.

But Snowden’s globally televised dissident activity may serve to create a more receptive audience for conspiracy theories about the U.S.A. It might, on the other hand, make American government agencies more aware of their public image and more eager to at least appear somewhat libertarian and sensible, a bit less like servants of bloodthirsty alien lizard-beings. And, then again, there’s a third possibility: Snowden’s audacity might shame other officials trying to retire with secrets in their bosom into stepping forward sooner. I think I have, unfortunately, listed these conceivable Snowden Effects in the order of their real likelihood.

June 12, 2013

VICE interviews Jesse Walker about his new book

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:14

The book is called The United States of Paranoia, and VICE‘s Harry Cheadle sat down with Walker to talk about it:

The question of whether you believe in conspiracy theories is surprisingly tricky. You may not think that the moon landing or Beyoncé’s pregnancy was fake, you may not imagine lizards lurking behind Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney’s faces, but by now you probably know that the US government is operating a massive secret surveillance apparatus, which would sound like a paranoid fantasy if it weren’t true. And many, many Americans profess some level of credulity when it comes to some conspiracies, which at times can seem less crazy than believing that there’s never, ever, a man behind the curtain pulling strings.

[. . .]

VICE: You take a long historical view of conspiracy theories in America. Do you think we’re more paranoid than we used to be?
Jesse Walker: I don’t think so. I’m not quite sure how I would even measure that, given what the baseline of paranoia is. What I do think happens is that the direction of the paranoia shifts. One thing I mentioned in the book was how a lot of people started saying after Obama got elected, “Ooh, the right wing has suddenly gotten very paranoid.” In fact, in the Bush era, there were tons of right-wing conspiracy theories, it’s just that they weren’t about the government. They were aimed mostly at people outside America’s borders. With another party in power, [the right] has rediscovered some of its libertarian impulses. A lot of discussions about the United States becoming more paranoid or less paranoid just has to do with what kind of paranoia people are paying attention to.

The recent revelations about the NSA and FBI’s monitoring of cell phone metadata and internet communications make me wonder if it’s possible that the government itself is paranoid.
I can’t get into the head of the average NSA bureaucrat enacting a program. But I think that the creation of that sort of system obviously has to do with fear and paranoia. I should stress I’m using the word paranoid in a colloquial way. I should just be saying “fear.” Another problem has to do with the way “conspiracy theory” gets used, because people who use the phrase conspiracy theory disparagingly believe in all sorts of conspiracies, it’s just that they say, “Well those are true, so they don’t count.” What they really mean when they say “conspiracy theory” is, at best, “nutty conspiracy theory,” and, at worst, “conspiracy theory that feeds into an ideology that I don’t share, which I will therefore think of as nutty.” But I’ve forgotten your original question.

June 11, 2013

Remember the Canadian political scandals?

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

Andrew Coyne got the secret decoder ring from one of his readers:

May 16, 2013

QotD: Did the IRS do anything wrong?

Filed under: Government, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Here we sit on the precipice of a grand realignment of history, society and culture in the image of the new order of common sense government that seeks to cast aside the trappings of backwards for-profit mindsets and yet again we are forced to endure the incoherent ramblings of the simple-minded who seek to derail this overdue progression.

Instead of thoughtful policy discussions, we will now be treated to an endless parade of government boogeymen and convoluted conspiracies brought on only in an effort to discredit an honorable and trustworthy administration, run by a renowned Constitutional law professor and respected Nobel Prize winner.

Let us dispense with trivial formalities. The slack-jawed logic of the perpetually offended will never seek to understand the internal flaws inherent to the human soul. The alleged failure of the I.R.S. to consistently apply their fair standards was nothing more than the failure of a system designed by men. The government is made up of men, and therefore is subject to the same defects. This is not an indictment of government itself; this is an indictment of those who fail to recognize the collective good of advancing a streamlined and progressive government.

So, who is ultimately to blame? Perhaps if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll look deeper into the depths of your heart and you will recognize the brutal truth.

This is your fault. For shame.

