"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Stole Borrowed the graphic from Cathouse Chat.
“In a democracy (’rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom
…and stupidity.
You wanted change, dumbasses; you got it. Problem is, now the rest of the country has to live with your mistake.
Bollywood star, Shahrukh Khan, one of the most popular and well-known celebrities in the world–just notsomuch in the US–was hassled by the TSA in New Jersey.
…one can only imagine the American reaction if Brad Pitt was subjected to a “routine inspection” in India to ascertain his intentions and identity. However, the comparison is hardly apt considering Khan’s star power in India [N.B. pop. ~1,148,000,000, or nearly 4X the U.S. population] is likened to the combination of Pitt, Tom Hanks and Will Smith multiplied tenfold by ten Oprahs reading a book by Deepak Chopra.
Par for the course with an agency that hassles active duty military, nursing mothers and Medal of Honor recipients with equal churlishness. *feh* The Thugs Standing Around is nothing but security theater performed as an exercise in turning citizens into subjects and visitors into (justly) anti-Americans. We’d be better off to take the folks working for the TSA and pay them to sit home and watch soap operas and pound the floor with their clubs.
Dissing a guy with an estimated 3.5 billion fans worldwide? Just another day with the TSA.
*heh*
A group of Durham (N.C.) residents taking aim at speeders with the threat of a paintball gun said Tuesday that they are “amazed and gratified at the reaction.”
The group, Angry Neighbors With Paintball Guns, posted signs at strategic locations throughout the city, warning motorists to slow down or risk being shot at with a paintball gun.
But, of course, the local cop shop which is apparently NOT ameliorating the problem thinks it’s a bad idea all around. Can’t have citizens doing what they’re unwilling and/or unable to do:
[Kammie] Michael (Durham, N.C. police spokes”person”) said it is a crime to shoot a paintball at a vehicle and that the signs could be a distraction for some drivers and make the problem worse.
Yeh, the sign’s a problem. Could be “a distraction”. *throws the bullshit flag* How will it be any more distracting than the speed limit signs that are being ignored, eh? Now, that’s a stupid cop. *sigh*
I’ve never had a typing or “keyboarding” class. Back “in the olden days” guys just did NOT take typing classes, unless they wanted to be secretaries or some such (and most guys who had ambitions like that hid them pretty well *heh*), OR their girlfriend had ’em by the short and curlies and also had ’em enrolled in Home Ec.
OK, so that’s one: I type by the biblical method: seek and ye shall find. Over the last 20 years or so of computer use, I’ve managed to become pretty quick and accurate with that autodidact “methodology” although I do sometimes have to look at the keyboard.
Recently, that’s changed a bit because of my stupidity.
Almost twenty years using a keyboard but fifty or more using kitchen knives (and longer exposure to knives and other sharp implements–what boy didn’t carry a pocket knife in first grade? None I knew). But, still I got careless and am now–while my attempt to slice off my left index finger heals–I’m typing a finger short. Makes for a lot of edits, I can tell ya.
Now, I’m a pretty smart guy, as my IQ scores and grades (whenever i wasn’t bored to tears by teachers who were demonstrably less well-informed than I was–seriously. I was an arroganht lil snot as a student) and various accomplishments can testify. Not only that, but I can generally handle a chef’s knife about as well as Bobby Flay–after more than a few decades’ more experience with it than he. But smart, experienced people can do stupid things, and I certainly did.
So, while my left index finger heals, I’ll be using the middle finger on that hand for both middle and index finger tasks, but don’t think I’m giving y’all the finger just cos that’s the case, ‘K?
BTW, I’m just adding this to the total of “left side injuries”. *heh* The ONLY real injury I’ve suffered to any part of the right side of my body has been my right knee. All other major injuries (including the area of my brain most affected by a concussion from a skull fracture *heh*) have been left side injuries. If I could get a left side transplant, most of my aches and pains would disappear. 🙂
After the Lakers’ 15th NBA championship win, ACORN apparently held a recruiting rally.
(source for photo: LA Times, as is following pic)
Makes ya feel all warm n fuzzy, eh? “Diversity” in action.
