Category: Dumbasses

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Hyperventilating Tinfoil Hat Wearers

 

 

*sigh*

Probably once a week I get email trumpeting this, that or t’other conspiracy theory of the week, or whatever. Usually, these come from people who are easily smart enough to either know better or be able to find out “better” with a couple of simple clicks. Here’s the most recent from the tinfoil hat population, although it’s actually been around for three or four years in some form or another and its ancestry goes all the way back to conspiracy theories and hoax petitions circulated in the 60s and 70s, at least.

The text of the hoax/tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is this:

REFUSE NEW COINS

This simple action will make a strong statement.

Please help do this.. Refuse to accept these when they are handed to you.

I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead.

The lady just smiled and said ‘way to go’ , so she had read this e -mail.

Please help out..our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins

You guessed it ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!!

If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation…

The email included one picture of the obverse of the 2007 issue (so much for the contrafactual “U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins “) of the George Washington dollar coin and went on to “argue” that this supposed elimination of the motto was a part of a conspiracy to remove God from the public forum, yada-yada.

Here’s a picture of the obverse side of the coin:

 

 

 

 
Sure enough, “In God We Trust” isn’t there. How about the reverse side of the coin?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*huh* Not there either. So, at least the “missing motto” part of this nutso email is right, right?

Nope. If you buy the thing with only this much information, you’re the sucker.

 

 

 

 

That’s right, the “edge-incused inscriptions” include “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and the date and mint marking. But since this idiot-attractor conspiracy theory/hoax gained so much traction a few years ago, dumbasses in Congress felt it necessary to assuage their dumbass conspiracy theory-hoaxed constituents who were up in arms over the “missing motto” and ordered the mint to redesign future American President coins with the motto where even idiots could find it (if they could manage to puzzle out the letters well enough to know what it said), and so in 2009 the motto was moved to the obverse of the coins with the minting of the Harrison and all future Presidential series coins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, although the first eight Presidential series coins had the motto, “In God We Trust” on the edge, where it was subject to less wear than on the coins’ faces and even served a sort of symbolic purpose, to my mind (a part of “binding” the two sides together, eh? ;-)), all eight coins already circulated in the years 2009 and 2010 had the motto plainly on their faces where even the stupidest sheeple might eventually find them.

But has that stopped this dumbass hoax/conspiracy theory from circulating? Nope. Not any more than the facts have stopped the “Madeline Murry O’Hare/FCC” hoax petition that’s been around in one form or another for 40-some-odd years.

Dumbasses come in all sizes, shapes and IQ measurements.

 

 

Yes, I suppose I could be more charitable in correcting this sort of thing, and I was with the person who sent me the email. As Jerry Pournelle put it when someone corrected him about a factual error he made,

One of the neat things about the Internet is that if you get something wrong you’re not stuck with being an uncorrected idiot. There will be someone out there who knows, and will offer the correction. My thanks.

Classy, Dr. Pournelle. But then, the error he made wasn’t so glaring as the ones in the email, nor was he hyperventilating about some vast conspiracy. Indeed, his error was a simple lack of information in a specific field of endeavor in which he has never claimed expertise, and the person correcting his lack of knowledge understood that.

The chief differences between Dr. Pournelle’s error and the ones in the email are several:

1. The email called for widespread social action based on grossly inaccurate and quite likely deliberately deceptive (as it originated) information. Dr. Pornelle’s inaccurate comment fit neither of those criteria.
2. ANYONE–literally, anyone with literacy skills above that of a typical kindergärtner–could readily verify the falsity of the claims made by the email simply by looking at one of the coins. Not so with the information a reader corrected in Dr. Pournelle’s offhand comment.

Still, I recognize that “smart” people say and do as many stupid things as anyone else, and so calling people who fall for things like this hoax “dumbasses” may be a bit harsh.

But it’s still true, IMO.

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Plunder Day Postponed by Celebration of Fraud

OK, by now almost everyone and their pet goats know that the IRS has delayed the sack and pillage of the middle class to April 18. Why? Because Washington D.C. is scheduled to have a holiday that day, whether an unscheduled “holiday” from budget disagreements is on or not.

And what, pray tell, are the Beltway Bandits celebrating? That great fraud, the Compensated Emancipation Act, which president Abraham Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862, and which D.C.ers celebrate annually on April 16. Since April 16 is a Saturday this year, in order to give the suckers-at-the-public-teat another day off, the “holiday” was moved to the 15th.