John Ekdahl, Jr. “The New Yorker‘s @JeffreyToobin: Did the I.R.S. Do Anything Wrong?”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-05-16

May 5, 2013

Sorcery, conspiracy theories, and a magical worldview

Filed under: Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Strategy Page looks at some of the widely held beliefs in some Islamic countries:

… in most countries where there is a dominant religion, especially a state approved one, there is usually still a fear that the previous religion (or religions) will try to make a comeback. The former faiths often involved some really old-school stuff, including magic and sometimes animal, or even human, sacrifice. It is not uncommon for there to be civil laws covering those accused to be practicing such sorcery, and severe punishments for those convicted. At the very least, the accused will be driven from any senior government jobs they might hold, and that’s what’s being done to dozens of Ahmadinejad associates.

All cultures have a certain belief in magic and what Westerners call “conspiracy theories” to explain otherwise unexplainable events. In the Islamic world, there is a lot of attention paid to sorcery and magic, and people accused of practicing such things are regularly attacked and sometimes executed. Conspiracy theories are also a popular way to explain away inconvenient facts.

For example, back in 2008 many Pakistanis believed that the then recent Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai, India was actually the work of the Israeli Mossad or the American CIA and not the Pakistani terrorists who were killed or captured and identified. Such fantasies are a common explanation, in Moslem nations, for Islamic terrorist atrocities. Especially when women and children, and Moslems, are among the victims, other Moslems tend to accept fantastic explanations shifting the blame to infidels (non-Moslems).

[. . .]

American troops arriving in Iraq after 2003 went through a real culture shock as they encountered these cultural differences. They also discovered that the cause of this, and many other Arab problems, is the concept of “inshallah” (“If God wills it.”) This is a basic tenet of Islam, although some scholars believe the attitude was a cultural trait that preceded Islam. In any event, “inshallah” is deadly when combined with modern technology. For this reason, Arab countries either have poorly maintained infrastructure and equipment (including military stuff), or import a lot of foreigners, possessing the right attitudes, to maintain everything. That minority of Arabs who do have a realistic attitude towards maintenance and personal responsibility are considered odd, but useful.

The “inshallah” thing is made worse by a stronger belief in the supernatural, and magic in general. This often extends to technology. Thus many Iraqis believed that American troops wore sunglasses that enabled them to see through clothing, and armor vests that were actually air conditioned. When they first encounter these beliefs, U.S. troops thought the Arabs are putting them on. Then it sinks in that Arabs really believe this stuff. It’s a scary moment.

April 16, 2013

QotD: Media “experts” immediately after a tragedy

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Right now, I could write segments on the idiot comments made by the usual suspects … but do you really need another piece of evidence to support the argument that, say, Cynthia McKinney is a lunatic? […] I can’t get all that revved up about it. She is what she is. If you really put much stock in her judgment of what’s “the real story” behind a horrific news event, theories that hear this awful news and immediately jump to elaborate theories of “false flag” operations and the notion that our local and federal law-enforcement ranks are full of men and women willing to set bombs and blow up children in order to score some sort of propaganda victory … well, then I doubt there’s anything anyone can say to dissuade you of that vast worldview you’ve constructed within your mind.

The conspiracy theorist is only a couple of steps away from the person who — often on Twitter — begins discussing who was behind it with way too much certainty. As I said on Twitter yesterday, I suspect that speculation, unhelpful as it is, is a coping mechanism: People attempt to make a sudden unexpected horror fit into pattern of known facts. If we can figure out who did it, we can find someone to feel anger and rage towards and, for some people, that’s a much easier emotion to deal with than shock, horror, fear, and sorrow.

The all-too-confident speculator is only a few steps away from the ordinarily knowledgeable terrorism expert or pundit yanked into a television studio at a moment’s notice and asked to speak, extemporaneously, about what could be behind these awful events based on nothing more than initial reports and the most horrific of images playing on a monitor just beyond the camera.

Jim Geraghty, “The Morning Jolt”, 2013-04-16

April 15, 2013

Tabatha Southey and the “Grapes of Math”

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

In the Globe and Mail Tabatha Southey hears the laments of readers “We need a new John Steinbeck for the Great Bitcoin Depression”, and she delivers:

Pa was a simple man, a techno-anarchist by trade, and long after the Bitcoin bust, he stayed on with the mining. “Don’t know nothin’ else,” Ma said, although she once suggested migrant IT work, at least until her own contract was renewed at the hospital where she worked most of her grown days for a pediatric endocrinologist’s wage.

