On 2/15/2012 5:02 PM, Richard wrote:

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...



The mistake is in believing that somehow things that happen in our time
are so different from what has happened in the past. History shows that
things are pretty much the same as they have always been. It's only
hubris that makes us think it's so different for us than it was for
them. In most cases it's really the same as it's always been.

Hawke