And why do I call both the celebration and the object of celebration a fraud? Read the thing sometime. The Emancipation Proclamation which announced its signing didn’t note the provisions of the act (another of Mr. Lincoln’s frauds), which were the abolition of slavery in the Southern States (where Congress exercised no authority at the time) but a strange silence about continued legally practiced chattel slavery in Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia.

Neither Lincoln nor the Congress “freed” a singe solitary slave with the the Compensated Emancipation Act or Mr. Lincoln’s disingenuous “Emancipation Proclamation”. They were frauds from the get-go. Pure propaganda. Lies.

NATURALLY, such a massive and pervasive historical fraud deserves celebration in Washington D.C.!

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Defund NPR!

No Shiite! (Seriously: the Muslim Brotherhood which is the pretext for this investigative report, is Sunni, so “No Shiite!” is correct… in more senses than one*… )

*Recently, in “polite” conversation, I have taken to substituting “”Shiite!” for a word that means much the same thing but which has only one “i” and no “e”.

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It’s No Longer Simply Ironic

With the open display of antipathy toward democracy in recent days–so-called “Democrats” using various tactics to avoid the outcomes of democratically-decided elections, beginning with the “Democratic” State senators of Wisconsin fleeing the state to avoid providing a quorum–isn’t it time the party was formally renamed the Anti-Democratic Party?

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Is It My Fault?

Well, partly, I guess. After all, with the weather dominating my thoughts recently, I’ve actually been watching TV weather ‘casts. But really… Sticking a sharp stick in my ear with abortions of the English language like “tempature” and “FebYOUary”? Over and over and over again!

*arrrggghhh!*

And it’s not just some regional crapspeak limited to local yokels, no!

Why are these people allowed to poke me in the ear with a sharp stick? Why is there no capital punishment for these crimes?

But no! It’s my fault for watching these idiots. But they accept pay to butcher the English language! It’s criminal, I tell you, criminal. They should all be hung by dangling participles…

I’m going to pledge to myself to stick with accuweather.com, weatherbug.com (although the weather station at the local high school is giving some weird, anomalous readings recently) and weather.com. At least I don’t have to listen to “dumbassspeak” when I read a web page (just poke a fork in my brain and twirl when reading some web pages *arrrggghhh!*).

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What’s the Matter With Kids Today?

*heh*

Okay, so my topic’s not the same as the Bye Bye Birdie tune’s. Here’s a switcheroo. A recent (well, 2007) book on school reform and what can go dreadfully wrong with reform efforts had one comment that made me hoot til I almost cried. “Oh, what was it?” you ask. Praising the intent of the “New Math” era and how it breathed life into Math curriculum.

Yeh, right. If anything were deliberately designed to wreck budding students’ interest in or understanding of math, it was New Math. Either it was a conspiracy of evil persons to completely screw kids up or it was a conspiracy of dunces who were too stupid for words… completely screwing kids up. That is, if their “intent” was good, the people who designed and implemented “new math” were monumentally stupid people.

4th Grade: “new math” screwed me up so badly, it wasn’t until I had a high school geometry teacher who was teaching just for the joy of it (her family was in Big Bucks City) that my head started to come unscrewed from “new math” so the threads could be reworked and I could have the thing screwed on right (as to math). From there, calculus, stat, whatever, was fun.

What’s the matter with kids today? A lot of it is remote educrats having screwed up public education for decades (with the complicity of lazy, dumbed down by their own school years, parents and stupid, compliant pubschool administrators).

[great story excised to protect the innocent]

Asshats.

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Gad!

And people get paid to write mind-numbing crap like this!

“A large and potential [sic] historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

The guy who wrote the sentence above ought to have “Butt Stupid” tattooed on his forehead in red lettering. Just how freakin’ hard would it be to add two letters to make that sentence’s grammar correct?

“A large and potentially historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

See? Not hard at all, but some dumbass actually got paid to encourage subliterate morons to stick a (metaphorical, folks) fork behind their eyeballs and stir vigorously. *feh* At least the offenses against English I commit here aren’t paid, so I’m not a thief as well as being occasionally grammar-challenged.

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Politics vs. Science

Nope. Not what you think. In fact, in order to remove current political “science” from consideration this time, I’ll simply ask:

Tomato: fruit or vegetable?

True fruits are developed from the ovary at the base of the plant’s flower and contain the seeds of the plant. Botanically a tomato is a fruit.

However, in 1893, in what I view as a purely political decision contrary to fact, simply decreed the tomato to be a vegetable in order to satisfy the bureaucrappic “needs” (read that as “desires”) of tariff collectors, since fruits were exempt from a tariff on imported foods and vegetables were not.

