Ezekiel Bulver; the first Truther;

[LARED]

Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

[whatchamacallit]

1. Pfffffft...

Two-way street. So claims of "irrational hatred of Bush" is somehow not "Bulverism"?

[seemslikeadream]

2. All the while the fake muslim terrorists are being hunted down

with a never ending eternal boom boom war, the real terrorists have had free reign to destroy this country silently, quietly, stealing every last dime while we used every resource available to get 19 highjackers. How convenient for "wall street" to have such a distraction.

[hack89]

3. These must be the best of times for you

so many evil people, so many evil deeds, so many threads for you to weave.

[LARED]

5. It's fascinating to watch how no matter what happens

it is just wove into the fabric of the woo quilt.

[seemslikeadream]

8. Just who do you hold responsible for the biggest scam in history?

[LARED]

9. A the biggest scam in history is what? nt

[seemslikeadream]

13. Do you have any idea whatsoever how much money has been stolen from the American citizens?

my god man they've even stolen it from our grandchildren, who are not even born yet.

[seemslikeadream]

15. Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/mar2009/ca20090319_591214_page_2.htm


Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity
By refusing to consider the consequences of their actions, those who created the financial crisis exemplify the banality of evil, writes Shoshana Zuboff
By Shoshana Zuboff

The financiers at AIG were awarded millions in bonuses because their contracts were based on the transactions they completed, not the consequences of those transactions. A 32-year-old mortgage broker told me: "I figured my job was to get the transaction done…Whatever came after the transaction—that was on him, not me." A long list of business executives have reaped sumptuous rewards even though they fractured the world's economy, destroyed trillions of dollars in value, and disfigured millions of lives.

Most experts now blame a lack of regulation and oversight for this madness. Or they point to misguided incentive programs associated with the push for shareholder value that tied executive rewards to a firm's share price. These factors are surely important, but they ignore the terrifying human breakdown at the heart of this crisis.

Each day's economic news leaves me haunted by Hannah Arendt's ruminations on Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as she reported on his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker 45 years ago. Arendt pondered "the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil" and sought to capture it with her famous formulation "the banality of evil." Arendt found Eichmann neither "perverted nor sadistic," but "terribly and terrifyingly normal."

Remoteness from Reality
He was a new type of criminal, a participant in "administrative massacre" who committed his crimes "under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong." Eichmann had no motives other than what Arendt described as "an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement…he never realized what he was doing.That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together," she concluded, "…was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem."

[seemslikeadream]

16. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

poor Eliot it's not a good idea to tell the truth around the mafia that's running this scam



It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.
By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 10:41 AM ET

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?


For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.


But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.

http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/

[seemslikeadream]

18. The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power/ The Big Takeover

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

[seemslikeadream]

19. Company paid $218 million, not $165 million,

Company paid $218 million, not $165 million, Conn. attorney general says



NEW HAVEN, Connecticut - Connecticut's attorney general says documents turned over to his office by American International Group Inc. shows the company paid out $218 million in bonuses, higher than the $165 million previously disclosed.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office received the documents late Friday after issuing a subpoena.

Blumenthal says the documents show that 73 people received at least $1 million apiece, and five of those got bonuses of more than $4 million. The financially ailing insurance giant has been under fire for giving bonuses after receiving more than $182.5 billion in federal bailout money.

AIG spokesman Mark Herr declined to comment Saturday.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29812224/

[seemslikeadream]

21. The Decline of the American Empire Who's Calling the Shots Now?

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03182009.html

The Decline of the American Empire
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

By DAVE LINDORFF

It may not be obvious today, and certainly it’s not how the corporate media reported it, but future historians are likely to look back at March 13, 2009 as the day that American imperialism began it’s inexorable decline. That’s the day that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that his country was “worried” about its holdings of over $1 trillion in US treasury securities, and warned that he wanted the US to assure China that it would maintain its good credit and “honor its promises” and “maintain the safety of China’s assets.”

There is no way that the US can accommodate Premier Wen and still finance and operate a global military system with over 1000 overseas bases, massive aircraft carrier battle groups, and with hundreds of thousands of men and women armed to the teeth with the latest high-tech military hardware, not to mention fight endless wars on the far side of the globe.

What China is doing is pulling the rug out from under America’s six decades of global military dominance. It is no coincidence that the weekend before Wen’s statement, Chinese naval vessels aggressively harassed a US intelligence ship, the Impeccable, that was operating in the South China Sea.

