The Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Stupid
Why accept the simplest explanation for an unpleasant event when you can create an elaborate conspiracy theory? There’s so many advantages when dark and mysterious forces are after you as opposed to things just happening. If things just happen, they’re over and done. But a conspiracy lives forever, because it must be covered up forever. And the best part is that finding nothing to support your conspiracy simply means that it’s a really sophisticated conspiracy. And after all, aren’t you important enough to merit a really sophisticated conspiracy against you?
I remeber when Princess Diana died because it interrupted Saturday Night Live, and that was before the show started sucking. (I think the best headline the next day would have been “PRINCESS DIE”, but nobody ever agrees with me.) The crash also killed her (drunk) driver and boyfriend Dodi Fayed, a member of the idle rich. Fayed’s father thinks it was a more than just a high-speed car crash:
On the night of Diana’s death, there were apparently two top agents for MI6, the British secret service, on the loose in Paris, and possibly a third, if you believe that Henri Paul, the chauffeur, was also on the spooks’ payroll. That’s the theory of Mohammed Fayed, Monsieur Paul’s employer and father of the princess’s last boyfriend Dodi. Mr. Fayed asserts that Diana was at the time of her death carrying Dodi’s baby, and thus the car crash was arranged because Buckingham Palace decided it would be unacceptable for Prince William, the future King, to have a Muslim step-brother, a Muslim stepdad, and a soon-to-be-Muslim mom. The Princess of Wales’s fortuitous demise was, as Mr. Fayed puts it, “murder in the furtherance of a conspiracy by the Establishment, in particular His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who used the secret services to carry it out.”
Except Diana wasn’t pregnant. And, as Mark Steyn points out, the British Royals are more inclined to kiss Muslim ass rather than kick it.
. . .there’s not much point getting the princess eliminated for going Muslim when the prince of Wales himself has a roaring case of Islamofever. Even though he will one day be, like his mother, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he’s had an “Islamic garden” built at his home. It was designed by the Muslim great-grand-daughter of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister who took Britain into the Great War and thus ended the caliphate. Ninety years on, Charles gives the impression he’d far rather be a caliph than a king. He loves dressing up in Muslim garb. A couple of days after 9/11, for a dinner engagement with a sibling of Osama bin Laden, he got dolled up like a Saudi prince and amused the guests with droll cracks like, “So, what’s your brother doing these days?”
It’d be pitifully funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. The Muslim world treasures any claim of their oppression, no matter how preposterous. As Steyn relates:
A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed.
Educated, Yet Stupid
Texas Tech has banned sales of a t-shirt that says “VICK ‘EM” on the front and a silouette picture of a football player with the number 7 on his jersey holding a rope from which a dog is hanging.
Tech officials announced the fraternity that sold the shirts was suspended temporarily and will face judicial review for allegedly violating the solicitation section of the students’ code of conduct. The school said it wouldn’t allow the sale on campus of items that are “derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste.”
The creator of the shirt, Geoffrey Candia, said he originally had wanted to give 50 percent of the proceeds to an animal defense league in Lubbock “because we knew there would be a controversy about the shirts, you know, animal rights, stuff like that.”
For those who don’t care/know about the Big 12, this is obnoxious because (1) Texas Tech considers itself to have a rivalry with Texas A&M, (2) Texas A&M has a dog for a mascot, who wears an outfit easily identfied in silouette, (3) Texas A&M uses the slogan “gig ‘em,” and (4) Michael Vick wore # 7 and has been mean to dogs. Personally, I only think it’s in bad taste if you were selling them in College Station instead of Lubbock. And given the nature of the act being described by “gig ‘em,” I don’t think Texas A&M has any room to claim offense.
Stupid For Legal Purposes
Maybe the producers of Desperate Housewives aplogized too soon. Or maybe Phillipines medical elves are more benign than the legal ones.
As a trial-court judge, Florentino V. Floro Jr. acknowledged that he regularly sought the counsel of three elves only he could see. The Supreme Court deemed him unfit to serve and fired him last year. . . . Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. “Angel” is the neutral force, he says. “Armand” is a benign influence. “Luis,” whom Mr. Floro describes as the “king of kings,” is an avenger.
