Tag: Stupidity

Pure greed not motivated by altruism only.

My hypothesis is that some men have no stigma attached to failure due to pure solid stupidity.  

If true, it follows that if hot plasma stupidity could be contained, cooled and compressed through the states of matter to form a perfectly arranged crystalline structure at absolute zero, solid diamond stupid should look like this:

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can’t be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

 – Tom Friedman, The Secret From Our Sauce, March 7, 2004

How solid is that?

About those foreclosure snobs, “It couldn’t happen,

oh no, it couldn’t happen to ME,” snobs.

The “It’s all those stupid borrowers fault!” arrogant snobs.

The “I have no problem with them being put on the street if they’re not paying,” snobs.

Here’s a few questions I have for them, red-hot off the griddle of my righteous indignation about the foreclosure fandango:

Dear Mr Snob,

Haven’t you heard interviews with some of these people? Did you listen up when you had the chance?

Dear Dems, Feed me a Sh!t Sandwich on HCR and I’ll BURN THIS MFing TENT TO THE GROUND

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    After reading Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH10) DKos post titled The Private Mandate Sausage Machine which explains how Health Care Reform may/will be twisted into a bill mandating that I purchase private insurance but lacks all content of reform, I would like to make the following statement.

    Dear Dems, Feed me a Sh!t/Sausage Sandwich on Health Care Reform and I’ll BURN THIS MFing TENT TO THE GROUND!!!!

    If the Private Health Care disaster is addressed by making it madatory that I buy junk insurance from the bastards that caused this mess, I will make it my personal business to drive the Corporate snakes from the tent and burn the tent to the ground.

    Simply put, if Dems pass a HCR bill with mandates and no public option, I will kick these Dems frakkin asses, and you should too.

    More below the fold and a call to action..

     

The Stupidity Reserve: America’s economic salvation

What if there were a secret store of wealth that America could use to pay down its debts and restore prosperity? What if we could free hundreds of billions of dollars to reinvigorate our society and restore confidence to industry and financial markets? Such a reserve does in fact exist. It is our accumulated store of institutionalized stupidity.

Readers of “Dilbert” who have worked in large organizations must constantly explain to children and other innocents that the pervasive stupidity depicted in Scott Adams’ comic strip is only slightly exaggerated. It exists in every corner of our “efficient” quasi-capitalistic marketplace. In prosperous times, institutionalized stupidity is annoying, but in times of extreme economic difficulty, this huge reservoir of dysfunctional behavior is inevitably tapped as desperate necessity becomes, temporarily, powerful enough to overcome the general human tendency toward stupid institutional behavior.

Whence institutional stupidity? The best answer I can come up with is that our species is designed by evolution to adopt destructive simplifications of behavior. The eagerness of individuals to substitute obedience to simple rules for independent development of specific solutions is the foundation of institutional decay. Fixed rules substitute for context-based decisions and dogmas crowd out considered judgments until schools produce dropouts, prisons incubate criminals, food plants ship toxic peanut butter, and Vista bogs down your computer. As every institution ages, the accumulation of irrationality in its growing mass of rules, dogmas, and habits raises the level of dysfunction and stupidity, until some final crisis sweeps away the accumulated mountain of folly.

A year ago, I began using the FIOS high-speed Internet service provided by Verizon, a huge telecommunications corporation. Ever since I began using FIOS, Verizon marketing personnel have contacted me, on average about twice a month, asking me to sign up for the FIOS service. Each time they call me, I carefully explain to them that I am already a FIOS customer, and they reply that they will not solicit me again. Then, a few weeks later, the phone rings again with another FIOS solicitation. Verizon has probably spent more money on re-marketing FIOS to me than they did on the initial installation of the service. This is not an isolated anecdote. Such stupidity accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars of waste. Let’s look at the big examples.

Heartless bastards

Clueless, arrogant, cynical, stupid, greedy, heartless bastards.

On Shooting Self In Thigh: My Country ‘Tis Of Thee

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Photobucket

Plexico Burress, Shakespearean Tragic Hero



OMFG. New York Football Giants star receiver Plexico Burress last night shot himself in the thigh with a handgun.  Will he play again this year?  Who knows?  He was released from the hospital today.  There are other questions though.  Like: WTF is he doing with a loaded pistol in a night club during the season?  And htf did he shoot himself in the thigh?  Isn’t that like totally embarrassing?  And is this the stupidest economic “accident” we’ve seen this year, a year of gigantic, incredibly stupid economic “accidents?”

So those of us in the “life as figure of speech” department were thinking about Plexico Burress this afternoon.  And we were thinking hard.

The big question for us is whether he’s a metaphor for the United States’s economy?  Or the war effort in Iraq?  Or the Bush Administration?  Or the War on TerrorTM?  Or something else that’s a gigantic f*ck up?