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I’ve met some Obamabots–even here in America’s Third World County where Democrats, let alone dyed-in-the-wool Dhimmicraps, are scarcer than hens’ teeth–recently that have caused me to go back and examine some stereotypes.
But first, a fore-word: before you get the wrong idea (even though I know it’s probably too late for that), stereotypes are good things, as long as we know we use them as shortcuts, as models based on a reality that is far more complex than the most accurate model can be. Stereotypes exist because a great preponderance of a certain class of objects or persons share characteristics that make them a class. We could substitute “class” for “stereotype” except that stereotypes embody more data than we can actually weight classes with via objective criteria–data derived from firsthand, subjective interaction with objects or persons. Now, because it is subjective interaction that adds the stereotyping, it involves a certain amount of projection, and therein lies the danger of stereotyping: if the emotional projection isn’t consciously recognized and analyzed for its qualitative values, for what it both contributes to or detracts from the observations leading to the development of ones own stereotypes, then one runs the danger of having models that aren’t very useful.
That said, my model, if you want to put the word “stereotypes” on the shelf, of contemporary faux liberals and those who support their agendas as falling into two general classes–the truly, wittingly evil and the stupidly, lazily evil–has held up fairly well in my encounters with Obamabots.
“Evil?!?” you may screech. Yep. You see, it doesn’t matter one damned plugged nickel whether a contemporary faux liberal (or a faux liberal enabler) such as Obama or his coterie of Chicago-style, (mostly) corrupt, socialist hangers-on have “good” intentions or just normal, Chicago-style, (mostly) corrupt, socialist genuinely evil intentions, because the end result of their behavior is evil.
Yes, evil. For they are intent–even the most stupidly altruistic of them–on dictating YOUR “best interests” as they see them, instead of allowing you the freedom to make those decisions on your own or with counsel of your own choosing. And that–compelling behavior to comply with THEIR ideology that the state is the fount of all that is good and that THEY, the self-anointed enlightened, decide what is good for you, the poor benighted idiot who does not belong to their club–is indeed evil.
Not even the God they so frequently rail against is that tyrannical. He has simply pointed out Good and Evil and said that Good will lead to Him while evil will lead to eternal death. Make your own choice and live–or die–with it. The statists who disingenuously call themselves liberals want to make your choices for you. Free will? Nope. That’s out, along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
To any who call yourself “liberal” or “progressive” let me offer you this: when you can show me–using facts and reason, not whiny faux-victim bleats–that denying free political speech to someone because his speech offends some hypersensitive whiny rabbit is a genuinely liberal act, then we can start discussing what’s right or wrong with the “philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide” that is contemporary so-called liberalism/progressivism.
As far as I can see, there is no real difference between the evil results of those faux liberals who know the evil they are doing and those faux liberals (and their enablers) who intend to do good but simply are too lazy (morally and intellectually) to think things through.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:16)
Oh, and another lil question for any faux liberal who might wander by: When, oh when, will you and your ilk articulate an exit strategy for the quagmire you’ve unconstitutionally stuck the country in with your “War on Poverty”–the fruits of which have been advancing illiteracy, more poverty, and worse? Oh, right. To a faux liberal those are all good things, because they form a pretext for the government, at your behest, to do more harm.
OK, so chimp goes wild, acts like a typical gangbanger (or illegal alien/Mexican drug dealer2, or “moderate” Muslim only tamer). Sad for the woman he attacked but otherwise, not all that significant.
What is really disturbing is this caption under a pic of the chimp:
A 200-pound chimpanzee named Travis attacked and critically injured a 55-year-old woman in Stamford, Conn., on Monday. This is an image of the monkey when it escaped in 2003.
Chimp=monkey? I don’t think so. Illiterate boob captioned the pic. That’s the quality of Hivemind reporting. Even when it has plain old ordinary news, it screws that up with dumbass stuff like “chimp=monkey”.
Ya just can’t make this stuff up, folks. These people are illiterate boobs, and it’s illiterate boobs like these who “inform” a vast majority of the other illiterate boobs who make up the electorate.
