Comment Re:That is not how conspiracy theories work. (Score 2) 497
Evidence against them? What evidence against them?
(Conspiracy groups either ignore evidence against them or claim it is part of the conspiracy.)
Evidence against them? What evidence against them?
(Conspiracy groups either ignore evidence against them or claim it is part of the conspiracy.)
Don't forget a sense of purpose. You are fighting this extremely large group of powerful individuals who are conspiring to make the public believe a lie. (Be it AGW, the moon landing, vaccinations preventing disease, alternative medicine, Obama not being a secret Muslim lizard robot intent on world domination, etc.) Only you and your small band know the truth and must fight against overwhelming odds to battle the lie. I'm sure many conspiracy theorists feel like they are living in a movie and cast themselves as the dashing hero determined to save the day.
Beyond the "you shouldn't be forced to reveal private matters or be assumed guilty?" Then how about because nothing shuts up groups like this. Say he releases his e-mails and there is nothing incriminating in there. They will find one passage which, if taken out of context, will "prove" their point. Then they'll tout this out-of-content statement all over the place. Sure, some people will see the truth, but many more will believe the lie instead.
To put it another way, I suspect you of committing illegal acts. Send me all of your e-mail correspondence for the last 10 years. I'll pour through that and see if anything looks wrong. If you typed "I hope we don't get caught" in the context of throwing someone a surprise birthday party and sneaking the gifts past them, I'll take that line and use it to show how you're really a shady criminal conspiring to avoid capture for your crimes. I await you sending me all of your e-mails so I can use them against you in any way I see fit.
Why not both work to prevent (or if we can't prevent, at least reduce) Climate Change as well as work to adapt to it? Cover both our bases. I can understand if you take issue with specific means of preventing Climate Change because you think method X is better than method Y, but saying we won't take any preventative measures at all and instead just deal with it when it comes is short-sighted. If you own a home, should you allow the foundation to crumble, refuse to patch it, and just decide to deal with it when the house finally begins collapsing?
Exactly. Look at how often the moon landing has been proven to have happened and how often President Obama's birth certificate was shown to be real. Yet, there are still people out there who think the moon landing took place on a sound stage on Earth (obvious clue: Not enough lens flare for it to have really been from space! What, J.J. Abrams doesn't make accurate space scenes?) and/or that the birth certificate was forged (thus proving that Obama is a secret Muslim who will abolish Congress, form an Empire, crush his enemies with the lightning that he can summon from his fingertips, and turn Joe Biden into a "more machine than man" dark side cyborg. (Oh, now Lucas isn't an authoritative source either?!!!)
The oil companies/heartland institute don't have to create spin anymore, because they've had the most important success possible: making denialism an important part of the identity of a lot of people.
In other words, the spin has become self-sustaining. It would be ironic if we could harass this self-sustaining spin to generate enough energy to stop using fossil fuels and reverse climate change.
"Why this isn't climate change at all! It's *removes mask from monster* Michael Mann and 97% of the world's scientists!"
"We would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling billionaires!"
(Oops. Should have added a spoiler alert.)
The person took my personal information (from where I'll never know) and opened a credit card in my name - in other words, using my identity. This damaged my credit rating. Granted, it wasn't damaged as bad as it could have been, but that's like saying someone took my car for a joyride one night and brought it back with just a dented fender.
Other people who have had their identity stolen haven't been as lucky as I was. The thieves can make off with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise in a couple of days/weeks and the person won't find out about it until the collection agencies come calling for payment. Then, it can take months or years to get your credit rating back to where it was pre-identity theft. In the meantime, you might not be able to get loans that you need or credit cards that you'd like to open. So you can be deprived of access to things you would have had access to had your identity not been stolen. (Lest anyone try arguing that you still have full access to your credit rating the same as if the identity theft never happened.)
Also, if criminal identity theft occurs - criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB - you could wind up on police watch lists for years which is a whole other kind of hell. Profiled because you are "a known felon." Failing background checks because of the crimes "you" committed, etc. Even if the error is obvious (wrong skin color, alibi about where you were when "you" were arrested, etc), purging it from the police systems takes years of effort. One system left with the error will start flowing it back to the other systems and start the process all over again.
So it's not that you lose all access to your identity, but rather that your identity becomes tarnished and damaged and it can take you a lot of time, money, and effort to fix it.
The Supreme Court majority can't even get their excuses for the Hobby Lobby verdict right. When the verdict came out, they said it was a limited verdict on just those forms of birth control and the form declaring the institution a religious institution was a good workaround. The next day, they said the verdict applies to all forms of birth control. (Apparently, the company just needs to "religiously believe" that something is wrong and they don't need to cover it in their health care plans.) The next day, they made a preliminary ruling in another case that said that the form declaring that an institution has religious issues with something wasn't good. The very form they pointed to 2 days earlier as a good thing. Now, merely requiring an institution to declare "we are religiously offended by X" is offensive.
Of course, Hobby Lobby apparently has no problem covering Viagra regardless of the marital state of their male employees.
I'd boycott Hobby Lobby, but we never shop there anyway as we've known about - and had issues with - the owners making personal religious beliefs into company policy for years. We much prefer Michael's or JoAnn's.