Pa sat on the sofa, the whir of the computer fans all but drowning out the Cato Institute podcast he’d downloaded the night before. He’s there, frozen in my childhood, Pa, mining, mining, mining, with nothing but his iPhone, his laptop and, for a while, my sister’s old Tamagotchi, which he found in the couch cushions while looking for the remote, to amuse him.

Dodging viruses like crop-dusters, Pa is experiencing hard times. He never did come to trust that ol’ anti-virus software. Said it was reporting on him to the Federal Reserve. And always the dust, the dust, the dust, which may have been because Pa never did get round to changing the furnace filters. His time, he said, best spent elsewhere.

Pa, oh, Pa. He never did stop spreading the word of Ron Paul on completely unrelated news items.

April 4, 2013

QotD: Declining belief in (some) conspiracy theories

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In case you’re curious: The Paul-is-dead theory is reportedly embraced by 5 percent of the population — far less, no doubt, than believed it in 1968, though you might expect all those mediocre solo albums to make the theory more popular rather than less. The Icke/Slitheen thesis about reptilian overlords was endorsed by 4 percent of the country. I figure a bunch of those “yes” answers were only trolling, but some of the “no” answers surely came from people who just DIDN’T WANT THE LIZARD MEN TO KNOW THEY WERE ONTO THEM, so let’s call it a wash.

Jesse Walker, footnote to “Paul-Is-Dead Cover-Up Fools 95 Percent of America”, Hit and Run, 2013-04-03

March 21, 2013

How Russians view American foreign policy moves

Filed under: Government, Middle East, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In short, they don’t believe it’s mere ham-handedness, arrogance, and incompetence — they think it’s only supposed to look that way:

It’s instructive to view ourselves through a Russian mirror. The term “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them,” I wrote in 2008 under the title “Americans play monopoly, Russians chess.” Russians have dominated chess most of the past century, for good reason: it is the ultimate exercise in paranoia. All the pieces on the board are guided by a single combative mind, and every move is significant. In the real world, human beings flail and blunder. For Russian officials who climbed the greasy pole in the intelligence services, mistakes are unthinkable, for those who made mistakes are long since buried.

From a paranoid perspective, it certainly might look as if Washington planned to unleash chaos. The wave of instability spreading through the Middle East from Syria is the direct result of American actions. [. . .]

If the Russians sound mad, consider this: there is another substantial body of opinion that sees an evil conspiracy behind American blundering in the Middle East, and it votes for Ron Paul and Rand Paul. I am not suggesting that Sen. Rand Paul is a paranoid, I hasten to clarify: I have never met the man and don’t presume to judge his state of mind. But his popularity stems in no small measure from conspiracy theorists who think that the U.S. government really is planning to criss-cross the continental United States with killer drones and pick off American citizens on their home soil. A lot of the same people think that America invaded Iraq on behalf of the oil companies (who would make a lot more money if Iraq were zapped by space aliens) or by the Israelis (who never liked the project from the outset). A fair sampling of such paranoia gets posted on the comments section of this site.

Thus we have the strangest pair of bedfellows in modern politics, the Russians and the rubes. Try to explain to them that George W. Bush was a decent and well-intentioned man without a clue as to the consequences of his actions, and they will dismiss it as disinformatsiya. Tell them that the New York Times and the Weekly Standard both believed in the Arab Spring as the herald of a new era of Islamic democracy, and they will see it as proof of a conspiracy embracing both the Democratic and Republican establishments. How, the paranoids ask, could two administrations in succession make so many blunders in succession? It stretches credibility. I wish it were a conspiracy. The truth is that we really are that dumb.

January 23, 2013

How easy would it be to fake the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing?

Filed under: History, Media, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

H/T to Kathy Shaidle, who writes:

Remember: Conspiracy theories are history for stupid people. They provide idiots with the thrilling sensation that they’re smarter than everyone else, and are a seductive distraction from real problems.

As the (liberal) filmmaker says:

“They lead you to sell your soul for the comfort of being a rebel.”

That’s what Satan did.

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