On 2/15/2012 6:36 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:55:49 -0600,
wrote:

On 2/15/2012 2:00 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:38:39 -0500, Frank
wrote:

On 2/15/2012 3:03 PM, Bible Studies with Satan wrote:
Just Facts wrote:

I'm 76. Except for brief period in the 50's when I was doing my
National
Service, I've worked hard since I was 17. Except for some some
serious
health challenges, I put in 50-hour weeks, and didn't call in
sick in nearly
40 years. I made a reasonable salary, but I didn't inherit my
job or my
income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, it
looks as
though retirement was a bad idea, and I'm tired. Very tired.


Ahh, the world of cut-and-paste nonsense. Get real.



I get a lot of emails like this and sometimes pass them on but I always
clip the part that says, if you do not pass this on your balls will fall
off, or some other stupid thing.

If you're getting e-mails like that one, why would you pass them on?
Most of the time, most people let them slide by -- in disgust. But if
you've noticed, whenever anyone knows the facts or digs them out and
exposes the truth, the e-mails most often turn out to be frauds or
packs of lies.

They're an interesting phenomenon. Some angry, furstrated people have
decided that they can pull off an outright lie if they dress it up to
make it sound like something authentic. Then they can get some suckers
to pass them along...which someone always does.

My mother-in-law passes a lot of these along to me. Usuaully, I point
out to her where they're fraudulent. She always thanks me, and then
she sends me another one. d8-)



I'm not so sure that it's "angry frustrated people", Ed.
Some of this stuff is just too involved.

Were I more prone to believing in conspiracies, I'd suspect
a whole lot of this stuff is designed to grab at certain
kinds of people.

Why, you ask?

Politics...

Well, it *is* political, and that's the root of the anger, IMO. But
I've never seen a consistent pattern to any of it. My opinion is that
it's mostly freelanced, mostly by amateurs, and that those people have
a lot of time on their hands and deep roots in conspiratorial
thinking.

Some of them are just tall tales -- crude fiction writing. Others are
carefully orchestrated polemics of the conspiratorial sort. An
increasing number are just lies with numbers and statistics, larded so
thick that few people would be able to untangle them.

When I see someone who'se pasting them here, the one thing I know for
sure is that the person doing the pasting is suffering from some
emotional weakness and grasping for support, usually not very smart,
with problems organizing information and communicating it on their
own, and unconcerned about anyone else. Beyond that, I don't think too
much about it anymore.



There is, of course, the old saw about not attributing to malevolence
that which can be attributed to stupidity.

In normal times that's most likely what's happening.
MY only concern is that these are not normal times...