With insincere apologies to Mark Twain, a society that doesn’t count is no better than one that can’t. Consider the wisdom of the internet:
Eh? Come again? *heh*
Or better yet, consider this:
I don’t even know where to begin… *sigh*
One cent=$0.01
$0.01X0.002=$0.00002
$0.00002X35893 (the kb use cited in the video above)=$0.71786
It’s very, very, very simple arithmetic. “Do-it-in-your-head” arithmetic. Doesn’t even qualify as “math,” IMO.
Why did the two Verizon reps just not get it? Well, not only is adult literacy on the decline in these (dis)United States, but a growing number of folks just can’t count… largely because they’ve not been compelled by education and experience to do so. Heck, even this otherwise thoughtful article at Money Instructor.com uses a model that is part of the problem, a big part.
There is nothing wrong with using a calculator, of course. Calculators are useful in that they save time on arithmetical computations. But in a modern society where most citizens have graduated from an advanced system of formal education, one would expect that educated people would have an understanding of what the calculator is doing. To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated, but recent studies show that a majority begin to have difficulty when faced with such concepts as square roots, simple algebraic terms, and grade school geometry.
Did you catch that? “To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated… ”
It doesn’t matter one bit whether people “consider themselves educated” or not. Those who cannot tell the difference between $0.002 and $0.00002 can’t perform “the four basic operations” and indeed do NOT understand them. They are innumerate. And their numbers are legion. And it is they who combine their illiteracy (“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”–Twain) with their innumeracy and thus allow the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind, politicians, illiterate and innumerate Academia Nut Fruitcakes, so-called educators and all their ilk to fill their minds with illiterate, innumerate, toxic sludge.
When a people cannot measure the impacts of public policies in clear and meaningful ways, then that people can fall prey to all kinds of flim-flammery. And such is the American public becoming.
Millions of Americans engage the services of income tax accountants every year because they are unable to perform the simple calculations themselves. Many others have difficulty interpreting statistical information, percentages, or any kind of information expressed in terms of graphs and charts. When it comes to calculating areas, capacity, or weights and measures, the average North American is not sure where to begin. For a modern society, this should be an intolerable situation, yet it seems that for most people it is quite normal and acceptable.
In short, millions of Americans are enstupiated sheeple, ripe for shearing. Worse, these same people cannot really blame the failures of “public education” (AKA “prisons for kids”), because almost anyone who wants to, who puts in a little effort, can become literate and numerate. Well more than half the population of enstupiated American sheeple are self-made enstupiated American sheeple.
In a representative republic, such is a recipe for disaster. In an ever more democratic (rule by mob) representative republic, we are beginning to reap many of the ills feared by the Founders, largely because a lazy, illiterate, innumerate electorate enables the obscene autoeriticism of politicians who gain almost orgasmic pleasure from misusing tax monies as yet uncollected from future generations.
I met a woman in her 60s the other day who declaimed that “We older people will lose all our benefits if the Republicans gain power.” *huh*?!? What benefits? Social Security has long been bankrupt, stealing from younger generations to buy older folks’ votes. Medicare and other “benefits” are likewise nothing but Ponzi schemes writ large. “Benefits” that steal from my children and grandchildren (and yours) to pay me are beyond obscene; they are simply wrong. Dhimmicraps/Repugnican’ts: makes not one bit of difference. The Ponzi scheme remains. And people who can’t or won’t do the math to see behind the smokescreen are the problem–or at least a large part of it–that keeps the government’s shameful Ponzi schemes going. For now. But someday, numbers will force an accounting, and when that happens, katie bar the door.
“There are three kinds of people in the world: those who count and those who don’t.”
*heh* Which are you?
Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Wingless – Belgium Says Israel Uses Child Soldiers, Refuses to Sell Weapons, Democrat=Socialist, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
I used to say (probably stolen from Lazarus Long *heh*) that you live and learn, or you don’t live long, but in today’s rubber-bumber society, that no longer applies. It’s be more accurate to say “You live and learn, or you don’t really live at all.” Or perhaps,
“‘A learning experience.’ The traditional three-word preamble to a burial.”
