Accusations of Propaganda Should Warrant an Indictment and a Trial

In a recent political debate on reddit, many people express doubts about whether or not Congress can be trusted to even want to end dissension in this country, let alone actually pass a fair bill into law that gives news organizations the right to resolve their grievances with other media/propaganda outlets in court.

I can't say I really blame them. Such a law would have to be very well worded. Here are some major issues that would have to be outlined:

1. fair, open, and sincere trial (no illogical 'debating', no hiding 'evidence' from the public, no shady shills gaining complete control over the investigation and prosecution)

2. to file an indictment on this type of felony (or misdemeanor), the crime has to be committed by what is technically an economic special interest (some type of company, preferably a wealthy one that is well connected to the economy in many controversial and powerful aspects)

3. the obvious lawsuits that come to mind would be something like "Fox News vs MSNBC". actually, i think it'd be impossible for Fox News to not receive the brunt of these types of charges being filed (i'm guessing). frivolous lawsuits can't be the emphasis, while major sources of propaganda and dissension get a free pass.

4. if a news organization wants to tell its audience that the trial banning it from saying something was done improperly, then they will be allowed to say this (because this type of argument cannot be considered propaganda until it gets a separate trial).

5. if a previous trial's legitimacy is reviewed in its own separate trial, efforts will be made to improve the education, replication, and broadening of that trial's appeal toward the masses. (this includes making the trial more believable to people who could have any kind of sensible grievance with the original trial)

Attempt at Explaining How Ron Paul Lied (to idiots) About Purchasing Power

Ron Paul: ".. The Federal Reserve has destroyed 98% of the value of the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913.."

So, let's take a look at what this means in terms of a comparison between the purchasing power of a person in 1913 vs the purchasing power of a person in 2011:

1913: 100% purchasing power                               2011: 98% less than 100% (2%)
ratio:                50                                     :                                     1

He's trying to make you subconsciously believe that a person in 1913 somehow had 50x the purchasing power of a person living in 2011, by assuming that you're too stupid to understand the basic algebraic implication of his talking point! And it gets worse: he has propaganda outlets that are trying to distract with misleading supporting evidence.

So, let's take a look at the supporting evidence for those who empathize with his belief about purchasing power reduction. It's based on the observation that if someone in 2013 had a time machine, traveled to a store in 1913, and tried to purchase any item (assuming that they brought their wallet with them, and that it had cash that was legal tender for 1913 for some reason), they'd find that yes: it would be roughly 50x easier for them to buy something. For instance: you can go to this website, and without having any real understanding of what you're actually looking at, you can pretend that 2013's economy has no purchasing power compared to 1913's economy, simply by examining discrepancies between some numbers dealing with value conversions (this is basically how an idiot's mind works; they're too lazy to really try and grasp what they're looking at, because they just want an easy excuse to start a rebellion, regardless of whether or not they're even correct in their reasoning).

Now let's take a look at what 1913 was actually like in terms of spending power. In order to challenge the credibility of the source I just linked, we'll even calculate later what 1913 must've been like in order for Ron Paul's statement to hold merit, just to gauge the limit for margin of error that Ron Paul would have to use in order to accuse such a source of lying. The average wage was $585, and if they wanted to spend that wage to buy an average house, they would've had to save 100% of their yearly salary every year for over 10 years, and 1 year for a car. In 2011, these ratios went down in favor of an increase in purchasing power by a factor of 2 (100% more value for your salary).

Now to figure out what a 50:1 ratio would mean in terms of margin of error for the original source linked in the previous paragraph. Seeing as how the original source used roughly 2 kinds of unique data (1913 salary for prices of things you'd buy + 2011 salary for prices of things you'd buy) and arrived at a ratio of 1:2 (50% increase in purchasing power since 1913), this would mean that 1 set of numbers is either skewed by a factor of 100 (50x2), or that both sets of numbers are skewed by a factor of 10 (√(100)). So, go back to that source and ask yourself, "What's more likely: Ron Paul lying to idiots who then use propaganda to cheat themselves into believing that they're rebelling against the establishment for the exact correct reason OR that this website is fudging some or all of its numbers by a factor of at least 10 to 100?"

Let's take it a step further and place ourselves in the shoes of a person who really wants to try and skew these numbers to match the projected reality of Ron Paul's propaganda. If you look at this set of information and this set of information, and interpret it as 4 unique sets of data rather than just 2 sets, you can use the fact that they scale inversely with one another to marginalize the odds of getting caught. So, because skewing the factor by 10 for both page's ratios works, you can minimize this to the √10 (which is 3.16). This would mean multiplying 1913's salary by 3.16, dividing 1913's cost of certain items by 3.16, multiplying 2011's cost of certain items by 3.16, and dividing 2011's salary by 3.16 all just to make Ron Paul's numbers seem correct under exact mathematical and historical scrutiny. I have a link here where someone attempts to accomplish something similar to this effect, where certain numbers are conveniently doubled or divided by two to give the kind of correlation that the author wants to convey.

Note: see my older posts for more thorough examination of this issue. This particular article is a more simplified version of this post.

And before I get accused of being an anti-conspiracy shill, take a look at this post by the same author on the very same blog that you're reading.