The implied threat in Wen’s seemingly mild comment was that if the US doesn’t trim its deficit spending dramatically, and get its economic house in order—which means dramatically reducing the American standard of living, and reducing wasteful spending of its military, China will simply cut back on its funding of the US deficit, in the form of buying US Treasury issues, an act which would cause the collapse of the US dollar and what’s left of the US economy.

Now this decline of the US as an economic and military power is not going to be an overnight thing, because China needs to keep selling manufactured goods to the US market—the largest in the world—and in order to do that, it needs to keep recycling dollars spent on Chinese goods back into the US, which to date has meant buying US debt issues.

But there are other ways to recycle dollars back to the US, most notably by investing in actual US assets. To date, China has done this cautiously, in part to avoid arousing political concern in the US. Typically China, when it has purchased shares of US companies, has done so by buying small minority stakes, as it did in the case of the Blackstone Group, a private equity investment firm. But if China were to decide to stop funding America’s massive deficit, this could change. It could decide to just let the dollar slide, and take advantage of the slumping value of US assets to start buying the US up on the cheap.

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[LARED]

40. Are you saying I'm a Bush knight?

I thought it prudent to discover what SLAD thought the "biggest scam ever" was before I answered.

[Bolo Boffin]

42. If you think there are "Bush Knights" here, Old, you should alert the moderators.

Really disappointing seeing a shiv come out from you.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[SDuderstadt]

22. for christ's sake, slad...

would you please quit spamming this op?

[seemslikeadream]

25. just answering a question, the way YOU like it, one thought at a time so not to put any strain

on that beautiful mind of yours

[LARED]

24. It was a simple question.

One or two sentences, maybe a paragraph, would have sufficed.

So you now believe 9/11 was a distraction to avoid anyone noticing the economic issues on the horizon?

Yes?

[seemslikeadream]

41. no

[LARED]

43. Ok, then the "relationship"

between the fake terrorists and the real terrorist is simply coincidental?

Yes? Please explain what you meant when saying:

All the while the fake muslim terrorists are being hunted down with a never ending eternal boom boom war, the real terrorists have had free reign to destroy this country silently, quietly, stealing every last dime while we used every resource available to get 19 highjackers. How convenient for "wall street" to have such a distraction.

You clearly imply the WOT was simply to distract Americans from the economic issues. If that's the case there must be some connection.

[LARED]

4. The problem with Truthers has always been

a pathological refusal to deal with the lack of, or misapplication of evidence.

[whatchamacallit]

6. Nice Bulverism there LARED

:think: :eyes:

[SDuderstadt]

7. please explain how lared's statement is...

in any way, a bulverism. please be specific. i believe that, instead, you are merely demonstrating you don't understand the term. logic isn't exactly your strong suit.

[whatchamacallit]

10. It may not be in the strictest sense

but unless I'm mistaken, the intent of the OP was to backhandedly assert that CTers substitute motive for evidence. Ironically, LARED then backs up his assertion with statements about CT motives and character flaws.

BTW, regardless of the somewhat incessant and disturbing claims of your own mental prowess, logic is not your strong suit either.

[SDuderstadt]

11. then point to any logical fallacy i've committed...

and call it by name. that should be easy. it's also hysterical how, when challenged to explain precisely how lared's statement is a bulverism, you have to begin backpedaling and rationalizing your claim by saying, well, maybe not in the strictest sense. how did lared's statement, in any way, go to the issue of either motive or character?

[whatchamacallit]

14. i didn't claim you did

also, your transparent and simpleminded attempt to battle me in some "textbook term war" is lame. No matter what random logical terms you may have mastered, when it comes to common sense, you shit yourself every time.

[SDuderstadt]

17. okay...if, as you claim, logic isn't my strong suit...

but you're not claiming i've committed any logical fallacies, upon what grounds are you drawing your conclusion? logic isn't a ''techical term war'' and, moreover, i can easily define, explain and give examples of the logical fallacies i point to. on top of that, ''common sense'' often proves to be wrong. i'll stick with logic.

[wildbilln864]

20. don't he though!

Bravo whatchamacallit, bravo!

[Name removed]

29. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[whatchamacallit]

23. Talk about backpedaling

did you just recompose your entire post? Caught that fallacy didn't you?

