Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Mischief Maker]

Andrew Cuomo resigns.

[BryanM]

So today's episode of Belief It Or Not is on the tithing scam.

As far as faith-based investments go, such as kickblasters, technological/medical research, and political contributions, this megachurch stuff is about the worst return on your investment. Unless you really want to see your preacher ballin', snorting cocaine and banging the most expensive of hookers.

The desperate lady dying of cancer hoping for a miracle.... that they would take her money, they really are ghouls.

I probably told this story before, whatever forum's dead listen to it again.

So this one time a guy who worked under my father for a bit came to visit him. With his entire family. And brought their preacher along. Preacher tells this story about Some Guy diagnosed with cancer, but when they scanned him again, the cancer... WAS GONE. My father said "That's amazing!" From his tone if you didn't know him you could maybe believe he was being sincere, but I knew 100% he wasn't buying it at all and excused myself from the room. When I returned after they had left, he was furious with me for leaving. "Why what happened?" They had all laid hands on top of him and performed a chant, which creeped him the fuck out. I explained I found his response to the miracle story very amusing, and that I didn't want to laugh in the faces of people who only meant him well. "Oh, ok..."

Years later I looked it up and it was what I expected it to be: There's always an error margin in tests, and if the chance of having a specific disease is less than the error margin, you'll get more false positives than accurate diagnoses. So the "miracle" in this story happens somewhat often, at least for someone in their initial screenings.

If you don't want to die from cancer, rather than giving it to a community center/preacher, a better place to throw your money away might be on say the research on targeting cells with elevated telomerase levels. It would wipe out about 90% of the different types of cancers out there by itself, if we can get it working.

Or you could spend your money supporting a wall to keep tigers away.

[orange808]

https://www.businessinsider.com/dominio ... 2021-8?amp
So delicious.

[Steamflogger Boss]

So today's episode of Belief It Or Not is on the tithing scam.

As far as faith-based investments go, such as kickblasters, technological/medical research, and political contributions, this megachurch stuff is about the worst return on your investment. Unless you really want to see your preacher ballin', snorting cocaine and banging the most expensive of hookers.

The desperate lady dying of cancer hoping for a miracle.... that they would take her money, they really are ghouls.

I probably told this story before, whatever forum's dead listen to it again.

So this one time a guy who worked under my father for a bit came to visit him. With his entire family. And brought their preacher along. Preacher tells this story about Some Guy diagnosed with cancer, but when they scanned him again, the cancer... WAS GONE. My father said "That's amazing!" From his tone if you didn't know him you could maybe believe he was being sincere, but I knew 100% he wasn't buying it at all and excused myself from the room. When I returned after they had left, he was furious with me for leaving. "Why what happened?" They had all laid hands on top of him and performed a chant, which creeped him the fuck out. I explained I found his response to the miracle story very amusing, and that I didn't want to laugh in the faces of people who only meant him well. "Oh, ok..."

Years later I looked it up and it was what I expected it to be: There's always an error margin in tests, and if the chance of having a specific disease is less than the error margin, you'll get more false positives than accurate diagnoses. So the "miracle" in this story happens somewhat often, at least for someone in their initial screenings.

If you don't want to die from cancer, rather than giving it to a community center/preacher, a better place to throw your money away might be on say the research on targeting cells with elevated telomerase levels. It would wipe out about 90% of the different types of cancers out there by itself, if we can get it working.

Or you could spend your money supporting a wall to keep tigers away.

Perfect to see that psycho Copeland clip in there again.

[orange808]

Edward Soloman. Mild mannered swingset installer by day. Drug dealer felon slash amazing prodigy uneducated (no college degree) mathematician by night! He is Swingset Math Man!

[Sengoku Strider]

The Mein Pillow Cyber Symposium has been a spectacular train wreck thus far. It's Four Seasons Total Landscaping all over again, except it goes on for 72 hours straight.

For those joining us late, guy who has heard the term 'cyber security' and pillow salesman Mike Lindell has promised 70 "cyber guys" will make Trump president again:

...he is holding a “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota, a three-day conference beginning Tuesday that will bring together dozens of “cyber guys” to verify what he claims is election data that will reveal fraud in all 50 states—and ultimately see former President Donald Trump return to the White House.

His web platform, Frankspeech, launched in the spring. It was initially supposed to be an alternative 'free speech' (read: bigotry and conspiracy lies) social media platform "somewhat like a YouTube-Twitter blend." Presumably he found out after the announcement party that he couldn't actually do that on a $1 million budget.