*heh*
I had occasion to sit down the other day with my parents–both in their mid-80s. They live a few hours away, so I don’t have a sit down with them all that often, though we do chat once or twice a week on the phone. One thing that struck me during our chat was that each of my now elderly parents are still learning… and using what they learn in productive ways.
Over the course of our conversation, it turned as it often does with them to the time when they were the most active in my life as parents. After all, that period does contain the most mutually shared memories. And yes, school came up, and, as usual, my status as the family changeling entered the conversation. *heh*
Now, unlike most Mass Media Podpeople, politicians *spit* and Academia Nut Fruitcakes, all my siblings easily have more intellectual capability than a head of cabbage. In fact, no dummies need apply at our family reunons. Still, I’m the odd one out among my sibs. For one thing, I’m almost certainly the only one that’d go back to school at the drop of a hat, were time and money pressures a tad different. Oh, not for a degree. Have enough of those. For the pleasure of sitting in a class taught by someone who knows more than I do and likes to share that knowlege with people who want in on it.
Oh, and I like taking tests. Just a wee tad competitive. No, not with fellow students, my competitiveness usually manifested itself in striving to outdo my teachers in some way. If it showed up to party at all. *heh*
Still, my sibs and I caught the learning bug from our folks, to one degree or another, and so learning new things is just what we do, even if not in formal school settings. Not all the same kinds of things, of course, but curiosity and imagination have made us into lifelong learners.
Some people aren’t like that, though. Some folks have to have new information crammed down their throats, packed into their heads like sand into a rat hole, poured into their stopped up ears and then hammered. And still they refuse to think about what they’ve (not) “learned”.
I think that’s a large part of the political and societal mess we’re now in: a large population of sheeple who have a hard shell of stupidity wrapped closely around a cotton candy fluff of contrafactual “truths” they’ve been drip-fed, NG-tube-fed, by the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind after long and careful enstupiation (with the sheeple’s mostly willing cooperation, of course) by Academia Nut Fruitcakes’ and remote educrats’ Prisons for Kids, enstupiated parents (yes, it’s a generational thing, now), “edumacators” and real teachers who’re trapped in the machinery of “public schools” and dumbed down colleges, forced at every turn to surrender teaching to “edumacating” (lobotomizing) young minds.
What to do, what to do?
1. Don’t attack directly. Chip away at the hard shell stupidity covering the cotton candy ignorance with humor, ridicule. When the enemies of The People are shown to be fools, the sheeple may be open to being fed real food. Dennis Miller’s biting sarcasm comes to mind. Oh, you’ll not be able to reach a True Believer in Leftardism with Miller’s material, but those who are just among the common enstupiated sheeple might find a bit of the hardshell stuidity eroded by his ridicule of Leftardism.
2. Once you find any crack in the hardshell of stupidity, start pouring facts through the cracks. Facts are stubborn things. Amazingly, once facts can be brought into juxtaposition with the “reality-based fantasies” of Leftardism’s many lies, the lies begin to unravel. The difficulty is in finding the cracks in the hardshell of stupdity into which one can pour a bit of the antidote.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Unceasingly.
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OK, someone has to say it: Anyone who is undecided at this point about who to vote for come November for Senator, Representative or President is an idiot or profoundly lazy or both.
Local races could be either easier or harder to decide, but the national offices? [Assuming–a radical and possibly unwarranted assumption–voters have the basic intellectual capabilities to do their homework on candidates and issues] Either folks have been doing their due diligence and studying the candidates and issues or they’ve been slacking off and don’t really deserve the franchise at all.
There. Now I’ve said that the “Emperor of the Undecided Electorate” is walking around in blissful, lazy, naked cluelessness can we move on to a discussion about how to alleviate the problem of stupid, lazy, dumbass so-called “undecided voters”? (Personally, I think a quick civics exam at the polling place followed by handing those that don’t pass a ballot that WILL NOT PROCESS is a good place to start…)