Now, can anyone else name anything in current events that might fall into this unscientific denial of reality that is being pushed as public policy? Hmmm?

Note: I originally, and very uncreatively, typo-ed “1983” for the date of 1893 above. You would have thought I’d at least make some sort of interesting mistake, eh?Oh, well. 🙂

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About That “Literacy” Thing

In our progressively (yes, I meant the pun) dumbed-down society, “literacy” has come to mean simply being able to laboriously puzzle out the written word. That’s sad. For one thing, it means that people who are literate by that commonly-accepted definition can graduate from college without being able to puzzle out the meaning of the directions on a prescription pill bottle, a bus schedule or a dumbed-down (to supposed eighth-grade level) newspaper editorials.

There. Did I make that link hard enough to miss? 🙂 The data that article draws on is scarier than the article. If you search hard enough, you can find it. *heh* (Yeh, not doing folks’ homework for them on this one. I only want the ones who are… literate enough *heh* to be able to handle the info to get it. Snarky enough? Probably.)

But the problem is really worse than that. Maybe because we’ve become a society defined by the audio-visual media that is TV and radio more than anything else, the proliferation of markers demonstrating that even folks who can read, don’t, or (worse?) that when they do, they read dreck, slop, crap, really, really stupid and uninformed writers.

A very few examples will illustrate my point.

How often have you seen and heard people use “anniversary” to indicate something other than an annual event? “Two month anniversary” is a common example. What part of “anni”–from Latin, “anno” or YEAR–have these subliterate idiots missed?

Or, one I read recently from someone who is ill-read, but who listens to subliterate Hivemind podpeople enough to be dis-educated: “…for the light of me…” when the appropriate phrase was “for the LIFE of me”. Compound that with the multiple occurrences of such phrases as “woks of life,” “chester drawers” “intensive purposes” and a veritable Legion (and yes I meant that2 cultural reference *heh*) of other malaprops, stupidities and downright illiteracies, and we have a society progressing toward genuine illiteracy.

And what, pray, hath brought about this effusion of disgust for a growing illiteracy in our society? Why, the annual profusion of one of its most stupid examples: FEB-YOU-ARY.

*gag-spew*

It’s FebRUary, dumbasses.

Of course, in the mini-rant above, I did not place enough stress on one of the worst aspects of progressive illiteracy: who the illiterates listen to and “read”. As Mark Twain wisely said,

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

Note the word, “good”. People who find books written by such as Dan Brown to be readable are people who have denied themselves the advantage of reading books that are well-written and so don’t even know that they are poking a metaphorical screwdriver into their forebrain and stirring. People who watch or read “news” (propaganda) promulgated by an increasingly subliterate Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind rarely twig to the fact that they are being enstupiated by doing so. (And yes, I know that the word “enstupiated” is used more often by me than by any other source known to Google. So? It’s a perfectly good neologism coined by John Stossel, IIRC. :-))

Of course, it’s a thorny problem. So many people have “gradumacated” from American public schools having been told they are”literate” that most do not even know that they are, at best, fumble-headed subliterates. Those few of us who twig to the fact that the “edumacation” system is seriously broken may figure out that we are technically literate subliterates and begin to take steps to correct the problem, but it’s a long, hard row to hoe (and a tip o’ the tam to Davy Crockett for being the first to record that phrase :-)). I’m still working on my literacy (the Lays of Ancient Rome and other works by Macaulay, among many, are still unscaled works, for example), and expect to continue to do so right up until my body’s ready to be cremated.

Most folks, it seems, surrender their literacy to the care (and poisoning) of others more interested in keeping them fat and stupid than anything else.

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Freudian Lingerie?

From Language Log:

Rep. Steve King:

“As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman’s words down, however many of the members are off on other endeavors and I would make the point that- that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress and I don’t believe it can be effectively challenged and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves for making wild accu- accusations.” [emphasis added]

And if you doubt that the “maroon” quoted above actually asserted–vigorously asserted, I say!–that his colleagues lack integrity, then listen as he speaks:

[audio:What-a-maroon.mp3]

Of course, this is simply a case of a puffed up politician using words he thinks sound high-falutin’… that he knows not the meaning of.

Common synonyms of “mendacity”: fabrication, falsehood, lie, untruth, whopper.*

But one hears (and sees in print) this sort of thing all the time: people who really are NOT literate–or at least not as literate as they think or want others to think them–speaking “above their own heads” as it were in an attempt to puff up the seeming importance of their utterances.

Just another politician *gag-spit* Nothing new. Move along, now.