It ultimately launched as a circa-1998-style web page, yet still managed to crash multiple times as soon as it went live. Er, I mean was cyber-attacked by cyber-Deep State cyber-guys:



It probably doesn't help that Cloudflare ghosted the right wing conspiracy crowd last year after finding out Christchurch shootings and child abuse how-to discussion forums were slightly extremely terrible for their brand. To date Frankspeech still has not managed to launch any actual means to interact with other users.

Fast forward to yesterday, and wouldn't ya just know it? Mike Pillow told the world the Deep State cyber guys had hacked his site again. It was streaming the event, but they wanted to prevent THE TRUTH from getting out there, and this was proof the Bolsheviks were running scared. The Symposium was delayed.

Unfortunately, even patriots were having a tough time buying it:



But no biggie. It eventually got underway. They'd even used the text crawl from The Matrix. Surely, even the haters now had to realize this was going to be cyber AF:



The announcement was made that the damning, undeniable proof of election tampering that the world could not possibly deny, that was God's will, that would force Joe Biden to resign the very next day, would be shared at 7pm.

It was announced later that day that the undeniable truth would be delayed until Thursday.

Apparently his star witness whistleblower's office got raided by the FBI and they panicked & backed out. Somehow this was all the fault of the radical leftist Governor of Colorado. I think. But that's okay. Mike Pillow wasn't going to let anybody else talk anyway. He'd done like 8 rails of Adderall, and by George he was going to make use of them. He vowed in front of the crowd that he was going to stay awake and on stage straight through all 72 hours. Dude was wired, I completely believe he couldn't sleep if he wanted to.

Unfortunately, this didn't play well with the patriots watching at home, or at RRayzer's house:



Just for the record: if Mike Lindell ever empties out an entire party at my house, I won't feel like an asshole for wishing "somebody had the balls to tell him to shut the hell up."

[BryanM]

I like how all these guys have to append "real" to their tweeter handle. As if they're the only person with that name on the planet. As if the shitposter with the real account name isn't a million times more useful. (Tweeter is only good for shitposts.)

What I'm trying to say here, it always reminds me of The Real Ghostbusters, which was not the real Ghostbusters, but was better than the real Ghostbusters. The official youtube account has been releasing them to build hype for the movie. In case you want to go back to the past.

We were equally as doomed back then, but it wasn't quite as blatantly obvious.

As if the shitposter with the real account name isn't a million times more useful.

I'm really not kidding. They hijacked the real DonaldTrump account and now it only has one post: a link to the fake realDonaldTrump account. Which hasn't even bothered to make one post. 0.5 posts between two accounts. Such sinful waste, smh

[Sengoku Strider]

So...here's why the undeniable proof lady suddenly backed out of undeniably proving anything:



Just another reminder that this is a symposium of bonafide, 100%, Grade A cyber security experts.

Like this guy:



And lo, the truth was found!:

Edward Soloman. Mild mannered swingset installer by day. Drug dealer felon slash amazing prodigy uneducated (no college degree) mathematician by night! He is Swingset Math Man!

That article is beautiful.

"It's not clear where Solomon got his data set. Factcheck.org compared the numbers he used in his analysis with the data available from Georgia's secretary of state and found that they did not match.

A spokesperson for Stony Brook University, with which Solomon said he was affiliated, previously told Factcheck.org that he took several math classes over the course of seven years at the school but never received an undergraduate degree."

But he's not even the king of this trash heap. The Team Pillow cyber guys shared their undeniable data. Data so concrete, so airtight that Mike Pillow himself had publicly promised $5 million US dollars of his own money to anyone who could prove it wasn't legit.

I'll give you one guess what's about to happen.

I couldn't make this up if I wanted to, so I'm gonna let the Washington Post take it from here:

Rob Graham, a technologist and author, went to the summit to evaluate what Lindell claims to have. During a “breakout session,” he and others were provided with access to what Lindell’s team claims to have obtained.

Graham shared what they were given — a collection of files that consists of 1) a list of computer Internet protocol addresses and 2) gibberish like that above.

Well, technically they were given rich-text format files, some of which were inexplicably converted to hexadecimal encoding. Graham, an expert on Internet data, described the provided material as “a bunch of confusing stuff they can’t explain,” and said that those running the symposium pledged to hand over the “real” information Tuesday night or Wednesday.

IT. ONLY. GETS. BETTER.

Update: Rob Graham later reported that he and other experts at the symposium would not be able to examine some of Lindell’s data after all, data that reportedly came from a known hoaxster.