Ok champ, here's your chance to show us what you got. I already told you what I believed LARED meant with this post. Now it's your turn to prove I'm wrong. What is bulverism and what was LARED'S point in drawing a line between the theory and CTers?

[SDuderstadt]

28. Sigh....

I edited my post to add a couple sentences that would be more responsive. How in the world you could confuse that with backpedaling is beyond me. Do you even know what backpedaling is? Please provide a specific example of where I've backpedaled. Imaginary ones don't count, unless you expect people to honestly believe that since I edited my post, it MUST have been because I caught a fallacy. Jesus.

As to your question about Lared, it doesn't make any difference what you THINK Lared meant. What counts is what he actually said. If I have to explain that to you, then you need more help than I can provide, otherwise anyone could claim a logical fallacy was committed by simply saying, "well, when so and so said "the sun is red", I thought he meant the sun was a communist....".

I don't know if you bothered to follow Lared's link, but, if you did not, a "Bulverism is a logical fallacy in which, rather than proving that an argument is wrong, a person instead assumes it is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held that argument". It follows the form:

You claim that A is true.
Because of B, you personally desire that A should be true.
Therefore, A is false.

Here is Lared's statement: "The problem with Truthers has always been a pathological refusal to deal with the lack of, or misapplication of evidence". Please explain, how that is, in any way, a Bulverism.

[whatchamacallit]

31. Sigh...

You're not really a "big picture" kind of guy are you? You are obsessed with boiling down every argument to "where is the logical fallacy?". All tactics no strategy. You might win a few battles that way but you'll always lose the war.

As to your question about Lared, it doesn't make any difference what you THINK . Lared meant, What counts is what he actually said. If I have to explain that to you, then you n3eed more help than I can provide, otherwise anyone could claim a logical fallacy was committed by simply saying, "well, when so and so said "the sun is red", I thought he meant the sun was a communist....".

Thanks for meaningless un-answer.

I don't know if you bothered to follow Lared's link, but, if you did not, a "Bulverism is a logical fallacy in which, rather than proving that an argument is wrong, a person instead assumes it is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held that argument"

News Flash: the OCT has not proven government complicity wrong. You assume it's wrong and spend all your time calling "truthers" idiots because they don't agree with your assumptions. You assume all your "facts" are real facts and any information that runs contrary is erroneous bullshit. LARED'S OP can just as easily apply to the OCT.

You claim that A is true.
Because of B, you personally desire that A should be true.
Therefore, A is false.

Nice, copied straight from the wiki link. Thanks for proving your superior grasp of the subject with copy and paste. :eyes:

Here is Lared's statement: "The problem with Truthers has always been a pathological refusal to deal with the lack of, or misapplication of evidence". Please explain, how that is, in any way, a Bulverism

Easy. LARED claims that truthers have a pathological problem dealing with evidence. He has no proof of this, only a desire for it to be true. Instead producing actual proof for his argument he relies on assumptions about the nature or character of truthers. Pot meet kettle. This entire thread is a hypocritical mess.

[SDuderstadt]

34. Jesus Christ...

Although I think it's probably futile to try to reason with you, I'm going to take one last stab at it, then I'm done.

You're not really a "big picture" kind of guy are you? You are obsessed with boiling down every argument to "where is the logical fallacy?". All tactics no strategy. You might win a few battles that way but you'll always lose the war.

Actually, I'm very much a "big picture" guy. It's pretty silly to claim that I'm "obsessed with boiling down every argument to "where is the logical fallacy?". Logic isn't an obsession, but, along with facts and evidence, is a way of reasoning that leads to the truth more than any other methodology I'm aware of. Logic is your friend...maybe you should try to master it.

I said, "As to your question about Lared, it doesn't make any difference what you THINK . Lared meant, What counts is what he actually said. If I have to explain that to you, then you n3eed more help than I can provide, otherwise anyone could claim a logical fallacy was committed by simply saying, 'well, when so and so said "the sun is red", I thought he meant the sun was a communist....'.". To which you replied:

Thanks for meaningless un-answer.

Do you see the flaw in your response? I doubt if you do, so I'll spell it out for you. By pretending part of my answer was my entire answer, you try to portray it as an "un-answer" (I'm pretty sure you mean "non-answer"). How positively deceptive of you, but other members can easily refer back to my actual post and see how you've clipped it.

