Biden fell asleep during The Zero’s Speech?
Looks that way. I may have to revise my opinion of Crazy Uncle Joe upwards a wee tad…
Who’s the Big Dog in the Yard?
And the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Climate Scare-ism think we control the climate.
Egocentric dumbasses.
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.
Oh, Yes: Buy This Company’s Products, Riiiight
On the product label of a 3-piece ethernet cable/adapter set:
“Idea for connect almost anything to your USB devices”
WTF?!? The cable has two RJ-45 connectors. One adapter is a marginally useful (very marginally useful in an emergency situation, I suppose) Female/Female RJ-45 connector and one completely useless RJ-45 splitter (anyone who’d use such a thing instead of using a router, hub or switch needs their head examined, IMO).
No USB cable or adapters whatsoever.
And note the fractured English, which was probably intended to convey, “Ideal for connecting… ” Yep. Made by slave labor in China.
Oh, I read the back for more amusement, such as,
“This product contains chemicals, including lead; know [sic] to the states [sic] of California… “
Wow. Chinese slave labor as founts of wisdom noting the gaseous, liquid and solid states of California? Somnolent state vs waking state? What?
And,
“When you open package please use scissors and cut along perforation… “
You guessed it: no perforations.
There was more, but these were enough to provide me with a bit of amusement.
If W.H. Auden Was Right…
…I might just live forever!
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well hung.
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.!
How Are Congresscritters and Slinkys Alike?
They’re both useless, but it is fun watching them fall down the stairs.
Note that I did not form the plural of “Slinky” as “Slinkies”. Why? Because Slinky is a proper noun, of course. “Congresscritters,” OTOH, is just about the most UNproper noun in existence… Just about.
“Bacon makes the best Koranic bookmark… “
These videos speak for themselves. My only quibble is the waste of perfectly good bacon. After all, mere contact with the toxic waste that is the Koran would make otherwise perfectly good bacon useless for anything but feeding to “good” Muslims.
and
It’s Probably Just Me…
…But, has anyone else noticed a growth of “life incompetence” in the population in general here in these (Dys*)United States? OK, time to back up and expand on my understanding of “competence”. I’ll let Robert Heinlein’s words stand in place of my very likely less competent *heh* attempt to do so:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Well, I’ve not butchered a hog (though I’ve butchered other animals), conned a ship or died gallantly, yet, but the rest of the list isn’t really all that hard, and I’d want to add a few things to it, were I to be its author. But Heinlein gives the flavor of my attitude toward “life competence” with the idea behind the list, ending with, “Specialization is for insects.”
A couple of simple examples should suffice.
The Sears Auto Hammer. Now, confession time: I own one of these. I’ve never used it, but I bought it to loan to some folks who just could not get the basic idea of using a hammer. Nothing against them; they’d not had anyone teach them how when they were tadpoles, nor had they had any life experience swinging a hammer, and they had a time-constraint they were working with that pretty much disallowed time to practice with a hammer to get their skills up to snuff (and so avoid ruining a bunch of trim on their house). So, a “Hammer for Dummies” approach was my assessment of the quickest, easiest solution for the situation, used by some really bright folks who are anything BUT “dummies” but were simply cursed with a decidedly narrowed skill set.
But the very fact that there is such a thing as an “auto hammer” speaks to a widespread incompetence with one of the most basic of hand tools. Anyone should be able to master the use of a weighted object attached to the end of a stick. And darned near everyone (save for the idle rich who can afford to pay folks to swing such weighted sticks for them) ought to at least master such things before moving on to power tools. (The idle rich probably should move right on to power tools… complete with not reading the directions or taking proper safety precautions. They can afford the multiple surgeries that would likely result.)
(BTW, I believe those folks have since mostly repaired their skill set, so the $100 auto hammer sits unused in one of my tool boxes, now. Anyone want? It’s going cheap. ;-))
And then there’s “righty-tighty/lefty-loosey”. (*huh*?!?)
Yeh, it’s almost universally standardized that turning whole classes of things to the right (clockwise) tightens and turning those same classes of things left (counter or anti-clockwise) loosens them. Light bulbs, screws and nuts, almost all kinds of threaded devices (save for threaded comments *heh*) with very, very few exceptions follow this rule.
And yet… *sigh* About every third loaf of bread I buy has the twist tie tightened on backwards. Once in a while I am called on by some cultural illiterate to help open a bottle or jar, because the cultural illiterate is tightening the lid by twisting the wrong way.
This doesn’t take literacy, folks, just basic functional competence.
The list can go on and on: folks who can’t solve simple problems because they have no concept of relationships between various weights and measures, people who are NOT tone deaf who nevertheless think they are reproducing pitches in their abominable attempts to “sing,” people who write letters to editors proving they didn’t understand the editorial they read and cannot write coherent sentences in English, etc., etc.
The new normal seems to be subliterate, incompetent, highly specialized morons.
BTW, apropos of nothing in particular *heh*, my collection of hammers (which includes four slightly different framing hammers–two of them “heirlooms”–a 2# machinist’s hammer, a small selection of ball peens, etc.) doesn’t see as much use as in days of yore, but a small range of differently purposed hammers should be among the first things acquired and mastered by anyone who owns a home. Screw that new big screen: get some hand tools and learn how to use them well! This is especially important nowadays as our political masters seem intent on creating an inflation/depression situation where fewer resources will be available to the average citizen and what resources there are will be much more expensive. Knowing how to use basic hand tools to effect home repairs could well be one of the things that lets you keep the wolf from the door in these growing-ever-darker days…
*(Dys)United States: bad, abnormal, ill.
Oh, *yawn*–Dog Bites Man
Is anyone surprised?
“The United States now ranks near the bottom of the list of advanced economies for its high school dropout rate — 23.3 percent of American students do not receive a high school diploma.”
The really distressing thing is that at least 70% of those who do graduate probably shouldn’t have. After all, if 70% of college grads don’t have the literacy skills to read their way out of a paper bag, what does that say for prior “education accomplishments”? What? Most high school grads only go to college to get lobotomies?
Nah. They got those while in pubschool.
Note: I’m not asserting they had their lobotomies performed by the pubschools alone. No, students’ parents, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind and many other elements all work together to accomplish this task. With the full cooperation of the students, for the most part.