So as soon as somebody who actually knew what they were looking at saw their smokeless smoking gun, they immediately bailed. See, Solo-man the swingset installer is a small fry in the data intelligence grift game. He is greatly surpassed by the 'known hoaxster' mentioned in the quote above.

Allow me to (re)introduce you to Dennis L. Montgomery:



Just look at all the cyber and freedom around this guy!

Some of you may remember Dennis from the Bush administration. He was a nobody programmer with a gambling addiction from Las Vegas. He somehow convinced the CIA that he had created software called 'Hammer' which could decrypt secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. W. Bush was very interested in this dumb, implausible idea.

The idea that Arabs had their own news network was weird and scary to dumb people at the time, and so millions of dollars were sunk into Montgomery's business, and CIA staff sent on-site to help him. It was the most classified project in US intelligence at the time.

Except - and this will blow your fucking mind - it was a con all along. There were no secret Al Qaeda messages on Al Jazeera. The software didn't do anything. And he blew all the money on blackjack and still wound up $1.5 million in the hole and was charged with writing bad cheques to casinos. Shyamalan!

So yeah. That's the guy Mike Pillow got his secret intercepted data packets of remote Chinese interference of Dominion election machines from. Super weird that it just turned out to be random garbage ctrl + V'd into an rtf file.

A ton of the "hacked election" conspiracies turned out to be from him. See, this time around, 'Hammer' was suddenly hardware, paired with 'Scorecard,' software he said he'd invented to scramble Chinese websites or something. Except the Deep State stole it! And were using it to harm America and hack elections! But he was on America's side, Trump's side, and he wasn't going to take it laying down. This patriot was blowing the whistle!

I'll just skip ahead to the it-turns-out-he's-lying-and-is-not-remotely-capable-of-any-such-feat part and leave it here.

[Hoagtech]

Oh, lovely:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/11/anti-vax- ... NYPTwitter

Cheaters suck..

How are you feeling about these 3.5 trillion plus 1 trillion infrastructure debt bills Mischief?

I want to know how this level of spending is justified as the “highest debt spending of any sitting president”?

Do you believe it’s a little rushed and over funded or can I hear your explanation why we need more than 16 times the usual budget for “reform” ?

Mod Edit: Moved to more appropriate thread.

[BulletMagnet]

I want to know how this level of spending is justified as the “highest debt spending of any sitting president”?

The way I tend to see it, and with the obvious caveat that in the end it will depend on how much of the money ends up going where it's supposed to be going, pretty much the only things the government has been willing to spend big money on without any hesitation for decades running have been gifts to the wealthy (upper-end tax cuts, foreign wars, etc.), and it has continued to do so no matter how many times the windfall they're promised to provide to both the rest of us and the economy at large fails to show up.

So now when someone finally says they're willing to spend money on stuff that pretty much everyone agrees 1) Is needed, 2) Is vastly overdue (feel free to reference the recent Florida condo collapse as a de facto harbinger), and 3) Will actually deliver the benefits it promises, now the same people who smiled and nodded at the tax cuts start freaking about how it costs too much? Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned those legitimate concerns go directly on top of the ever-growing bad faith pile.

[Mischief Maker]

Oh, lovely:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/11/anti-vax- ... NYPTwitter

Cheaters suck..

How are you feeling about these 3.5 trillion plus 1 trillion infrastructure debt bills Mischief?

I want to know how this level of spending is justified as the “highest debt spending of any sitting president”?

Do you believe it’s a little rushed and over funded or can I hear your explanation why we need more than 16 times the usual budget for “reform” ?

Mod Edit: Moved to more appropriate thread.

Start with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA

[BryanM]

Discussions on the national debt are almost always a form of concern trolling. The underlying issue is a matter of value alignment - one person might be aware all man-made shit wears out, and think it's good and useful to have bridges and buildings not fall down. Others just don't care and want to use that treasure elsewhere, like getting their personal high priest a nice plane or yacht. People care about different things and you can't make people care about the wellbeing of other people or themselves, you just can't. Some things can't be forced. :shrug:

The only people who actually give a shit about the national debt are those who worry about how the ruling class might use it as an excuse to impose misery on unborn children, who had zero say in the matter. (And it's not a completely unfounded worry, debt slavery isn't just a mechanism used for colonialism. Our minimum wage exists to service debts, not enable reproduction and building any savings.) "Populists", one might call them.

Such people would be more concerned about global warming, however. Only the most chris-chan asperger suffering psycho cares more about imaginary numbers on a spreadsheet more than systematic crop failure. This is an easy tool to infer sincerity from bullshit.

