Help to fight the lies

by Mick E.Talbot
How To Respond To Right Wing Viral Emails:
[Via Crooks and Liars]

My friends and family of the right wing persuasion have finally figured out to take me off their distribution lists for those viral emails that circulate about the internets. It was a lesson hard taught, because I felt obliged to obsessively research the facts and then reply to those emails, systematically destroying the wingnut talking points. You humiliate those wingnuts enough times, and they take you off their email lists.

Now, not everyone has the OCD to research and debunk these talking points, nor the need to be so…well, frankly, confrontational. So for people like that (you know, the ones much nicer than me), Media Matters has created an action site just for you. In it, they take some of the common viral emails–and then write responses to them, debunking the lies and very politely suggesting that the sender might want to use that gray matter lodged in his noggin for more than regurgitating Hannity. (I paraphrase, of course)

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Almost every point found in many of these emails is a lie or misrepresentation. It is nice to have a site that includes not only a direct response but links to the facts. Snopes is also very useful but has a larger focus.

I guess it is just easier to forward on an email full of falsehoods than spending just a few minutes checking is veracity. Telling the truth seems to be viewed as more of a fool’s game than telling lies.

Technorati Tags: General, Health

Regulate the hard before they kill us all!

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Nothing could go wrong here:

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,”life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash – $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize”these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return – though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

It is time for everyone to start learning how to garden, hunt, and can food.

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Great. Let’s create a new, unregulated derivative market based on how long we live. They did such a nice job with derivatives based on where we live. How about some based on what we eat?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Then we go after the bankers.” These guys need to have so much red tape piled on them that they can never screw with us again,

UPDATE: And, of course, the financial guys would hate for a cure to cancer to come along. That would make their wonderful new financial scam worth less money. In fact, health care reform could have substantial effects on these sorts of devices. So there would actually be an open market reason to help people die sooner. It would make these things worth more.

Technorati Tags: Economy