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Litmus Tests for Stupidity


TrashMaster G

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28 minutes ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

Interesting that you single out 2020. Does your litmus test on stupidity apply to 2016? Or is buying into the Russian collusion story acceptable?

 

 

Nothing interesting about it.  I limited to 2020 simply because it is current and because it is a different kind of allegation than '16.  I think it's clear that there were efforts in '16 by outsiders (Russians, especially) to INFLUENCE the election, but no serious charge of vote tampering, manufacturing, etc. And certainly not enough to swing key states to change the outcome. 

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1 minute ago, TrashMaster G said:

Nothing interesting about it.  I limited to 2020 simply because it is current and because it is a different kind of allegation than '16.  I think it's clear that there were efforts in '16 by outsiders (Russians, especially) to INFLUENCE the election, but no serious charge of vote tampering, manufacturing, etc. And certainly not enough to swing key states to change the outcome. 

Sounds like you're going with something like Dan Rather's "Fake but True" argument.  Mm'k.

 

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3 hours ago, PRONG HORN said:

12.  Couples having children with under 100K income.  

I personally would never have a child that brings in less than $200k a year, but everyone has their price.

 

Also, people that think one political party is capable of dipshittery but the other isn't. 

Edited by Hate
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1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

This is a good sign somebody is stupid.  Unlike a lot of other conspiracy theories, but much like the 9/11 crap, I have yet to hear an intelligent person, or even semi-intelligent person, make a solid case that it was a hoax.

One time my Qanon-believing in-law and her bf actually didn't quite deny it, but said that there should be a lot of questions about whether it was all that big or whether it really hurt the Jews all that much.  I pointed out to her that mutual acquaintances of ours, that we both knew in high school, and still know, that their grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and still collected payments from the German government as a result, up until her death.  That millions of people simply vanished, as evidenced by post-war census taking.  I also pointed out to her that the German government has never, ever actually denied it.  And that's not getting into the hundreds of thousands of Allied troops who directly liberated those camps and saw things first-hand, and heard first-hand accounts from the survivors.

Other theories can be entertaining, and maybe even not that stupid, but just ignorant or whimsical, but the Holocaust is a hoax crowd, that is 100% pure, unadulterated stupid.  The kind of stupid that should have them wearing some kind of sign on their chest, that shows everybody else that they are stupid, that lets employers know not to hire them, and stores not to allow them entry.

Wait, what were we talking about again?

Challenge them to go spend a couple of hours at the Holocaust museum in Houston, spending enough time to read and contemplate every exhibit.  

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4 hours ago, Lobo said:

The part of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists that never made sense to me is that they ignore the most obvious aspect.  Those four airplanes crashed into those four places.  All those people are gone.  All of that happened.  Now you can get into why it happened or what could have gone different, but I don't think there's all but a few dozen lunatics that at least acknowledge those two tall buildings aren't there anymore, there was a hole in the Pentagon for anyone who cared to go see it, and there was a group of people who used to be alive and now they aren't because they burst into flames in a Pennsylvania field. 

But the thing they never talk about is the Nextdoor.com Effect.  In these apartment buildings near these flight training centers, in 2001...a black guy couldn't ask to train on small equipment or roll up in a 1988 Fort Tempo without arousing suspicion...but 20 hard-core, akbar-chanting swarthy mutha-fuckas lived and trained for months and months and months and nobody dropped one dime of concern.  Nothing reached higher up than the property management team, let alone the FBI.  But that never gets talked about.  All we ever hear from these idiots is how jet fuel can't burn the WTC towers.  That's how I know the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are full of shit.  They try to explain an engineering conspiracy that isn't there when the most obvious thing in the world is staring them right in the face.  Apartment buildings that didn't rent to Jews in South Florida suddenly rent to Muslims named "Josh" & "Trevor" who pay every month on time, in cash, without eye contact, and never asked to have the fucking cable turned on.  We are the dumbest fucking country sometimes.  

Cool. Pretty sure I said I don't care and didn't want to discuss it.

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Challenge them to go spend a couple of hours at the Holocaust museum in Houston, spending enough time to read and contemplate every exhibit.  

That museum will give you goose bumps. The worst feeling is when you step into that train car and imagine another 100 people stuck on there with you....and then it got even worse.
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1 hour ago, Helobious said:

People that make claims on message boards and then say they don’t want to discuss or defend it because it “isn’t the right place” to do so. Well then why’d you post it in the first place. 

The point I was making is that there is much more room for discussion and examination of what happened on that day than there is for things like the moon landing or whether or not the earth is flat. And I agreed with OP that I don't really think it was an "inside job".