[Hoagtech]

Oh, lovely:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/11/anti-vax- ... NYPTwitter

Cheaters suck..

How are you feeling about these 3.5 trillion plus 1 trillion infrastructure debt bills Mischief?

I want to know how this level of spending is justified as the “highest debt spending of any sitting president”?

Do you believe it’s a little rushed and over funded or can I hear your explanation why we need more than 16 times the usual budget for “reform” ?

Mod Edit: Moved to more appropriate thread.

Start with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA

That’s a reason for debt spending.I was interested in the repercussions of the amount of the debt spending. It’s never happened before in history at this amount so quickly so there’s no point of reference to exemplify it.

What would theoretically happen and how and at what timeline if overspending happened and we couldn’t afford to pay back the bill?

[Sengoku Strider]

Discussions on the national debt are almost always a form of concern trolling.

Why whatever do you mean?

[Steamflogger Boss]

https://twitter.com/JohnDiesattheEn/sta ... 5392408580

Thread about doomers/deathcultists.

[Mischief Maker]

That’s a reason for debt spending.I was interested in the repercussions of the amount of the debt spending. It’s never happened before in history at this amount so quickly so there’s no point of reference to exemplify it.

What would theoretically happen and how and at what timeline if overspending happened and we couldn’t afford to pay back the bill?

Redefining the sale of treasury bonds as "debt" was an intentional wordplay sleight-of-hand by Pete Peterson to create an artificial crisis.

By the same logic, the money you have in your bank's savings account is also "debt" owed by the bank. Yet banks don't go out of business when lots of people start accounts with them and the bank's "debt" piles up.

Also the last time the national debt was paid down was thanks to a massive infrastructure project paid for by debt-spending (the national highways).

Let Thom explain in more detail.

[BryanM]

As a doomer, I don't like being conflated with the death cultists. Much like liberals and fascists, there are differences! One side likes exciting fantastical elements and touching themselves in joy at the carnage, the other is a bunch of gross boring nerds with no imagination.

Has anyone come up with a better solution than "do that thing to the sky they did in the Matrix movies" yet? I think I might rather be eaten by ravenous Oregonians than do that thing to the sky they did in the Matrix movies...

https://abload.de/img/usnationaldebtbypresih7k9z.jpg

When you do it, it's bad. When I do it, it's good. No this isn't wrestling I totally care about policy.

[vol.2]

what thing is that? is that the "launch chemicals into the sky to prevent climate change or reverse the effects of the ozone layer depletion" trope?

[Hoagtech]

Discussions on the national debt are almost always a form of concern trolling.

Why whatever do you mean?

Look up us treasury National Debt year by year instead. It’s the bottom line that matters. And that meme doesn’t like look a solid source FYI.

Source:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/rep ... histo5.htm

[orange808]

Lots of hand wringing going on about Afghanistan. This is dated, but that makes it more relevant to me. These are the problems that couldn't be solved.

https://www.fpri.org/article/2009/11/what-afghans-want/

[Sengoku Strider]

Look up us treasury National Debt year by year instead. It’s the bottom line that matters. And that meme doesn’t like look a solid source FYI.

Source:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/rep ... histo5.htm

This is one of those things where no matter where your allegiances lie, you have to break through the kayfabe or you end up a mark.

Literally every president since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s has increased the US national debt. Absolutely every single one has created the "highest debt ever."

Six presidents have seen the debt increase by more than $1 trillion over their presidencies: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Purely coincidentally, that's a list of the last six presidents. 2 Democrats, 4 Republicans. None of them even tried to reduce it.

The debt debate really is just partisan pro wrestling promos for slow news days. They're out of control! No fiscal responsibility! The children are doomed as debt slaves! They're in for a world of hurt come Election Slam XXIV, brother!

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” - VP Dick Cheney, 2003

Every body, every time.

[BryanM]

what thing is that? is that the "launch chemicals into the sky to prevent climate change or reverse the effects of the ozone layer depletion" trope?

In the movies they blocked out the sun to keep THE MACHINES from getting solar power, so this would be a solar dimming thing. A few people have begun to bring it up as a topic of serious conversation lately.

It's certainly more realistic than stuff like building a time machine and imposing an energy conserving dictatorship. The techno optimists seriously think we can point a vacuum cleaner up into the sky and that's just... not as far away from absolute magic as it sounds on first pass.

