I think #18 is the best one. I don't like Bush either (not many people in America do), but there is PLENTY of perfectly factual material about the man that critics can cite. Spinning these fantastic conspiracy theories about him just makes it appear that there is no factual basis for disliking Bush.
Libertarianism today is being pulled down by two groups of nutters: 9-11 truthers and gold bugs. That's too bad because I and - I suspect - the majority of Americans, believe in the basic philosophy of libetarianism. But then people go to a libertarian forum like the Daily Paul and recoil. They think, "if that's what libertarianism is, then I don't want any part of it."
Half the posts there are by people whose entire knowledge of physics seems to consist of having looked up the melting point of steel in Wikipedia. But that doesn't stop them from spinning these complicated and completely improbable scenarios for how the WTC was brought down, while rejecting out of hand the obvious explanation, that extremists commandeered airplanes and flew them into the buildings.
The other half latch onto whatever the newspaper's headlines were that day and declare that it signals the "last chance to load up on gold." It is "inevitable" that the dollar will collapse, they claim, the only point open for debate being whether it will happen this week or the next. But gold has "intrinsic value," which will save us all if we just buy, buy, buy. (And they just happen to know where we can buy that gold too.)
I'm not a physicist (I minored in physics, majored in economics), so I'll leave it to the engineers to refute the 9-11 truthers. However, I am an economist, and I've written a paper titled Gold Does Not Have Intrinsic Value to refute the gold bugs. It's high time we cleaned house and forced both these groups to either back up their claims with real science or shut the f*** up.
www.axiomaticeconomics.com/golden_calf.php
