Kony Pony Bologna

For those of you who've been following my Twitter I've been after an internet cult of personality with a political agenda. No not TZM, they're pretty much dead and we'll get another glimpse of that this weekend when they open the coffin for another peek of the whole corpse. I'm talking about this KONY 2012 bullshit.

DISCLAIMER - LET ME STATE RIGHT HERE AND NOW SO YOU UNDERSTAND ME:
I'M NOT SAYING IT'S A SCAM, IT'S NOT A SCAM. THAT WOULD BE A TERRIBLE THING TO SAY AND COULD OPEN THE DOOR TO ALL KINDS OF LITIGATION AGAINST ME! I WILL SAY THAT I THINK IT'S A PILE OF ALIEN ZEBRA SHIT BECAUSE AS YOU KNOW ALIEN ZEBRA SHIT (or AZS for short) STUPID VIRAL VIDEOS THAT BEGS FOR MONEY!

Now that we got that out of the way I want to expose why this is a total AZS in a few key points for you to quickly understand, unlike the video, and get back to reality.

1. Kony is a monster, but a very little and outdated one. There's no question that Joseph Kony is an asshole. He did kidnap kids, his army did rape and loot and pillage, all that bad stuff. He started this 26 years ago. When I was still a baby and before most of the KONY 2012 sycophants were even born. His violent military cult, LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) has been largely inactive for the last 6 years and dissipated into other areas where they don't do much. Kony was a bad man, and is now in hiding in another country. It's clear though various government intelligence that Kony himself is no longer in Uganda and might very well be dead. So making him famous is a task that will go nowhere and might even turn out to be a 100% waste of time if he's dead, as to a 95% waste of time if he's not.

People thing they got the whole African situation figured out because a AZS video landed on YouTube with some very laid out emotional propaganda and little facts. What facts they do lay out are overly simplified and out of date and in words for a child to understand. This is not how you relate complex geopolitical problems to the public, especially if it's wrong. Which it is.

2. War is not the answer. The film makes it very clear that we should urge our congress critters to use military force in Uganda to capture Kony. Now for a lot of kids that like KONY 2012 that means that we will send our troops to Uganda where they will prance in the daisies holding hands with the African children until they catch the big bad wolf and then a large parade will commence as the put the wolf in a cage and parade him around and everyone is happy. That's not the way it works. There will be guns, there will be jets, there will be violence, there will be bombs, there will be gunfire because these are the tools of the military. You can't expect a tool like the military to have a new function like you can't expect a hammer to also serve as a screwdriver. You are advocating a war which comes with the whole package. The LRA will not turn over or comply peacefully. They are religiously motivated and will die for their cause and kill our troops as well.

If you think the Iraq war was bullshit, you can't be for a police action in Uganda. If you do, you are a hypocrite because the mission is identical except Kony isn't the leader of a state.

3. Ugandans don't want us there. African regions have a long history of violence and bloodshed. You can't fix it by sending western people to join in the violence and bloodshed NOR DO THEY WANT US TO. The Ugandan people have been pretty vocal about KONY 2012 and it's been overwhelming opposition. When Ugandans tell you "Don't worry about Kony, we have it under control" that should be a red flag right there.

4. Making Kony famous will do jack shit. Yay, now more people know about him. So what? Africa knows about him, he's not news like he was to use a week ago. This has been around for 26 years. He is famous there. Unless you plan on having US citizens go wander around Africa, this will not do anything. Sorry. Like all the Facebook links, RT every tweet, he's not getting anymore famous there. You could point to Iran but I would just argue 2 points about that. One, it was current events, not 6 year old information not applicable then, and two, the retweets had information for the Iranians to help fight back including police warnings and proxy lists. So no, you're wrong.

5. Invisible Children is a giant emotional propaganda AZS producing organization. Now when people say 'propaganda' they usually mean bits of information they disagree with for mass consumption. It's just a derogatory word. However in this case it's not. This is a well crafted manipulative video that isn't designed to give you any valid information, it's there to play on your emotions. Even more so than Zeitgeist movies. It all focuses on this guy and his crotch fruit showing his emotions and that kid from Africa crying. From start to finish it was just tugging your heart strings not giving you information like a documentary should.

So when you buy their stupid "action kit" you send them 30 bucks. 9 bucks goes to the 'cause' and the other 21 dollars goes to buying them tickets to fly around the world, stay and nice hotels, eat good food, buy them nice cars...etc. This is based on their tax forms. Now they put out a statement saying "Well yes, charities have overhead" which is AZS in it's own right. No charity has that much overhead. Charities pride themselves on keeping overhead as low as possible and try to stay under 30% where as Invisible Children think it's the other way around.

