If the lists of “wacky laws” is any indication, no one checks. Most of those laws don’t exist!
But back to the OP. I suspect that in many of these claims, they are actually true and not as strange once you see why. Take for example
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but during the 1973 *Roe v Wade *arguments, Sarah Weddington noted that the 1800’s law banning abortions in Texas was done to protect women since abortions were so dangerous. In fact, she points out that under that law, an abortion was considered a crime against the woman.
I’ll take on as many as I can say something intelligent about.
This is meaningless. The Roman Catholics and Lutherans, the Jews, the Orthodox Catholics, and the Anglicans and other Christian denominations each have their own version of the Ten Commandments. The only difference is which rule goes with which commandment. Wikipedia has a good overview.
It is not meaningless. All the versions you site come from the ethical decalogue. However in the bible it is the ritual decalogue Exodus 34:10-26 that is written on the tablets. It is a very different list.
In January, 1995, some Russian officials had a severe overreaction to the launch of a small research rocket from the Andøya rocket range in Northern Norway. (The range had informed the Russian military of the launch in the usual fashion, but for some reason the notification got lost in Bureaucratic Hell this one time.) Exactly how close Yeltsin came to doing anything stupid is not clear, but the press here in Troll Country at least had a lot of fun playing up how we almost all got nuked because of one little research rocket. That may be what this point on the list is all about, although it’s hardly a big secret.
And there were a couple more incidents like this as well, weren’t there? A plane bearing nuclear weapons bound for Alaska crashed in Northwestern British Columbia and another crashed on the coast of Spain, I believe.
William Patrick Hitler, the son of Adolph’s half-brother, lived in Patchogue, New York and had four sons. One has died, three are still living. I don’t know where they are currently located.
Correct, althought hostilities ceased there was no formal peace. However there still is not formal peace between Japan and the Soviet Union or its successor state Russia. Big deal they are not fighting. Does this mean WWII isn’t over. Well I guess technically. But for all intents and purposes it is.
Some of them like
The Bayer Company Made Heroin, are true but that was a long time back when heroin was not a controlled substance. Most drugs prior to the modern eras (1950s forward) at one time were not controlled substances.
It’s like when people say Joseph Kennedy made his money by doing illegal things. Well this isn’t really true. While it’s true things Joe Kennedy Sr did would be illegal today, when he did them, no one had thought to make them illegal yet.
Then there are questions like
7.The US Is Planning to Provoke Terrorist Attacks
This is so wide open it’s true. In fact the September 11th attacks were provoked, at least in Osama’s viewpoint.
I think the point of these type of articles isn’t to provide a factual answer it’s to provoke a discussion of an issue, which is can be fun to talk about.
Alice Paul’s views on abortion aren’t exactly clear. She seemed to disapprove of abortion personally, but also didn’t consider it her business to decide for other women.
Margaret Sanger was in to eugenics, but felt that parents rather than the state should decide how to do this (unless they were “feebleminded” in which they were to be sterilized). She was much less radical than others of her time (for instance she opposed euthanasia of the “unfit”.
You might think so, but they weren’t as covered nearly as much as Kent State. However, the statement in the OP is somewhat misleading, since although the first one occurred during the “Vietnam era” it was not about the war.
The Orangeburg massacre occurred two years before Kent State.
The Jackson State killings occurred 10 days after Kent State. As in the case of Orangeburg, some attribute the lesser media coverage to the fact that the victims were black.
Apart from the half-truths, fractional truths, unprovables and flat-out nitwittery, the major problem with the list is that favorite meme of the woo-prone and conspiracy-minded, i.e. “things you are not supposed to know”. Virtually nothing on the list can honestly be viewed as such, or less how would the idiots who spout that stuff come across the information? We’re supposed to believe they’re so much more intelligent and perceptive than the rest of us?
Among the more ludicrous allegations: we’re not supposed to know that smoking causes more problems than cancer and heart disease. What hole do they assume we’re living in, not to have heard of conditions like chronic bronchitis and emphysema? Was the Surgeon General’s announcement of the disorders caused by secondhand smoke made in secret, so that we wouldn’t learn that secondhand smoke causes asthma, lower respiratory tract infections and premature death in children? Somebody better tell the national news media and Google that they’re doing a lousy job suppressing this information.
And “advertisers’ influence on the news media is widespread”. Nooooo! Say it isn’t so!!! Those little movies they show between entertainment program segments aren’t public service announcements to help us choose non-disintegrating toilet paper and cheap car insurance? They pay the media to let them say those things? My faith in mankind has been shattered.
The “Louis Pasteur suppressed experiments” thing sounds like the blattings of those loon-tunes who also claim (falsely) that Pasteur confessed on his deathbed that the germ theory of disease was wrong.
You’ll have to excuse me now, I’m going to fill my gas tank with water, put in a little pill and go 500 miles on a single tank. I’d say more, but
That would be the NSA. And it’s hard to consider what they do as “criminal”-- between the FISA court for domestic cases, and the obvious legal loopholes for international communications, calling it a crime is a political argument, not a legal one.
Now, that doesn’t mean the politics of it aren’t debatable/objectionable, but that’s a whole 'nuther thread. . .
Let me address #27, which I have personal experience of. Of course, I haven’t read all of any paper I cite (excepting, I guess, my own). Who could? Generally I cite a paper either because I need one fact from it or else because the referee believes that I should. I have several citations that say that what I have done is different from what X (often the referee, I am guessing) has done. This way, X gets a citation and I get a paper published.
I recently had the experience of helping translate a 100+ page paper from French that I had cited a number of times in my work. I discovered that I had not read the paper before in its entirety, had no real idea that what I had cited was a small part of a very large theory and there were large parts of it I was not able to follow.
“Not supposed to know” implies someone is or was actively covering them up. I’d say most of them are simply obscure trivia that are not common knowledge.