I then posted the Wikipedia definition of a Bulverism, to which you replied:

News Flash: the OCT has not proven government complicity wrong. You assume it's wrong and spend all your time calling "truthers" idiots because they don't agree with your assumptions. You assume all your "facts" are real facts and any information that runs contrary is erroneous bullshit. LARED'S OP can just as easily apply to the OCT.

I've got a "news flash" for you. We're not discussing the "OCT" (whatever that is). We're discussing whether or not, as you claim, Lared's statement was a Bulverism. Beyond that, you've committed yet one more egregious logical fallacy (amid a panoply of others). The "OCT" doesn't HAVE to prove government complicity wrong, in that it's the "truthers'" claim that the government was complicit and, thus, the burden of proof falls on your side, not ours. This is a classic example of "trying to shift the burden of proof" when all our side has to do is point out that your side has not proven its claim (at which your side has failed miserably).

Eventually, you wind your way down to the following in response to my challenge to show that Lared's statement is, in any way, a Bulverism:

Easy. LARED claims that truthers have a pathological problem dealing with evidence. He has no proof of this, only a desire for it to be true. Instead producing actual proof for his argument he relies on assumptions about the nature or character of truthers. Pot meet kettle. This entire thread is a hypocritical mess.

Let me refer you back to the example of a Bulverism that I will gladly admit was cut and pasted from Wikipedia since it was the link Lared posted in the OP:

"You claim that A is true.
Because of B, you personally desire that A should be true.
Therefore, A is false."


Did you notice how that has THREE parts? Do you see the two premises followed by a conclusion? Do you see a similar form in Lared's statement? If you do, then kindly point it out to us. What Lared has posted there is an "evaluative claim", not an argument. As such, it represents his personal opinion. You can claim he has no proof of this. You can claim it is an instance of the "pot calling the kettle black". You can claim that this entire thread is a hypocritical mess. One thing you cannot claim without someone calling you on it is that Lared's statement is a Bulverism, as his statement is not even remotely in the form of Bulverism.

With that, I'll let you have the last word, as I learned a long time ago that it's impossible to reason with people who place no value on reason. See ya, Whatchamacallit.

[whatchamacallit]

35. I began preparing a long response, but then

sanity kicked in and I decided not to waste another precious moment jerking in this circle. I wish you luck. Try not to get so twisted up. Trust the universe and let some good shit happen. Adieu.

[SDuderstadt]

36. "Trust the universe"?

I'm thinking you didn't respond because you really can't. More importantly, it's YOUR circle jerk. Bye.

[whatchamacallit]

37. Sure man whatever you say

Good luck being... you.

[SDuderstadt]

38. I accept your concession...

now, maybe you'll apologize to Lared.

[LARED]

26. Nothing backhanded about it at all. I am insulted.

Simply put Truthers by and large need no evidence to support their beliefs. They refuse to address the evidence that puts their beliefs to the test, as it is far less intellectually taxing to just shout out that anyone that thinks all the investigations performed on the collapse of the towers are just Bush apologists.

[whatchamacallit]

27. Got some data to back that up?

didn't think so...

it is far less intellectually taxing to just shout out that anyone that thinks all the investigations performed on the collapse of the towers are just Bush apologists

see post #1

edit: changed #2 to #1

[LARED]

30. I would suggest you use the search function

and take a count on how many times so called OCT'er (that includes the NIST, FEMA, respected scientist and Engineers, etc) have been either directly or indirectly called; Bush shills, apologists, operatives, etc over the last 7 years.

[whatchamacallit]

32. And I suggest you do the same

to find where OCTers claim a CTer's lack of understanding is based on an irrational hatred of Bush. I'm just sayin...

added:

BTW I wanted data for this assertion: "Simply put Truthers by and large need no evidence to support their beliefs".

[LARED]

33. Please provide evidence

"Simply put Truthers by and large need no evidence to support their beliefs".

I have repeatedly requested evidence to back all the odd beliefs of the CT'er

I have never to this day been given any evidence that establishes that any of the WTC towers were destroyed by any other process outside of the "official" narrative of 9/11. The NIST reports, eyewitnesses, newspapers, Television, official investigation, etc all add up to a rational coherent (although imperfect) account of the events leading to and on 9/11.

If you have some sort of compelling evidence that is rational coherent and counter to the OCT, that's hereto unknown please let me see it. After watching ct'er wave their hands for over seven years trying to make out of context, imagined, misunderstood, willfully ignorant speculations, sound like real evidence the only conclusion I can draw is that to support your beliefs, you require no real evidence.