* * *
According to local newspaper reports, a mysterious fire in January destroyed the Supreme Court’s crest in its session hall, and a number of members of the court and their close family members have developed serious illnesses or have fallen victim to car accidents. Enough bizarre things have happened that in July, the Supreme Court issued an en banc resolution asking Mr. Floro to desist in his threats of “ungodly reprisal.” The Supreme Court’s spokesman declined to elaborate.
Mr. Floro says he is not suffering from psychosis, and that he’s not to blame for the incidents. He points the finger squarely at “king of kings” elf Luis, who Mr. Floro says is bent on cleaning up what he says is the Philippines’ corrupt legal system.
When you ask the elf guy to call off his elves, you have unambiguously lost the argument about whether the elf guy is nuts for believeing in elves.
Stupid.net
SFW: Hot Chicks With Douchebags
PROBABLY SFW: “The Hoff” Soap Dispenser (too bad the perspective error marks it as a photoshop job)
NOT SFW: Dragons Having Sex With Cars
Think Globally, Act Stupidly
For a movie with the word “Truth” in its title, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “documentary” isn’t standing up well to scrutiny.
In what is a rare judicial ruling on what children can see in the class-room, Mr Justice Barton was at pains to point out that the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.
The first mistake made by Mr Gore, said Mr Justice Burton in his written judgment, was in talking about the potential devastation wrought by a rise in sea levels caused by the melting of ice caps. The claim that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” was dismissed as “distinctly alarmist”. Such a rise would take place “only after, and over, millennia”. Mr Justice Burton added: “The armageddon scenario he predicts, inso-far as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”
I’d list more, but it’s boring. Here’s the whole bunch if you’re interested. The NYT’s Lede Blog cites other instances of educators refusing to get on the hype bandwagon:
He wasn’t the first to object to including the film in school curriculum. Last year, the National Science Teachers Association refused 50,000 free copies of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a gift from the film’s producers.
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Electronic Arts thinks we need more propoganda in our play, so it’s adding climate features into its forthcoming game SimCity Societies:
While the game doesn’t force you to power your city in any specific way, using cheaper, carbon dioxide producing sources of energy will raise the town’s carbon ratings, causing disasters like droughts, heat waves, and the like. Alternatively, choosing from a variety of BP Alternative Energy low-carbon power options like hydrogen, natural gas, wind farms and solar power, players keep their cities safe from harm and feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves while learning about some of the causes and consequences of global warming, which may or may not exist depending on your viewpoint.
Are the cause-and-effect reactions scientifically supported? Do the in-game costs associated with these alternate power sources refect their real-world costs? Who cares? Learn from your corporate betters.
Politically Stupid
There’s a line form Animal House when Flounder borrows his brother’s car, only to have it trashed by his frat brothers, and he’s weeping in the garage at his misfortune: “You fucked up — you trusted us.” Once that line’s in your head, you see its applicability to so many things in the world. Like the government, for instance.
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The New York Sun takes it from there:
One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”
Is it too much to ask that the government hire people to fight terrorism who are at least more clever than the terrorists?
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What do the Democrats do when they get power? Have meetings. Lots of meetings.
One leadership aide said that Pelosi schedules meetings to talk about the agenda for the next meeting, leaving no time to get anything done.
“If they’re not worthwhile, I just don’t go,” said Frank, conceding that it’s a luxury his staff doesn’t have.
The government: where talk is always better than action.
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The south must scare the living heck out of yankees.
. . . some congressional aides were instructed to get immunized before going to Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord and the racetrack in Talladega, Ala.
The House Homeland Security Committee planned a fact-finding trip about public health preparedness at mass gatherings and decided to conduct the research at two of the nation’s most heavily attended sporting events, NASCAR’s Bank of America 500 event this weekend and the UAW-Ford 500 last weekend. Staff who organized the trips advised the NASCAR-bound aides to get a range of vaccines before attending — hepatitis A, hepatitis B, tetanus, diphtheria and influenza.