What kind of figure of speech is he anyway?  Is this an example of synecdoche? Is this an example of metonymy? Is it metaphor?  WTF is this anyway?  And, more important, what does it mean, if anything, to us?

The New York Times supplies the back story:

It was unclear what led to the gun’s discharge. There were no reports of any fights inside the club before the shooting. The police did not say whether any charges would be filed, but they noted that felony charges were possible if a person possesses a loaded, unlicensed handgun in a place other than his residence or business.

Under the league’s personal-conduct policy, violations of local gun laws can result in a player’s suspension…snip

It is the latest controversy involving Burress, who signed a five-year, $35 million contract with the Giants just before the season opener. He was suspended for 12 days, including a victory over Seattle, because he missed meetings without explanation.

Against San Francisco on Oct. 19, Burress shouted at Coach Tom Coughlin on the sideline after drawing an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty. The N.F.L. fined Burress $45,000 for verbally abusing the officials.

Coughlin held him out of the first quarter of the Oct. 26 game against the Steelers because he missed treatment on a neck and shoulder injury the day before.

The Times also reports that Burress, who is 31, has a 5-year $35 million contract.

I know that you, dear readers, are incredibly busy and perplexed by other, vital questions, but seriously now, have you ever heard of anything as ridiculous and expensive as this?

Then again, oops.  I guess so.  How about Michael Vick?

Oh, goddess supreme, preserve us in safety from the end of this Empire.

Rocket surgeons: Republicans and epic stupidity

Is it just me, or are these guys just epically stupid?

Try this one:

I burned through all my outrage in ’06, sorry

. . . all I got left is cynicism, snark and recycled outrage.

See, it was easy back in ’06 – when things were soooo bad. I mean, outrage was running, what – buck-and-a-quarter, maybe six bits a gallon back then, right? I was livin’ large, drivin’ the Escalade of outrage – we all were. And it was easy back then to figure out who our collective outrage should be aimed at:


Those filthy, nasty Republicans

– who, after all, were actually running things, so blaming everything on them was totally legitimate.

And I was committed to taking Congress away from those cretinous bastards so we could put a stop to the occupation of Iraq, and to warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to the whole idea of the President as king. You know, like we did 230 years ago, right?  

Pony Party: Such As!

Hi all! Pickle here to bring you an oldie but goodie from teh tubz! I first encountered this charming and eloquent young lady’s performance on Keith Olbermann’s show a few months ago. All I can say is: SUCH AS!!!

Like, totally, OMG!!!

They hate Us

But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.

“They hate us for our freedom” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president.

–Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

They Hate Us.

Yes, They do.

“They Hate Us For Our Freedoms”

The ringing words of presidential banality.  Inspiring, after a fashion.

The community Bush limited his comments to hate us.

Not because of our freedoms…they don’t know us

We won’t let them.

They no nothing of our freedoms.

They no nothing of freedom.  Not yet.

They know what they dream, and we’re not in those dreams.

Only in their nightmares.

They hate us because they don’t trust us.  Not yet.

The people I am limiting my comments to hate Us.

They hate Us for our freedoms.

Conservatives in power and their minions selling it on cable.  They.

Liberals like me…someone with questions, actually expecting answers.  Us.

Our freedoms, guaranteed.  Us.

Freedoms, meddlesome nuisance to Standard Operational Conduct.  They.

They hate Us.

Pony Party, muy malo

From the “You did what……why???? department…..

According to this Yahoo!News story, Clint Straatman, a PE teacher at Minico High School in Rupert, ID, took a Mexican flag from a student…

because “white kids” might have hurt the 16-year-old.

¡Malo!

But wait…..it gets better…..

He said he put it in a garbage can because he had no place else to keep it.

¡Muy, muy malo!

Camelo had brought the flag to school, as did other students, in celebration of Cinco de Mayo….

Stupid stupid stupid media analysis of Giuliani’s “failed strategy”

How stupid is the political media?  This stupid: they take seriously the notion that Giuliani’s decision to avoid the first six Republican nomination contests was a failed “strategy.”

It was a strategy of sorts, I suppose, in that had Rudy been able to pull off a win in Florida he could very well have been positioned to land a death blow in the Northeast and California on Stupor Tuesday.  But calling it a failed or foolish “strategy” ignores the fact that it was not his free choice or original intention to run to win the nomination in this way.  Rudy waited until Florida for one reason only: because he was hemorrhaging support in the wake of the “Sex on the City” scandals highlighting his misuse of city resources (including the police) in conducting his affair with Judi Nathan, and he needed to lay low.  His alternative to this “strategy” was not to run hard, under the bright media spotlight, in Iowa, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan Nevada, and South Carolina.  His actual alternative at that time was to drop out in disgrace.  He has been running since last fall to avoid that end.

Load more