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Sunday, December 15, 2019 8:57 PM

Alex Jones' Sandy Hook deposition

Alex Jones performs live on radio and online three hours a day, five days a week, and two hours on Sundays. Sometimes more. A relentlessly ranting, blustering figure, by turns entertaining, frightening, even mesmerizing, the outrageousness of his claims is only exceeded by the certitude of his delivery and the promise to his more credulous viewers and listeners that what he is delivering is the real deal, the hidden truth behind the lies of the globalists, the deep state and the mainstream media.

It has made what was once a late-night Austin cable access novelty act into the most famous conspiracy theorist on earth.

But to watch the video of his recent three-hour deposition in one of the Sandy Hook lawsuits arrayed against him is to see that persona and its pretensions come undone and to understand how his tangling with the parents of those children whose tragic deaths in the school shooting that occurred seven years ago Saturday — and that he tauntingly denied — could be his InfoWars empire's undoing.

"I cannot emphasize enough how much this man is not taking these lawsuits seriously and has refused to do any preparation to testify," Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, who is an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook cases, tweeted after Jones' Nov. 26 deposition, which she attended. "It's an absolute train wreck and honestly gratifying to watch, but the disrespect to the Sandy Hook parents is palpable."

On Dec. 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He also killed his mother and himself.

As Houston attorney Mark Bankston, representing Sandy Hook parents in four suits in Austin against Jones and his InfoWars operation, on Nov. 26 methodically asked Jones to explain how he came to report that tragedy as a hoax supposedly orchestrated as a pretext to crack down on gun rights, a subdued Jones seemed mostly befuddled.

Forty-four times he answered, "I don't remember;" 51 times, "I don't know."

Absent his gravelly and ferocious on-air growls, the various "anomalies" that Jones said made him suspicious of events at Sandy Hook, as recounted one by one by Bankston in the quietude of the deposition room, sounded ridiculous.

Jones' deposition, and those of three InfoWars associates, became public Thursday when they were filed in a Travis County court by Bankston in the case of Neil Heslin, the father of slain 6-year-old Jesse Lewis.

Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.

More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-alex-jones-sandy-hook-deposition-a-person
a-undone/ar-AAK82Ea


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.

What did Keynes really intend to be the key message of the General Theory? My answer is, that’s a question for the biographers and the intellectual historians; I won’t quite say I don’t care, but it’s surely not the most important thing. There’s an old story about a museum visitor who examined a portrait of George Washington and asked a guard whether he really looked like that. The guard answered, “That’s the way he looks now.” That’s more or less how I feel about Keynes. What matters is what we make of Keynes, not what he “really” meant.
www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/keynes_and_the_moderns.pdf

Krugman didn't stop there: I’d divide Keynes readers into two types: Chapter 12ers and Book One-ers. Chapter 12 is, of course, the wonderful, brilliant chapter on long-term expectations, with its acute observations on investor psychology, its analogies to beauty contests, and more. Its essential message is that investment decisions must be made in the face of radical uncertainty to which there is no rational answer, and that the conventions men use to pretend that they know what they are doing are subject to occasional drastic revisions, giving rise to economic instability. What Chapter 12ers insist is that this is the real message of Keynes, that all those who have invoked the great man’s name on behalf of quasi-equilibrium models that push this insight into the background, from John Hicks to Paul Samuelson to Mike Woodford, have violated his true legacy.

Book One-ers, by contrast, see Keynesian economics as being essentially about the refutation of Say’s Law, about the possibility of a general shortfall in demand.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 15, 2019 11:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:

Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.



Tough shit. We do trial by jury here in America. Democrats haven't turned us into China yet.

What damages? The only damages I see are that he pretty much destroyed his own internet presence. He didn't drag anybody's name through the mud except for his own and anybody associated with Info Wars.

I'd ask you to name one single person living or dead involved in Sandy Hook, but I know you'll just Google it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, December 16, 2019 2:11 AM

The Party That Ruined the Planet: Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.

. . . A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later. . . .

[There are lots of reasons for this,] but one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.

As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with someth

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Monday, December 16, 2019 2:16 AM

You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

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Monday, December 16, 2019 2:17 AM

In 2019 can we stop pretending that all Republicans deny climate change and that Democrats have ever done a fucking thing to fix it or even slow it down.


Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, December 16, 2019 7:29 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.

Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!

Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Monday, December 16, 2019 5:17 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

1kiki, the US decreased its carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons because it switched from coal to natural gas. Trump promised to switch it back, but that didn't work because natural gas is cheaper. As usual, you don't know a damn thing.
www.eesi.org/articles/view/u.s.-leads-in-greenhouse-gas-reductions-but
-some-states-are-falling-behind


By the way, the President does not have the power to lower carbon emissions because the Congress never gave that power to a President, unlike Congress giving the President the power to lower or raise tariffs. President Sanders can't do what Congress won't give him the power or the money to do. Which brings us back around to the GOP denying that too much waste carbon in the atmosphere is a problem needing solving.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, December 19, 2019 5:27 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.

Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!

Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.

Hello Signym. All those numbers you are talking about? The President doesn't control those numbers. It's guys like me, the top 0.1%, that control America's economy, manufacturing output, jobs, the stock market, even how much is spent on defense. Eisenhower famously warned about the Military-Industrial Complex getting rich by selling hugely overpriced weapons. H-bombs, subs, and aircraft carriers will make you richer faster than making anything else. And that is why America has too many H-bombs and not enough of other things.
www.history.com/topics/21st-century/military-industrial-complex

The American medical profession copied the weapon-builders' overpricing: A CT scan costs $1,100 in the US — and $140 in Holland. America’s health care prices problem, in four charts.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/17/21024614/us-health-care-cos
ts-medical-prices


Congress can bribe people like me into doing what Congress wants, but the important word is bribe. Being asked politely to patriotically do what is best won't work with people driven to accumulate large sums of money. You know where talking works more powerfully than money? In American science fiction, particularly "The Expanse". Sci-fi is probably where Americans get the idea that the President controls, not the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)

What “The Expanse” Can Teach About Macroeconomics!
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/opinion/the-macroeconomics-of-the-expanse.h
tml


Earth appears to be suffering from mass technological unemployment. Half the population is unemployed and living on Basic, which apparently consists of in-kind provision of housing, food, and other necessities. (Kind of like a global version of Trump’s idea of replacing food stamps with food boxes.)

But are robots really the problem? For the first three seasons, Mars stands in stark contrast. It’s a mobilized, full-employment society where everyone is working either on supporting a military strong enough to stand up to Earth or on the long-term goal of terraforming the planet, making it suitable for humans.

Over the course of Season Three, however, the cold war was (mostly) resolved, while the protomolecule (don’t ask) seemed to have opened access to hundreds of habitable planets, making terraforming Mars seem pointless. And in Season Four, Martian society is in deep trouble. Unemployment is rife thanks to the winding down of both military spending and terraforming, with some ex-military Martians who can’t find jobs turning to crime.

So, my question: If Earth has mass unemployment because robo

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Thursday, December 19, 2019 6:11 PM

Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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