Exactly what were these aides planning to do at the racetrack? Is there some bodily fluid exchange program at these things that I’m unaware of? If there is, I hope it’s voluntary. Because, you know, I’ve seen Deliverance.
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For years, the District of Columbia has banned guns. Recently, a federal judge found that ban unconstitutional. DC wants its gun ban back, and NR’s David Freddoso points out that District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer is claiming that the district can’t protect people without it:
“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”
Except that, as Freddoso notes, the DC government has taken the exact opposite position in court:
The plaintiffs’ attorneys refer to a series of cases in which the District literally asserted its right to “stand by” while its citizens are victimized. The most dramatic is Warren v. District of Columbia, in which three women were sexually violated because of gross negligence on the part of Metropolitan police officers responding to their call. In the early morning hours of March 16, 1975, two men broke down the back door of a D.C. townhouse in Northeast and began raping a woman on the second floor. Her two roommates, hiding one floor above, called the police. According to the court’s opinion, a squad car responded, and the officer failed even to exit his car before leaving. The two women, listening to their roommate scream, called the police again. This time, an officer went so far as to knock at the door, but then left without further inspection.
Once the attackers discovered the other two women, they had their sick, twisted way with all three of them for the next 14 hours (I will not describe any of the details). The women sued the District of Columbia, which argued that “a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.” The District won the case based on what is actually a long-standing legal principle.
So there you go. The District of Columbia is terribly worried about your safety in general, but not your safety as an individual, inasmuch as it would require them to do something other than file court documents.
Our Business Is Stupid, and Business Is Good
The “Massage Me” controller puts game controls onto a vest worn by another person. The theory is, work the buttons, work the body of the vest wearer.
Using the Massage me device requires two people, one who wears the device to receive the massage and one who manipulates the device to give the massage. Because giving a massage can be a boring and rather tedious task, the interface simultaneously acts a game controller which motivates the masseur by involving him in game play.
Pressure sensors embedded in the wearable interface sense the massage movements which are interpreted and passed on as control signals to play existing games. Otherwise wasted button-pushing energy is transformed into a massage and the addicted game player becomes an inexhaustible masseur.
This could only be an idea from a non-gamer. If you actually play games, you’ll know that certain buttons on your controllers wear out much quicker than others, since games use certain buttons heavily and others rarely if at all. Who would want a massage limited to one place on your body, over and over?
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Microsoft has turned the Xbox 360 into a cultural icon, but not necessarily in a good way. Celebrate the famously unreliable console with your own Red Ring of Death t-shirt. If they were smart, they’d have a way to show how many systems you’ve been through (I’m on my third).
Dangerously Stupid
Apparently, this is a culture in which people think they should be allowed to say anything at any time. But perhaps manners and maturity have thier place.
A young sheriff’s deputy who opened fire on a pizza party and killed six people flew into a rage when he was rebuffed by his old girlfriend - and others called him a “worthless pig.” A longtime friend told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday that 20-year-old Tyler Peterson came to his door in the hours after the rampage and calmly explained what he had done. Peterson told Kegley that he had gone to his ex-girlfriend’s house early Sunday morning in hopes of patching up the relationship after a recent breakup.
He said Peterson lost control when an argument erupted and other people started ridiculing him as a “worthless pig.”
Police, who declined to provide details of the argument, said Peterson stormed out, retrieved an AR-15 rifle from his car outside and burst back into the house firing 30 shots that killed all but one of the people at the party.
It’s a sad day when people don’t understand that insulting emotionally stressed peope with very easy access to firearms is a bad idea. But the AP has some interesting things to say at the end of the story, using the gold standard of quote attribution: “some.”
Some questioned the wisdom of hiring someone so young.
“No person that I’ve ever known at 20 years old was responsible enough to be a police officer,” said Steve Bocek of Oak Creek, Wis., whose nephew Bradley Schultz was killed. “It’s unbelievable.”
Never mind that 18-year-olds are legal adults throughout the nation, and that people this age serve in our armed forces, regularly handling life-or-death situations overseas. Or maybe Steve Bocek just hangs out with lameasses.