People that question some of the intricacies surrounding 9/11 or the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor should not be lumped in with those that think the earth is flat or beleive that we didn't land on the moon or that the Holocaust didn't happen. When it comes to conspiracy theories there is a lot of nuance involved and lumping all of them together and writing the practice off as a whole is at best an impediment to free thinking and at worst censorship.

So, with that said, I hope you would be able to understand why, in the context of this thread, I don't give a shit what anyone believes about 9/11 because it's besides the fucking point. And I don't feel like discussing it because I'm not sure what I believe or not - I haven't looked into it and examined it critically in awhile. We could do that on another thread I guess. I'm also guessing it would have come up here regardless of my comment. 

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9 minutes ago, Helobious said:

Yeah, I’m not old and I was raised in a sub 100k income household. And I’d say we lived very comfortably throughout my childhood. But we never went on ski trips or to Europe so I guess my parents just should have never had us. 

I mean, I guess he considers it a good method of greatly reducing minorities.

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59 minutes ago, ztejas said:

People that question some of the intricacies surrounding 9/11 or the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor should not be lumped in with those that think the earth is flat or beleive that we didn't land on the moon or that the Holocaust didn't happen. When it comes to conspiracy theories there is a lot of nuance involved and lumping all of them together and writing the practice off as a whole is at best an impediment to free thinking and at worst censorship.

1234.  So much nuance with conspiracy theories, but there's another factor - Occam's Razor.

9/11 - we can believe that 20 dudes got some airplane training, took advantage of relaxed security on the ground and in the air ($5 locks on the cockpit doors and 9/11 does not happen), and flew some planes into buildings (and lest we forget one dude flew a Cessna and crashed on the White House grounds while trying to hit the WH, so it wasn't unprecedented).  Or we can believe that a shit-ton of people came up with an intricate plan, covertly planted explosives, cut beams, etc. while going unnoticed in buildings that see tens of thousands of visitors every day at all hours of the day, with a lot of security (there was a truck bombing back in 1993 or 94), and then staged a hijacking of planes to crash into those buildings. 

Then there's the other side of things - JFK - there's honestly a lot of crazy shit surrounding his assassination, but unlike something like the 9/11 truthers, the Lunar landing truthers, etc.a lot of the weirder JFK shit can be boiled down to one or two people doing one or two things here and there.  Occam's Razor - Oswald was a nut, who did nutty things (going to Russia, Mexico City, taking a shot at the retired General, etc.), but at the end of the day he was more than capable of doing what he did by himself.   But if that's not good enough, he (and Ruby) had a lot of shady connections, did a lot of shady shit, and JFK had a lot of enemies that wanted him dead.  And if Ruby doesn't kill him, Oswald gets put to death, and the conspiracy stuff is nipped in the bud.

I will say this:  Having been a fan of the JFK stuff (around the time of the Stone movie), I saw a lot of people for whom JFK's assassination had a really deep impact on their lives - the whole end of "Camelot", some kind of loss of innocence for America (not long after we ramped up Vietnam, the Civil Rights stuff was getting huge, etc.).  And toss in Bobby Kennedy in '68, which really affected these people - it was like they couldn't win.  

The Stone movie came out not quite 30 years after JFK's death, and it was not a coincidence that so many people following the conspiracy stuff were in their 40s and 50s.  A lot of these people genuinely believed that America was on a bright path going forward with JFK (and later RFK), and then *boom* it all comes crashing down.  They don't want to believe it was some fucking little twerp with some screws loose.  They had to believe that more sinister, and larger, forces were at work, because it couldn't possibly be just Oswald (and then Sirhan Sirhan).  They wanted there to be better answers, bigger answers, JFK had to actually die for something larger-than-life, not because some little asswipe was angry at the world.

Sorry for the derail.

 

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4 hours ago, PRONG HORN said:

No not at all.  Just a good way to reduce the number of people who begin a sentence with “I mean”.

So what is your parents' excuse, Mr. Incomplete Sentence User?

Preach it up...

Edited by slorch
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9 hours ago, slorch said:

The 9-11 Museum fucked with me hard.

So did the holocaust museum in DC.

So might the pictures of the old lady whose genitals were burned off by McDonald's unreasonably hot coffee, which they had previously and repeatedly been warned about. And all she asked them for was enough to cover her medical bills, but McDonald's countered will a lowball offer and wouldn't throw her $100k or whatever, thus the lawsuit you think epitomizes frivolous lawsuits. 

Here's one picture - it doesn't show her scorched pussy, but those are out there somewhere if you care to dig around. I've seen them, and so I don't.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jqHC3ome9LU/UBSyTSXGfpI/AAAAAAAAFIg/Fm_clZXhghM/s320/mcdonaldsburns.jpg

(linked because gross)

Edited by Prepuce of Doom
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7 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

So might the pictures of the old lady whose genitals were burned off by McDonald's unreasonably hot coffee, which they had previously and repeatedly been warned about. And all she asked them for was enough to cover her medical bills, but McDonald's countered will a lowball offer and wouldn't throw her $100k or whatever, thus the lawsuit you think epitomizes frivolous lawsuits. 

Here's one picture - it doesn't show her scorched pussy, but those are out there somewhere if you care to dig around. I've seen them, and so I don't.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jqHC3ome9LU/UBSyTSXGfpI/AAAAAAAAFIg/Fm_clZXhghM/s320/mcdonaldsburns.jpg

(linked because gross)

I didn't comment on the lawsuit you fucking overreactive moron. IDGAF about the pictures either.
 

If you need a warning on a cup that the shit inside might be hot, you're an idiot.  Period.

Edited by slorch
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I didn't comment on the lawsuit you fucking overreactive moron. IDGAF about the pictures either.
 
If you need a warning on a cup that the shit inside might be hot, you're an idiot.  Period.

Hot, not a problem.

So hot that it can’t be consumed by a human and would cause flesh-peeling burns? Problem. Read the case, dumbfuck.
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10 minutes ago, slorch said:

I didn't comment on the lawsuit you fucking overreactive moron. IDGAF about the pictures either.
 

If you need a warning on a cup that the shit inside might be hot, you're an idiot.  Period.

A lack of warning wasn't the primary problem. It was that an accidental spill resulted in 3rd degree burns. Coffee should never be that hot, and McDonald's was told that before the incident. Lowering the temperature by 5-10 degrees would have kept the coffee hot enough without risking serious injury. But, by all means, boot straps away slorch. 

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The point I was making is that there is much more room for discussion and examination of what happened on that day than there is for things like the moon landing or whether or not the earth is flat. And I agreed with OP that I don't really think it was an "inside job".
People that question some of the intricacies surrounding 9/11 or the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor should not be lumped in with those that think the earth is flat or beleive that we didn't land on the moon or that the Holocaust didn't happen. When it comes to conspiracy theories there is a lot of nuance involved and lumping all of them together and writing the practice off as a whole is at best an impediment to free thinking and at worst censorship.
So, with that said, I hope you would be able to understand why, in the context of this thread, I don't give a shit what anyone believes about 9/11 because it's besides the fucking point. And I don't feel like discussing it because I'm not sure what I believe or not - I haven't looked into it and examined it critically in awhile. We could do that on another thread I guess. I'm also guessing it would have come up here regardless of my comment. 
Ok truther.
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6 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

A lack of warning wasn't the primary problem. It was that an accidental spill resulted in 3rd degree burns. Coffee should never be that hot, and McDonald's was told that before the incident. Lowering the temperature by 5-10 degrees would have kept the coffee hot enough without risking serious injury. But, by all means, boot straps away slorch. 

Just fuck y'all.

 

The post wasn't about the fucking lawsuit.  Sensitive lawyer types sure do get wound up about the integrity of their money chasing,  even if they are the ones who bring it up.

ya like this one better?

10_jpeg032f2f561e164de90869cd19de162919.

Edited by slorch
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2 minutes ago, slorch said:

Just fuck y'all.

 

The post wasn't about the fucking lawsuit.  Sensitive lawyer types sure do get wound up about the integrity of their money chasing,  even if they are the ones who bring it up.

I don't think anyone said your original post was about the lawsuit. You responded to someone providing another example of something that should hit you hard if you actually look into it. I don't know why you took @Prepuce of Doom's post personally. 

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2 hours ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

So might the pictures of the old lady whose genitals were burned off by McDonald's unreasonably hot coffee, which they had previously and repeatedly been warned about. And all she asked them for was enough to cover her medical bills, but McDonald's countered will a lowball offer and wouldn't throw her $100k or whatever, thus the lawsuit you think epitomizes frivolous lawsuits. 

Here's one picture - it doesn't show her scorched pussy, but those are out there somewhere if you care to dig around. I've seen them, and so I don't.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jqHC3ome9LU/UBSyTSXGfpI/AAAAAAAAFIg/Fm_clZXhghM/s320/mcdonaldsburns.jpg

(linked because gross)

Should have used a balm.

 

giphy (26) (1).gif

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15 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

1234.  So much nuance with conspiracy theories, but there's another factor - Occam's Razor.

9/11 - we can believe that 20 dudes got some airplane training, took advantage of relaxed security on the ground and in the air ($5 locks on the cockpit doors and 9/11 does not happen), and flew some planes into buildings (and lest we forget one dude flew a Cessna and crashed on the White House grounds while trying to hit the WH, so it wasn't unprecedented).  Or we can believe that a shit-ton of people came up with an intricate plan, covertly planted explosives, cut beams, etc. while going unnoticed in buildings that see tens of thousands of visitors every day at all hours of the day, with a lot of security (there was a truck bombing back in 1993 or 94), and then staged a hijacking of planes to crash into those buildings. 

Then there's the other side of things - JFK - there's honestly a lot of crazy shit surrounding his assassination, but unlike something like the 9/11 truthers, the Lunar landing truthers, etc.a lot of the weirder JFK shit can be boiled down to one or two people doing one or two things here and there.  Occam's Razor - Oswald was a nut, who did nutty things (going to Russia, Mexico City, taking a shot at the retired General, etc.), but at the end of the day he was more than capable of doing what he did by himself.   But if that's not good enough, he (and Ruby) had a lot of shady connections, did a lot of shady shit, and JFK had a lot of enemies that wanted him dead.  And if Ruby doesn't kill him, Oswald gets put to death, and the conspiracy stuff is nipped in the bud.

I will say this:  Having been a fan of the JFK stuff (around the time of the Stone movie), I saw a lot of people for whom JFK's assassination had a really deep impact on their lives - the whole end of "Camelot", some kind of loss of innocence for America (not long after we ramped up Vietnam, the Civil Rights stuff was getting huge, etc.).  And toss in Bobby Kennedy in '68, which really affected these people - it was like they couldn't win.  

The Stone movie came out not quite 30 years after JFK's death, and it was not a coincidence that so many people following the conspiracy stuff were in their 40s and 50s.  A lot of these people genuinely believed that America was on a bright path going forward with JFK (and later RFK), and then *boom* it all comes crashing down.  They don't want to believe it was some fucking little twerp with some screws loose.  They had to believe that more sinister, and larger, forces were at work, because it couldn't possibly be just Oswald (and then Sirhan Sirhan).  They wanted there to be better answers, bigger answers, JFK had to actually die for something larger-than-life, not because some little asswipe was angry at the world.

Sorry for the derail.

 

word up my G

Its what happened versus believing there is a calculated effort to make something happen. People crave order and reason so we make up shit to make the latter seem reasonable. 

The litmus test there is simple. The idea that somehow groups of powerful people can orchestrate, execute and contain all these activities is not logical whatsoever. 

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23 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

This is a good sign somebody is stupid.  Unlike a lot of other conspiracy theories, but much like the 9/11 crap, I have yet to hear an intelligent person, or even semi-intelligent person, make a solid case that it was a hoax.

My mom had an uncle who was a Holocaust denier. He never tried to prove his belief. [Red was a marine (on protective detail) on a transport boat at the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Claimed to have locked eyes with a a Japanese gunner. Served in the Pacific throughout WWII, and saw Hiroshima post nuke].

When he said the Holocaust was a story that diverted the world’s condemnation of what the US had done with our nuclear attack, I didn’t argue. (In part because the limit of his argument has merit, and didn’t  speak to the Holocaust being fact). 

I imagine that scene scarred his soul, and he was left with rage that the bombings weren’t viewed with the outrage he thought they deserved. Whatever I might have said would have also focused on something other than nuclear warfare, and would have twisted the knife in his heart.

Both things are true. The Holocaust and our nuclear attack were atrocities. We have an excuse for the nukes that we are willing to believe. Red didn’t buy that excuse.

Ridicule him if you want. I think he’s wrong, but only so far as the Halocaust.

Red was smart enough to know the finer that andouille is diced, the more flavor it offers gumbo. 

Edited by Willfully Horn
Andouille
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2 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

My mom had an uncle who was a Holocaust denier. He never tried to prove his belief. [Red was a marine (on protective detail) on a transport boat at the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Claimed to have locked eyes with a a Japanese gunner. Served in the Pacific throughout WWII, and saw Hiroshima post nuke].

When he said the Holocaust was a story that diverted the world’s condemnation of what the US had done with our nuclear attack, I didn’t argue. (In part because the limit of his argument has merit, and didn’t  speak to the Holocaust being fact). 

I imagine that scene scarred his soul, and he was left with rage that the bombings weren’t viewed with the outrage he thought they deserved. Whatever I might have said would have also focused on something other than nuclear warfare, and would have twisted the knife in his heart.

Both things are true. The Holocaust and our nuclear attack were atrocities. We have an excuse for the nukes that we are willing to believe. Red didn’t buy that excuse.

Ridicule him if you want. I think he’s wrong, but only so far as the Halocaust.

Red was smart enough to know the finer that andouille is diced, the more flavor it offers gumbo. 

Csb.

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On 11/13/2020 at 7:46 PM, atomheartbevo said:

I think people still remember the horror stories of the Thalidomide shit, or rather stories their parents passed down.  Or they are stupid.  WhyNotboth.gif. Or they are looking for an explanation for something that is a result of "sometimes shit just happens", maybe they feel guilty, or they want to blame someone or something.

YES....

Drives me bonkers.

It's that dumb people are jealous and envious of smart people.  At some level, they think the smart people are intentionally fucking them over.  They're not entirely wrong in some cases, including corporate and governmental fuckery.

But because they are too stupid to understand the subtleties of that fuckery, they extrapolate things like Thalidomide, or even tylenol poisoning, into this vast conspiracy of shadowy doctors/pharmas/governments/illuminati that are trying to poison them with standard drugs.

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On 11/13/2020 at 2:20 PM, Brisketexan said:

Cincinnati-Chili_EXPS_TOHAM20_11740_E11_

 

This a litmus test for obesity, not stupidity. A late night trip to Skyline is one of life’s great and simple pleasures. 
 

Also to the vaccine issue, what if stupidity is caused by a vaccine injury? Checkmate.

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5 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Jet contrails are evidence of the government seeding clouds in order to affect the behavior of citizens. I've met 3 or 4 people in the last 18 months who believe this. I don't give them the time of day anymore.

2 hours ago, TrashMaster G said:

Another good example.

Fantastic example of stupidity.

They believe that somehow the government has built massive chemical storage tanks in aircraft over 75 years, ranging in size from 2-seater aircraft to airliners, that can dump chemicals for hours on long flights, in front of the whole wide world, that those aircraft are loaded with this chemicals in full view of passengers and crew, and that millions of aircraft mechanics, engineers, pilots, airline staff (stewardesses, etc.), manufacturers, etc. are all in on this conspiracy for the last 80-90 years.  And somehow, those chemicals wouldn't evaporate/dissipate on their journey tens of thousands of feet down to the ground.  And if they were somehow that potent, people would not sample the air and figure out what the chemicals were.

I've ran into a few people who are "just asking questions".  I point out that it'd be far easier for for the government to just get a fairly small amount of anonymous people employed at various water treatment plants at various cities, and bring in anonymous-looking shipments of chemicals, and dump them in the water without anybody being wiser, and without the public ever seeing.  I even joke that it could be labeled "Flouride" and nobody would know.  But they want to believe a massive conspiracy that involves millions of people keeping their mouths shut.

Some of them know how stupid they sound, and will do the "well, the government is actually doing some kind of terraforming to mess with the atmosphere", and it's like "well, in reality, the government would declare some kind of emergency and openly do whatever they felt they needed to do."

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5 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Jet contrails are evidence of the government seeding clouds in order to affect the behavior of citizens. I've met 3 or 4 people in the last 18 months who believe this. I don't give them the time of day anymore.
 

What in the name of DKR would generate that bizarre bs to be the subject of anyone’s casual conversation?

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what do the chemtrail chemicals do to us anyway?  I mean, what's the angle?  Is it supposed to be like flouride, where it pacifies us and makes easier to control or what?  

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What in the name of DKR would generate that bizarre bs to be the subject of anyone’s casual conversation?
One time (when I met two nut jobs who believe this bullshit) was on the patio of a local pub. I casually knew these guys already, but it was just a bit of small talk on a nice afternoon with clear skies and cool contrail patterns. It went something like this.

Me: "that's a pretty awesome sky."
Nut job#1: "they're flying in crossing patterns now. Maximizes the coverage."
Nut job #2: "well it's March. In spring they change their seeding waves."
Me: "Excuse me?"
NJ1: "Those clouds are nerve agents spread by the government. We've got about an hour before we'll all be inhaling the dioxins. Better go inside soon. "
NJ2: "they're layering now. Y'see how some are thicker than others? They're making a lattice."

Me: "have a nice day (grabbed my beer & moved far away.

A few weeks later NJ1 tried to engage me again. "You seem skeptical, but let me tell you..I know a guy who works for a chemical company that no one in the world knows about. They make this stuff and ship it in Amazon and FedEx trucks so no one can trace it."

I just walked away & told him to seek help.
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