Anyway. This poet explained the alignment problem very elegantly:

"The trolley is heading towards a cliff and everyone is on the trolley with their own brake lever and all the brake levers have to be pulled to stop the trolley but if you pull your brake lever you smack yourself in the balls"

[Mischief Maker]

All I know is, if Elon Musk ever succeeds creating his outer-space billboards, then I am 100% in favor of scorching the skies.

[Hoagtech]

Look up us treasury National Debt year by year instead. It’s the bottom line that matters. And that meme doesn’t like look a solid source FYI.

Source:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/rep ... histo5.htm

This is one of those things where no matter where your allegiances lie, you have to break through the kayfabe or you end up a mark.

Literally every president since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s has increased the US national debt. Absolutely every single one has created the "highest debt ever."

Six presidents have seen the debt increase by more than $1 trillion over their presidencies: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Purely coincidentally, that's a list of the last six presidents. 2 Democrats, 4 Republicans. None of them even tried to reduce it.

The debt debate really is just partisan pro wrestling promos for slow news days. They're out of control! No fiscal responsibility! The children are doomed as debt slaves! They're in for a world of hurt come Election Slam XXIV, brother!

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” - VP Dick Cheney, 2003

Every body, every time.

This government is trending a lot higher than recent presidents you speak of.

I’d like to know the what happens if overspending were to occur.

Let’s double down on hypothetical and pretend the administration spent 100 trillion of debt for “reform” and could not afford the debt in the future.

At what point would that effect our economy and what would the detriment be? I would like to educate myself on the cause and effect of overspending in general..

[BulletMagnet]

To put a different spin on my most recent post, would you be more in favor of investing in infrastructure if just the most recent tax cut was rescinded to help pay for it? On a related note, I'd also solicit your opinion on the actual proposal to help pay for it - summarily deep-sixed by the GOP - to increase the ability to the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats.

[Hoagtech]

To put a different spin on my most recent post, would you be more in favor of investing in infrastructure if just the most recent tax cut was rescinded to help pay for it? On a related note, I'd also solicit your opinion on the actual proposal to help pay for it - summarily deep-sixed by the GOP - to increase the ability to the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats.

You could.. or you can answer my hypothetical overspending environment question so I can know where to look if it were to occur.

I prefer not to delve into “keeping corporations in the US instead of exploiting slavery” and would genuinely like to learn what the cause and effect of overspending is if you know the process and could share it..

[BryanM]

All I know is, if Elon Musk ever succeeds creating his outer-space billboards, then I am 100% in favor of scorching the skies.

As dystopian as that sounds, it's kind of even more dystopian that I read this and was 98% sure that was a real thing that he announced. And it's somehow even worse than you sold it as. At this point he's a little kid waving his hands all over the place to build hype and get morons to pump up his stocks. An excellent capitalist, I tip my hat to him.

It always reminds me of what wasted resources the shuttle program was. We scuttled our space ships for dingy space rafts that can't even leave orbit and kill everyone on board in the event of an explosion. At least one high ranking NASA engineer believes we could have had a manned mission to Mars completed over a decade ago for the manpower put behind the shuttle initiative.

I hope the people living in the dimension where we managed to walk on Mars and didn't ruin our climate are doing okay. Guess we can take solace that we're not one of the poor bastards living through nuclear annihilation, eh?

[vol.2]

To put a different spin on my most recent post, would you be more in favor of investing in infrastructure if just the most recent tax cut was rescinded to help pay for it? On a related note, I'd also solicit your opinion on the actual proposal to help pay for it - summarily deep-sixed by the GOP - to increase the ability to the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats.

You could.. or you can answer my hypothetical overspending environment question so I can know where to look if it were to occur.

I prefer not to delve into “keeping corporations in the US instead of exploiting slavery” and would genuinely like to learn what the cause and effect of overspending is if you know the process and could share it..

It doesn't work. Money is imaginary, and Capitalism is a ponzi scheme. The debt just gets passed into an unsustainable oblivion, but it can't ever be fixed because the system was designed to "not be fixed."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy-borrow ... 1625909583

You wanna "win" capitalism? This is what you do. That's what all the "winners" do. Fuck it, right?

[BulletMagnet]

The debt just gets passed into an unsustainable oblivion, but it can't ever be fixed because the system was designed to "not be fixed."

If you need a specific example of what a total screaming joke this is, simply turns your eyes toward the one portion of government that the fiscal hawks will never, ever cut.

[BryanM]

Like most macros, we've got a cartoon for that.





The sad thing about surface level political macro "discussions", is they're even more lame than goofy GPT output. At least GPT arranges words into a novel order, the wrestling hoots and hollering is more like old chat bots that'd copy and paste the same lines endlessly.