There's plenty of great (not just good) charities that help out Africa. Red Cross and (RED) are 2 good ones of the top of my head. Invisible Children  just seems like I'm enriching the lives of white American hipsters more than helping poor African children. Especially since most of the 30% doesn't ... actually this needs it's own number.

6. If you support Kony 2012, you support kidnapping children and gang rape. 
"The enemy of my enemy is not my friend." 
When you give money to Invisible Children, some of that 30% goes to the Ugandan and Sudanese Army which are no strangers to atrocities. These groups picked up the ball where Kony left off. In fact, the government of Uganda is the same government is currently trying to pass a law making it a crime punishable by death to be gay. This army will be the ones who will enforce it. This army has been known and is well documented that they find young women and girls and gang rape them sometimes to the brink of death. The Sudan armies pale them in comparison even kidnapping children for recruiting.

So yes, by supporting KONY 2012 you are actually doing more harm to Uganda than not sending money. Who knew some cheesy cheap bracelets could help cause such chaos and destruction. If you lost money to this, demand it back. Send back your action kit and demand a refund. You won't get it but it will send a message. But I hoped you learned a valuable lesson from this as most people who joined TZM did, you just can't watch a video and think you got life all sorted out because you laughed and cried at the right parts. Life is complex and can't be summed up in a video with cool editing and effects. The things you support have other implications that are never presented to you in them and consider your 30 bucks a lesson well learned. 

Why I Never Became a 9/11 Truther.

In the late summer of 2001 A friend of mine got a hold of a copy of Milton William "Bill" Cooper's infamous novel 'Behold a Pale Horse.' After he completed this book he gave it back to the owner and explained the book to me and told me to read it. He was rather convincing. Now I was only 18 at the time so I was very naive, especially if my friends liked something. Peer pressure on a very minor scale, I guess.  I didn't know anyone with a copy so I went out and purchased a copy at a local Barnes and Noble Store, and read it. I was convinced there was a global cabal of wealthy elites known as the Illumanati, JFK was assassinated by the limo driver with a gas powered pistol, and that the US Federal Government had flying saucer technology that they stole from the Nazis after World War 2 and were going to use it to stage a fake alien invasion to unite the world under a one government and one religion New World Order. And boy was that Kool-Aid* tasty at the time!

While I was tipped by one of my friends, I did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to convincing everyone else we knew. I used to go to parties and have people pull out a dollar bill so I could show them the secret symbols that enslaved us on every dollar. I used to interrogate my father who worked in Military Intelligence for verification of MAJESTYTWELVE (to which he denied on all counts.) Needless to say I was quite the annoying twat, but a very convincing one. In the end I converted most of my friends out of reality and into the world of paranoid fantasy. I was very good at it.

On the morning of 9/11/2001 I was awakened early by my Dad. I was wondering why considering classes that day didn't start until late in the afternoon but he was quick to tell me why "You need to see this. We're under attack. Terrorists have just crashed planes into the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon." I hopped out of bed and ran to the TV and saw what millions of Americans and billions of others around the world saw. Believe it or not, as much of a conspiracy nutter I was at the time, the thought of this being a conspiracy never crossed my mind. Even on Cooper's website did he even allude to it for the first month or so. In fact he was very jingoistic about the whole situation. Posting messages about how upset he was at al-Queda for doing this to America and how we should bomb the shit out of Afghanistan. I slowly drifted into a 'Let it happen on purpose" 9/11 conspiracy theroist but I simply couldn't back it up so I just let it go. It was so short it's hardly worth mentioning, but for the sake of honesty here it is.

Now this was in a time before YouTube and podcasting. Finding videos and mp3s of radio shows was no easy task, especially with the recent death of Napster. However, with some work I was able to track down a Cooper lecture and some of his radio shows after 9/11 and became pretty convinced I had wasted my time on this guy. While in his book he seemed very insightful, in his spoken word you can tell this guy was off his rocker. I started to really investigate his claims independently and found they were hoaxes, elaborations or total fabrications. I found that he had some personal issues as well. Before I could really dig too deep, he had a shootout leaving him dead. That was the final nail in the coffin for me, even though it was clenching proof to some of my friends that he was really onto something.

Now for those of you who've wondered why I spend a lot of time debunking conspiracies, listen up. I felt terrible for what I did. I went around promoting this crazed nut job and his crackpot theories. A lot of my friends were still jockin' this lunatic's cock as if he had something of value to say and it was my fault they were exposed to it in the first place. So I tried to make amends by correcting my mistake and spending a lot of time researching and debunking his nonsense. 

I did quite well. I managed to convince all of the people I previously conned into this trap. Then in 2005, I was presented with a Flash presentation of the controlled demolition 9/11 conspiracy. As I watched it, it seemed credible until after it was over I thought about it for a few minutes and there was a few big red flags in my head. Now I'm not going to sit here and debunk all of the claims, because there are plenty of websites and videos that can do this better than I ever could. But these are the thoughts that really put the whole thing in the Recycle Bin in my mind:

• "How the fuck did this all happen and not one single person involved get caught or confess?"

 For something like this, it would of taken at least 10s of thousands of people all working together. No one defected from the group and ratted his buddies out? No one after the fact had a crisis of consciousness? Please. Ben Franklin said something, that's dead right. Not because he said it, but because it's empirically true: "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." 

• "If there were demolition charges, how come no one saw them being installed or noticed them post installation?"

How could you rig a building with that many explosives and have no body notice? No janitors, carpenters, ..etc. ever noticed demolition charges or wires? One of these guys told me it was planted shortly after the 1993 WTC bombing. Again, how did no one notice? Civilians were standing around the building and they just happen to get all of this equipment in the building without anyone noticing? That's unfathomable.

• "If a missile hit the Pentagon, why did everyone say it was a plane? Why would something like wings leave a hole if they are designed to be lightweight?"

This really was the smoking gun of bullshit for me. Nothing about the 9/11 Pentagon CT ever made sense to me. It's just flat out retarded on every level.

After this came out I did some investigation and found a lot more problems with their arguments, virtually every claim they made was either unfounded and thus ignored, cherry picked which I found supplemental information to correct it, or inaccurate which I corrected.

I tracked down a group on MySpace (which was all the rave with all the kids at the time) and presented my arguments to them. This was really a wake up call if I had any lingering doubts about conspiracy theories having any basis in reality. It was no different than debating creationists. Even today it's no different. Let's say we were to take the argument of steel melting. They make the argument and I respond that steel doesn't need to melt in order to weaken the structural integrity of a building. Then they shift gears and say something like "Well, what about how they built the towers to sustain a plane hitting it." Creationists employ this exact style of debate. They bring up you can't have speciation, you show them examples of speciation, and then it's off to 'you can't add information to a genome!'  Bitch, please! To this day, I have yet to run into Twoofer who hasn't pulled this on every single time I present counter evidence. They will NEVER conced a point. It's as if 9/11 'Truth' is a religion.

Now, I don't care what your political position is. However, the best way to alienate potential converts is to use 9/11 as an argument for it. 9/11 being an inside job is not an argument for anarcho-capitalism, minarchism, communism, democratic socialism, anarchist communism, liberalism, conservatism, monarchism, national socialism, or even Zeitgeister Robo-communism. No matter the flavor, it's a non-sequitur It's not, bringing it up does nothing but make you and everyone else who subscribes to your political stance look like a group of cranks. So knock it the fuck off, please. 

However, I know people who are in the 'movement' are not going to listen to what I say and just accuse me of being a shill, disinformation agent, psyop..etc. They'll send the typical hate mail and threats to my e-mail. They'll also leave the always funny stupid comments like "The planes hitting the towers was like throwing a aluminum can at a steel beam." And a few anti-semites will accuse me of being a Zionist. So be my guest. Comments are open and will not be deleted. 9/11 Truthers are good and shrinking their own support. If you need any more rope to hang yourself with, let me know in the comments.

Cheers!

*Yes I know this is a false analogy. The People's Temple cult led by Jim Jones didn't use Kool-Aid for their mass suicide/murder finally, it was actually grape Flavor-Aid. 

I got a bite.

UPDATE: Noticing the lack of Zeitgeist during the last "ZDay" events I've decided to end the conversations with TZM. It's a dead movement, they've had their 15 minutes and it's slipped into the dustbin of history as just a minor blip in history. Phase 1 was a failure and it's time to move on to bust up other myths and collective delusions. My videos will stay up with comments disabled as my ode to their long standing history censorship. So long and thanks for all the death threats. 

Sort of. Socialists and communists for decades have attempted to confront Mises on his Economic Calculation Problem but miss the point of what Mises argument is. Otto Neurath, an Austrian-born (not Austrian school, thought I should clarify, the "article" they created gives the impression to someone Otto was a free-marketeer who disagreed with Mises) socialist economist who attempted to debate Mises is what they went with for a rebuttal. Otto concludes that a new system of calculation can develop in in place of missing prices. Zeitards contend that their super computer will somehow work itself out, once we find the right algorithm.

To this day, Austrian economists still contend Mises has not been addressed, even with citing Otto's attempt. Why? The calculation problem isn't about how complex the problem of distributing resources without a price system, it's about marginal utility.

Jacob Spinney has already addressed this in one of his videos, so I'll save myself typing.



Update:
For a more in-depth explanation which includes addressing Otto Neurath's argument, I provided you with a lecture by Joseph T. Salerno who wrote the post-script to Mises' article.