Don't forget that stress is a factor in bad health.
"We've detected your internal stress levels rose so we're charging you $5 more... Wait, they just rose more. $10. There they go again. $15. Boy you really have a problem with stress, $20. $25. $40!"
Sadly, I don't think this will be changed anytime soon. Identity theft doesn't really hurt credit card companies or credit agencies. The credit card companies just close the card and write off the fraudulent purchases. At best. At worst, they'll send collection agencies after you for years until you prove that "you" wasn't really you. (The credit card company in my case had various "suggestions" as to what happened including that my wife opened the account with my information without my knowledge. Finally, since my wife was right there and denied it, they conceded the fraud.) Even if they have to admit the fraud, they can push the charges back on the retailers or just eat the few thousand dollars.
Credit agencies, on the other hand, make their money by selling information about people. (They hate that my credit is frozen because they can't sell my information. ) To them, identity theft is a non-issue. So more people are opening lines of credit on your credit file? Who cares. They'll just adjust your credit score accordingly and demand mountains of proof if you claim that items on your credit report aren't from you. After all, they wouldn't be on your credit report if they weren't yours and they are on your credit report so that means they are obviously yours. There was a bill in Congress at one point to let people freeze/thaw their credit files for free, but the credit agencies lobbied to kill it. Because when the interests of ordinary citizens and giant credit agencies collide, they with the most money (aka the big credit agencies) win.
The businesses who need to change their practices won't do it on their own because identity theft doesn't really hurt them. Meanwhile, the government won't act to force them to change thanks to lobbyist pressure.
With a person's name, SSN, and date of birth (somewhat easy to obtain), you can steal that person's identity and open lines of credit in their name. Add in address (pretty easily obtained) and you can do a lot of damage to their credit - while racking up thousands in purchases to enjoy. I wish I could add the caveat that you'd only enjoy this stuff until the police arrested you but many identity theft cases don't result in arrest because 1) the local police are unprepared to investigate online crimes that span multiple districts/states/countries, 2) the local police don't want to spend resources on an investigation that will just lead to another district having jurisdiction/getting the arrest credit, 3) the federal authorities only care about your case if it is big enough. A single credit card opened in your name will get shrugs from them.
Step 1: Put on a dress shirt (or any shirt with a pocket on the front).
Step 2: Start your camera video recording and put it on your pocket (camera facing out, of course).
Step 3: Wait in line behind the person and position yourself so that you have a good view but also so that it's not obvious what you are doing. Pretend to be looking at something else. (Look at your watch or a book or something.)
Step 4: Review the footage later and get the person's password or PIN.
Wouldn't be hard to do, really.
I've been through identity theft. It's not fun. And I was lucky enough to catch it quick enough that little damage was done. Capital One approved a card for "me" based on an online form where the thieves had my name, address, DOB, and SSN. Mother's maiden name was wrong, but that didn't stop the approval process. The thieves paid for rush delivery of the card and then changed the address on it. This meant that the card was sent to me BEFORE the address change went through. If this hadn't happened, I would have only known about it once the bill collectors came barging down my door.
On a side note: Capital One was not helpful at all. They stonewalled both me ("If we tell you the address on the card and you go and kill the person, we're liable" = what they actually told me) and the police (gave them a phone number linked to an answering machine and never called back). The combination of their approval of the card, missing all of the red flags along the way, and refusing to help beyond canceling the card means Capital One will NEVER be "what's in my wallet."
For those who think they have bad credit and thus wouldn't be victims, it doesn't take much. Remember, the thieves don't care about whether you can pay back the bills they are generating. All it takes is one credit card company to approve a card and they'll tear through the balance leaving you with thousands in debt that you'll need to prove wasn't your doing. In addition, there's another form of identity theft where a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB instead of their own. Then your name goes into the police databases and you'll be harassed as an assumed criminal. Removal of your name can take years during which time you'll flunk any background checks.
There's no protection that I know of from the latter form of identity theft, but you can freeze your credit to protect against the former. This means that nobody - not even you - can open new lines of credit unless you first thaw the credit files. The downside is that you need to pay to freeze and for each thaw. The upside is that you have a handy retort for all of those "You can save $5 if you open up a credit account with us" offers at the cash register. "No, thanks. My credit file is frozen." I've found these people stop their sales push the minute they hear you were a victim of identity theft. (I don't think that's in the script they are supposed to read to customers.
The problem was in the story telling. Every writer would put Superman in a perilous situation and then invent a new power to get him out of it. Eventually, they found it hard to write for Superman. After all, when you have a guy who can juggle planets around for fun, what can threaten him enough that readers would think "this could conceivably kill Superman?" (We all know that Threat Of The Week won't kill Superman, but the villain needs to have a reasonable chance of winning or there's no suspense in the story.)
They tried correcting this when they reset the DC Universe and lowered his power levels, but the writers keep doing the same power ramp-up.
Then again, some depictions of Superman work nicely with an uber-powerful Supes. The final episode of Justice League, for example. Superman is beating up on Darkseid and notes that he feels like he lives in a world made of cardboard. He needs to be careful of his every action lest he hurt someone or break something. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in just letting go instead of worrying that hitting the villain would result in needless death and destruction.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth