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I found this thanks to Phil Plait's indisposable Bad Astronomy blog. It's a countdown of the 30 greatest conspiracy theories in history, compiled and presented by the Daily Telegraph.
How are they defining "greatest" exactly? No conspiracy theory is great, except in the depth of its lunacy, so maybe that's it. Or maybe they're going by how well-known a theory is by the general public. By either reckoning, they picked the proper #1: the nutty and unsubstantiated claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The classics all made the list: the Moon landing hoax, the JFK assassination, the looming North American Union; plus one or two I'd never heard of. Who knew, for instance, that the U.S. government has half a million plastic coffins piled up outside Atlanta for when they start executing the population en masse? I mean, I'd heard all about the plans to herd us all into secret concentration camps, but plastic coffins? Where are our tax dollars going, exactly?
Here are a few of my personal favorites that didn't make the list: Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Kennedy all by himself, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by members of Al-Qaeda, and we actually landed on the Moon half a dozen times from 1969 to 1972.
Nah, who the hell would believe that load'a shit? | |
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The A.V. Club published an interview with Rolling Stone’s star political writer Matt Taibbi today. Check it out if you haven’t already, it’s a really good read. I’ve become a fan of Taibbi in the last few weeks. His coverage of the presidential election is the only reason to read Rolling Stone most weeks.
The interview focuses on Taibbi’s new book, The Great Derangement, which I’m planning on picking up in the next few days. In it, Taibbi writes about some of the disturbed American sub-cultures that are nearest and dearest to my heart, namely John Hagee’s congregation at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and those laughable, lovable lunatics in the 9/11 Truth Movement.
He talks 9/11 Truth a good bit in the interview, actually. Get a load of this: A.V. Club: You’d think a movement devoted to seeking truth would encourage debate as a way to arrive at the truth, rather than trying to suppress whatever doesn’t already align with their own views. Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That’s not to denigrate defense attorneys, but that’s what they do. It’s exactly the same thing that Truthers do. They just take the 9/11 Commission Report piece by piece, and they try to break down links in that evidentiary chain that compose the official story, but they never really try to find out what happened. They’re just trying to convince you that the official story couldn’t possibly be true. For instance, the stuff about Hani Hanjour—the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon. They’re really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn’t have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen. They’re like, “Oh, it could have been a remote-controlled plane.” Offhandedly, they’ll say that. [Laughs.] Like that’s a very simple thing. It’s really weird. Take a few minutes to read the whole interview, and give Taibbi’s Rolling Stone articles (like this frank, scathing assessment of John McCain from last month), a look, too, if you’ve never read him before. He’s a funny, eloquent writer who can fluently talk politics while swearing a goddamn blue streak. No wonder I’m an envious admirer. | |
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Sure, sure, our newspaper here in Hagerstown, the Old Gray Lady with Cortical Dementia, the Herald-Mail, is useless except when put to a practical use as a birdcage liner, kindling, or emergency toilet paper. But we proud citizens of Washington County, Maryland, can at least cheer ourselves with the knowledge that our local paper, shit rag that it is, ain't the American Free Press.
As I've mentioned before, the American Free Press is a weekly publication put out by old school racist and conspiracy theorist Willis Carto. It trumpets itself as "America's Last Real Newspaper," the only remaining outlet for the true voice of the people, now that the media is dominated by conglomerates and corporate interests. I was curious this morning about what's really going on in America, so I checked out the top story in America's Last Real Newspaper:
RON PAUL FORGES AHEAD
AUSTIN, Tex.—The Ron Paul Liberty Ball held here showed that the spirited supporters of the Texas congressman will not entertain the notion of giving up, despite the dominant media’s obvious attempts to pretend Paul does not exist and predetermine winners and losers with poll results that bear little resemblance to reality.
Just three Republicans are still in the race—Paul, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. However, the television news media now give Huckabee and McCain exalted status. Even as Huckabee loses steam, Paul is rarely mentioned. News commentators often say things like “Huckabee is a distant third” right after Romney and McCain are lauded. And Paul’s name is left out, as the media slyly deceives its viewers.
You can click the headline to read the rest, if you're interested.
The AFP has been Congressman Paul's number one cheerleader ever since his quixotic and strange campaign for the presidency began. Even now, with his defeat a mathematical certainty, they continue to spend ink and paper on propping up Paul's hopeless push for the Republican nomination. Why? Because Paul is the only candidate in either party who has ever even so much as cast a glance in the AFP's direction.
The story recycles the AFP's standard gripes about corporate media trying to silence or excluse Ron Paul, and has a lot to say on the enthusiasm of the Paul supporters who attended the Liberty Ball, which was apparently held in a coffee shop in Austin. The Ball was so emphatically unimportant that Paul himself declined to attend, sending his son to press the flesh and brag about how much money the campaign has raised on the internet, and what a great doctor his dad is.
Nowhere does the story mention the fact that Ron Paul has not won any of the primaries contested so far, and only finished second twice, and third once, before Mitt Romney withdrew from the race. Paul has actually finished behind Romney in several states which held their primaries after Romney ended his campaign. He's losing to people who aren't even running anymore. Even if Paul somehow swept every remaining primary and won all 947 available delegates, he would still be short of the 1,191 needed to clinch the nomination. The best he can hope for, the never-gonna-happen dream scenario, is to deny the nomination to McCain and force a brokered convention, where the Republican party would gather to nominate someone who would definitely not be Ron Paul.
The media isn't responsible for the failure of Ron Paul's presidential campaign. The people of the Republican party, in state after state after state, have said unambiguously that they want someone other than Ron Paul to be their nominee. He's won no primaries, nearly no delegates, and he has no chance. He's still running at this point because attending the occasional fundraiser or campaign rally beats sitting in congressional committee meetings all fucking day. If your day job is being a member of the House of Representatives, who the hell wouldn't rather be running for president?
In conclusion, fuck the American Free Press. | |
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Rick has been doing a great job the last few months at his Bent Corner blog writing about what a crazy old coot Ron Paul is. Congressman Paul’s most recent display of televised psychosis was this past weekend on Meet the Press, when, among other things, he claimed that Abraham Lincoln started the American Civil War. Lincoln apparently did this through a diabolical scheme of getting elected President of the United States, then cleverly waiting for Confederate troops in the seceded state of South Carolina to open fire on Fort Sumter. Starting a war by waiting for the other side to start the war . . . he was an evil genius, that Abe Lincoln. (Helluva wrestler, too.)  Not only did Paul blame Lincoln for starting the war, he blamed him for starting it for the noblest reason he could possibly have started it — to free the millions of African Americans enslaved throughout the southern U.S. The bloody Civil War, with its calamitous loss of life and resources, was unnecessary to end slavery, Congressman Paul said. Instead, Lincoln could have freed the slaves by having the government buy them from their owners and releasing them. Except that by the time Lincoln made it to office, the war had already started. Southern state legislatures began declaring their secession shortly after Lincoln was elected, months before he was inaugurated. I doubt they would have been receptive to offers from their most hated enemy to relieve them of their vast force of wage-free labor in exchange for fair market value. Plus, as Rick points out in his article, wouldn’t buying the slaves, even if only to free them, legitimize the practice of treating human beings like livestock? Lincoln didn’t start the Civil War, and if he had, it would have been to restore the Union, not to free the slaves. He evolved into the Great Emancipator over the course of the war, but Abe was hardly an abolitionist when the shit started going down. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” he wrote in 1862, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” But faulting Lincoln and his then-non-existent desire to end slavery for the start of the Civil War wasn’t all Ron Paul had up his sleeve for us this week. As Rick writes about in another article posted today, Congressman Paul called in to Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning and defended his peculiar version of American history against guest host David Shushter, who had previously referred to Paul quite correctly as a “crackpot,” and co-host Jack Jacobs. Paul defended his “Lincoln started it” assertion by claiming that the MSNBC hosts hadn’t read “the right history books.” He also told Jack Jacobs that he was not “brave enough” to read those history books, the ones which told the real story. Technorati Tags:  2008 Election,  Abraham Lincoln,  Civil War,  Conspiracy Theories,  Politics,  Ron Paul | |
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Twenty-seven years ago today, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon outside the Dakota building in New York, as Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were returning home from several hours spent at a recording studio. Unless you see things the way Steve Lightfoot does, that is, in which case you know that it was really Stephen King who shot Lennon on this date in 1980, with some help from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who were apparently motivated by their incredible disappointment in Lennon’s solo work compared to the shit he did with the Beatles. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but in case you missed it, Lightfoot maintains a website devoted to pushing this theory, a totally preposterous and unsupported idea that he has become thoroughly convinced is the truth. The website is essentially a push for his self-published pamphlet detailing the “evidence” for the “King killed Lennon” theory, but there’s enough examples on the site to get a good idea of how completely fucking nuts Steve Lightfoot is. Skimming the site gave me flashbacks to when I worked at Pilot, and once or twice a year this guy would pass through, always dressed in ragged black sweats and a dark trench coat. He was usually unshaven, and had long, stringy brown hair which he pulled back into a ponytail. From the three or four conversations I had with him over the years, I gathered that his last name was Bridges, but that’s the only information on him I’ve ever had. He was of a similar mentality to Lightfoot, and found evidence for his pet conspiracy theory in the same sort of places as Lightfoot does. The kooky premise closest to Bridges’s heart was the old 9/11 inside job theory. A few months after 9/11/2001, Bridges showed up at Pilot. He told me he felt sorry for the people in the Twin Towers, because they were “just extras.” Then he asked me if I wanted to see a page from a script, and handed me a white envelope. Folded inside the envelope was a page torn from a glossy newsmagazine, Newsweek or Time or one of those. The subject was the then-brand new War on Terror, and might have pertained somehow to the anti-Taliban action in Afghanistan, I don’t really remember. What I do remember is that Bridges had taken a red pen and circled or underlined random words, both in the headline and throughout the body of the article. These, he explained, were “codes.” “I’ve been decoding the documents for close to twenty years, and I know they’ll never catch me,” he told me as he folded the article, tucked it back into its envelope, and returned the envelope to his coat pocket. He was a nice guy, and one hell of an interesting dude to talk to. I wonder sometimes about Bridges, that crazy bastard. I wonder where he is, and how many more of him there are out there, just wandering around. | |
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Sure, I've liked Bill Maher for years. He hosts Real Time on HBO, one of the few shows on television where people from different viewpoints come together to actually discuss shit rather than trade talking points; and before that, he hosted Politically Incorrect, the predecessor to his current show, on Comedy Central and ABC. And, lest I forget, he's funny as hell.
This past week, my like for Maher grew into genuine admiration. On his October 19 show, Maher and his guests were interrupted and repeatedly heckled by a rude lot of 9/11 Truthers who shouted from the audience, demanding to know "what happened at Building 7," and declaring that 9/11 was a hoax and a government cover-up. Bill reacted to the hecklers the same way anyone should react to propogators of the debunked and discredited myths of the 9/11 Truth movement: by kicking them the fuck out of his studio. Let's watch:
Technorati Tags:  9/11,  9/11 Truth, conspiracy theories,  humor,  video | |
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People who interrupt Bill Maher tapings yelling about the controlled demolition of Building 7 are easy to spot, but what about people who are still predominantly sane, reasonable folks, but find themselves drawn to the ideas of groups like the 9/11 Truth Movement, or, God forbid, Dan Brown? There must be some way to check yourself from time to time before you go charging off the deep end. As it turns out, there is, for I have created . . .  The Conspiracy Theorist Self-Test Answer the following questions with a Yes or a No. 1. Do you regard The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a reliable historical document, yet mistrust The 9/11 Commission Report? 2. Do you regularly purchase aluminum foil, despite never having leftovers? 3. Do you find barcodes reminiscent of the mark of the beast? 4. Do you consider the flatness/roundness of the Earth to be an unsettled issue? 5. Do you consider Capricorn One to be a documentary? 6. Do you consider Loose Change to be a documentary? 7. Have you ever referred to David Icke for any reason other than to ridicule him? 8. Do you think Buzz Aldrin was out of line for punching Bart Sibrel in the face? 9. Is your answer to the question “Who shot JFK?” more than three words long? 10. Can you list several eerie coincidences between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations? 11. If so, do you actually give a shit about any of these coincidences? 12. Do you think John Lennon was murdered by the guy who wrote The Shining? 13. Do you regularly rely on The American Free Press or WorldNetDaily as a source of news? 14. Have you ever speculated that the gated and heavily wooded mountain road near your house is actually the entrance to one of the secret internment camps constructed by the government to house the enslaved population in the Last Days? 15. Has anything Alex Jones has ever said made the slightest bit of sense to you? 16. Are you a member of the Constitution Party? 17. Do you listen to the Beatles played backwards more often than forwards? 18. Did you ever praise The X-Files for its realism? 19. Do you consider that trick where you fold a $20 bill to look like burning skyscrapers to be evidence of anything? 20. Are you planning on leaving a comment about what a clueless dupe I am at the conclusion of this article? If you answered Yes to any of the above questions, it is time for a course correction, my friend — otherwise it’s next stop: Nutburg. Population: You.
Technorati Tags: conspiracy theories, humor | |
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When a fringe conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones or the makers of Loose Change, or a bigot like David Duke cites a newspaper article to support his contention that George W. Bush planned 9/11 to help the Jews steal Iraq’s oil, say, chances are that article was published in the American Free Press. Nationalist, racist, free from the restrictive standards of actual journalism, it is the paper of record for politically minded ignorant lunatics all across the United States.  The American Free Press has only been published since 2001, but its roots reach back over fifty years. It was founded by far-right author and activist Willis Carto. Carto was an admirer of pro-Nazi writer Francis Parker Yockey, and was so impressed with Yockey’s book Imperium (isn’t that the perfect neo-fascist book title?) that he wrote one of his own, titled Profiles in Populism, which included glowing biographies of Thomas Jefferson, as well as Catholic priest/radio personality/Third Reich cheerleader Charles Coughlin, and industrialist and candid anti-Semite Henry Ford. In 1955 Carto founded Liberty Lobby, a nationalist and white supremacist political organization. He also started his own publishing house, Noontide Press, which reprinted Yockey’s Imperium as well as Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem and the completely discredited and exposed hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. | |
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It's been a few days since the 9/11 anniversary, so I feel justified in diving back into the politics surrounding the event, and also the swaying tower of bullshit built-up by the conspiracy-minded 9/11 Truth Movement. A few days before the anniversary, I read an article on the excellent website American Chronicle (to which I am happy to contribute) written by 9/11 Truther and member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Joel Hirschhorn, repeating many of the same false claims and asking many of the already-answered questions about the Twin Towers and WTC 7: molten steel found at the bottom of the rubble, thermate residue detected in the wreckage of Building 7, the falls of the towers and Building 7 exhibiting "all the classic signs" of controlled demolitions, what proof is there that the government wasn't involved?, and on and on and on. I'm working up to another lengthy and vitriolic rebuttal of this sort of baseless, irrational horseshit, but in the meantime I invite you to check out the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, and then go to a website like 911Myths, Debunking 9/11, or the excellent Popular Mechanics special report "Debunking the 9/11 Myths," which is now also a book, to see why none of the claims of even the most educated and scholarly 9/11 Truthers hold water. I also invite you to take a moment to laugh at these misguided imbeciles and watch this hilarious spot-on parody of Loose Change, produced by humor blogger and contributor to Cracked.com, Maddox, entitled Unfastened Coins: | |
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Pretty much any cockamamie conspiracy theory is likely to piss me off a little bit, but I'm especially offended by the ones that claim the NASA manned moon landings during the Apollo program were an elaborate hoax. Not only do such hoax theories fly in the face of mountains of evidence that the Apollo landings took place and were 100% genuine, they also display callous disrespect for the people who lost their lives in pursuit of those moon landings. The three astronauts — Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee — who died in the Apollo 1 fire, plus those involved in the program who died in airplane crashes during the 1960s, were a part of something real, a project that sought to do something incredible and unprecedented (and since unmatched in courage and audacity), not to defraud the public and embezzle billions from tax payers.
How rare it is that a government agency is able to accomplish anything, no matter how menial, these days; to think that 40 years ago one was able to land people on the fucking Moon and bring them back home again is a bit incredible. But it really happened. There is an excellent video series posted to YouTube entitled Lunar Legacy that does a good job debunking some of the most commonly held moon landing hoax theories. The synthesized narrator voice gets a little annoying, as does some of the music, but it's mostly a well presented, well argued piece. It's in five parts, all of which I've posted below.
Part One:
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Shitting on tax protesters and reading the feeble rebuttals from kooky folks like Anonymous the last two weeks has been so much fun that I want to chase that feeling. So I did some reading, some web research, and it turns out there’s a huge area of nutty conspiracy theories that I have barely touched on, but which definitely warrants some attention. I refer, of course, to Little Green Men. Or are they gray? Whatever — the point is, they’re here and they’ve been here for a long time. Their highly advanced technology provided the basis for our development of stealth airplanes, and they even signed a treaty with the United States government in the 1950s to allow them to legally abduct cows and citizens to conduct experiments. How do we know so much about these aliens despite the fact that their existence has never been proven nor acknowledged by the government or any reputable agency? We know from the testimony of a few brave men — patriots, heroes, citizens of Earth willing to stand in the face of alien and government oppression to tell the truth. And today I will share with you the tales of two of these brave men. | |
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ATTENTION “ANONYMOUS” AND OTHER TAX PROTESTERS — Here’s where you find the law that doesn’t exist: A disgruntled reader – a certain “Anonymous” – commented on an article from the day before yesterday. Here’s what he said, to save you the trouble of looking it up: You are wrong!
The Federal reserve is a private bank. I haven't paid taxes for over 11 years now. Regular income taxes don't apply to the private sector.
You need to check your facts before writing any more shit. Go find the law and show us, we are waiting. In the meantime, after you get tired of searching for a law that doesn't exist, watch the documentary "Freedom To Fascism" by Aaron Russo. The article being commented upon was about Operation Northwoods and has nothing to do with Aaron Russo or tax protests, but I’m happy to respond nevertheless. I agree that the Federal Reserve is a private bank. I’m bothered by that, but one thing Russo’s film conveniently overlooks is the amount of oversight Congress regularly exercises over the Fed. I’d still rather the government print its own money instead of borrowing it from the Federal Reserve, but I don’t see it as the evil beast bent on enslaving the people that Russo and his buddies do. And anyway, with Congress and the Supreme Court and the President and the CIA and the IRS already in town, what’s one more evil beast? Regarding this “no such law” horseshit, I searched for about thirty seconds last week and discovered exactly where the laws requiring us to pay income tax are. They are printed in English for everyone to see in Title 26 of the United States Code – that’s the United States Code, the law of the land, not the so-called “IRS code” that so many tax protesters and conspiracy theorists are constantly claiming is irrelevant and non-binding. The income tax is not imposed by the IRS, but by the United States Code which everyone is bound to follow. When people say the IRS code is irrelevant, what they are claiming is that the law of the United States for whatever reason does not apply to them. This is, to put it politely, horseshit. Since I imagine people like Anonymous aren’t likely to take someone else’s word on where the tax laws are (unless it’s Aaron Russo telling them there are no such laws), feel free to look it up for yourself at any law library, or online at one of the many searchable copies of the U.S. Code available. My favorite is the one from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, on the House of Representatives website. It’s right here, just click the Search link and type in the Title and Section you’re looking for. What might the relevant titles and sections be, you ask? After the break, I’ve not only got the sections of Title 26 that impose the income tax on most of you – this means you, individuals in the private sector – but the relevant text of the statutes, as found in the U.S. Code, in all their boring-as-fuck legalistic glory. You want to see these laws you say don’t exist? Read ‘em and weep, tax protesters. | |
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I published a version of yesterday’s post on American Chronicle and have already received email from amateur conspiracy theorists presuming to point out that their various “alternative explanations” are not only completely reasonable, but true. This one fellow, who seemed earnest enough and at least didn’t come off as pissed at me for belittling his beliefs, sent me a PDF file of the infamous Top Secret memo sent to the Secretary of Defense by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 detailing Operation Northwoods. Northwoods, for the three or four of you who have avoided being beaten over the head with it by 9/11 conspiracy theorists, was a proposed secret military project to provide a pretense for U.S. military action against Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba. It called for a series of staged “false flag” events to give the impression that the Cuban government was hostile to the United States and posed an imminent threat, therefore giving the U.S. the justification to invade the island and kick Castro’s commie ass out of power. Among other actions, the plan calls for phony acts of sabotage and terrorism to be carried out inside and near to the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, including sinking American dummy ships and holding funerals for non-existent victims to drum up public support in the States for a Cuban invasion. All this is perfectly immoral and nefarious, typical of the trustworthy, stand-up government we’re fortunate to have here in the good ol’ U.S. of A, but the part of most interest to conspiracy nuts is when the plan calls for the destruction of a drone aircraft, supposedly loaded with civilian passengers and shot down by Cuba. Before the shoot-down, the passengers — actually government agents traveling under aliases — would be off-loaded to a duplicate aircraft and flown safely to an undisclosed location. Some contend this precise thing happened on September 11, 2001. The plan for Northwoods doesn’t speak well for the U.S. government. But conspiracy theorists who cite it as evidence for an “inside job” on 9/11 miss two very important points: 1) Operation Northwoods was rejected and never carried out; 2) Operation Northwoods has nothing to do with September 11. 9/11 Truthers, I beg you — I fucking beg you — not to waste your breath trying to convince me that our government is staffed by immoral, opportunistic, contemptible motherfuckers. I know. The Tuskegee experiments, gentrification of American Indians, arresting Japanese Americans and holding them in internment camps during World War II, the appallingly inhumane conditions of POW camps at Andersonville and Camp Douglas during the Civil War — history is full of government-sanctioned atrocities. I don’t argue that our government isn’t capable of committing a horrific act of mass-murder like 9/11; I argue that they didn’t. So please, spare me your Operation Northwoods bullshit, 9/11 Truthers. It’s a weak induction at best and it proves nothing about 9/11. If you want me to believe that the government perpetrated 9/11, then show me some actual evidence that the government perpetrated 9/11, not evidence that they planned to perpetrate something vaguely reminiscent of 9/11 over forty years ago. That’s not convincing; that’s pathetic. | |
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I have nothing against conspiracy theories or those who promote them, in spirit. There are things about the attitude I rather admire — the questioning of the obvious, the determination to peer behind the curtain and see what’s really going on. My admiration is tempered somewhat by the fact that nearly every conspiracy theory is poorly conceived, misguided and spectacularly wrong, but I still can’t blame the theorists for trying. If you’ll allow me a minor revision, there is something fundamental to conspiracy theories that I have an issue with: the word “theory.” In science, a theory is a logical explanation for something, formulated from evidence and objective observation. By that reckoning, I think a better term for what men like Alex Jones, David Icke and Aaron Russo peddle is “conspiracy delusion.” | |
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Since the 15th was on a Sunday and yesterday was an obscure holiday in Washington, D.C. called Emancipation Day, which celebrates the day in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln ordered all slaves in town to be freed and paid the former slave owners 300 bucks a head for their trouble, today is Tax Day. I filed my taxes like three months ago and have long since received my state and federal refunds, but there are always those who insist on waiting until the last possible second. I’m not sure why this is, other than blatant slothfulness, since the vast majority of people in the U.S. have paid their taxes already by having them automatically deducted from their paychecks, so filing late only means you’ll have to wait longer for your refund. Not everyone gets a refund, I realize, even following the progressive and compassionate tax cuts championed by our saint-like chief executive, which put a whopping couple of hundred dollars back in the hands of thousands of middle class families, most of whom no doubt made use of their newfound financial security to make a car payment or purchase a new pair of shoes. But even if you wind up owing, isn’t it better to just get it over with? I visited Ashley at the library yesterday and there were still people coming in looking for tax forms. If it’s the day before the deadline and you haven’t even gotten the forms yet . . . all I can do is applaud. You are an inspiration to slackers and procrastinators the world over. | |
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