Stupidity – The Burning Platform

Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade. In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in.

Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us. We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach. Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television. 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet.

What in the world has happened to us? How is it possible that we have become so stupid? According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…

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College Cry Bullies In Pennsylvania Demand “Racist” Lynch Memorial Hall Be Renamed

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

In a recent post, Not a Safe Space – Canadian University Suspends Yoga Class After Students Become Offended, I explained how those most responsible for the almost inconceivable authoritarian idiocy spreading across college campuses are not the students themselves, but their spineless and inept administrators.

These kids are more or less acting like Wall Street financiers after the bailouts. After the bankers were provided with trillions of dollars in backstops and no one went to jail for destroying the economy, they immediately paid themselves record bonuses a year after the worst of the crisis, and are now once again thieving and pillaging at will.

Why? Because when no one is held accountable, the incentives are in place to steal. Similarly, no adults are holding these out of control child-fascists accountable for their despicable behavior. As such, these tyrants-in-training are getting more out of control every day, and getting away with it. Thank you college administrators.

– From the piece: Protesters at Smith College Demand Journalists Swear Loyalty Oath Before Reporting on Them

You’ve got Trump supporters on one side, college cry bullies on the other. One group consists of self-described conservatives, the other self-described liberals. Both have authoritarian tendencies and would throw out the rule of law, civil liberties, and rationality in a heartbeat if it meant advancing their own agendas. Both are equally dangerous, and both movements appear to be growing. The depressing thing is, rather than Americans uniting under Constitutional principles, the trend seems to be two camps diverging into their own unique brands of totalitarianism. The future does not look bright should this continue.

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The 145 Solution

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Sapience, not Sentience

In the modest and unassuming manner natural to this column, I advance a small proposal for the emendation of such tatters of the Constitution as can be found: For voting in federal elections, we should employ a literacy test to disenfranchise the majority of the population, to the infinite betterment of the country. This wise move should be accompanied by an increase in the voting age to twenty-five.

The necessity cannot be denied. Consider the following:

Forty-three percent of Americans think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.

Sixty-four percent cannot name the three branches of the federal government.

Fourteen percent are illiterate.

Twenty-six percent think the sun goes around the earth.

These numbers may be understood in various ways. To a curmudgeon, who obtains a sour satisfaction from the endless repetition of human folly, they provide the satisfactions of confirmation. We all enjoy being right. In practical terms, they mean that democracy, or our mild approximation thereto, is a sham, a fraud, an impossibility, and a bad idea. No one so blankly ignorant, so mentally without furniture, so muddle-headed, limited, and barren, should be allowed within hailing range of a voting booth.

Such people cannot possibly know anything of national questions. Those who live in a featureless tundra of the mind usually do so from stupidity. It is unreasonable to blame them for a genetic condition over which they have no control, but it is equally unreasonable to allow them to vote. As for the fairly intelligent who through intellectual shiftlessness learn nothing, I have no patience with them. What possible cause is there for thinking the willfully dull, the deliberately ignorant, or the dull and ignorant, are ompetent to influence policy on matters that they cannot spell? Given that everyone today has access to virtually every book ever written and to the internet, there is little excuse for living in Oprah fog and Eminem darkness.

Continue reading “The 145 Solution”

DYING FOR SOCIAL SECURITY

The Federal government certainly is a well oiled machine. Do they ever do anything right? They can’t figure out they have been paying a dead person for 23 years? All you Boomers should be happy. You’re going to get your Social Security payments even after you die. So stop bitching.

And now we are handing over our healthcare to these government drones. What could possibly go wrong?

NOTHING TO CUT: Meet the Multi-Millionaire Who Collected His Dead Mom’s Social Security Checks for 23 Years

Guest post by Laura Trueman

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/
The 2014 omnibus bill contains an increase in funding for running the Social Security Administration (SSA). Maybe now they can stop paying Social Security benefits to dead people.

According to a December Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, SSA systems do not accurately note and confirm the deaths of beneficiaries, resulting in payments being made to dead people—sometimes for decades. The flawed system doesn’t just impact Social Security payments, either. Multiple other federal agencies that pay benefits—from federal pensions to payments to farmers and the disabled—rely on SSA’s flawed death data.Collecting Dead Mother’s Social Security for 23 Years. Raymond O’Dell made news this week when he was sentenced for collecting his dead mother’s Social Security benefits for 23 years. O’Dell collected $188,000 in benefits, while building a successful Taco Bell franchise. His accountant put his net worth at $4 million (including $431,000 in cash). This week, he was sentenced to pay back the benefits, along with a $20,000 fine, and will serve six months in prison.

O’Dell is not unique. In Washington state, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan convicted five people for collecting a dead parent’s Social Security benefits. One man personally disposed of his mother’s body in a rural area and never reported her death; he collected her benefits for 9 years. More examples are cited in the SSA’s “Deceased Payee Fraud; Strange But True,” released this month.

As Durkan noted, “Cheaters shred the safety net for those that really need it…and need to know prison and hefty fines wait at the end of the scheme.” The SSA has the Office of Inspector General Fraud Hotline for reporting suspected fraud. That’s good, but it isn’t enough.

Getting a Handle on the Problem. The SSA receives and processes death reports from a variety of sources, including states, family members, funeral directors, post offices, financial institutions, and other federal agencies. It’s a big job: In 2012, seven million deaths were reported to the SSA; overall, they manage the death records for some 98 million people.

The GAO reports that the agency does not verify the death reports from all of its sources. The SSA has no clue how accurate the unverified reports are because, according to the GAO, the agency has “never performed an analysis validating the accuracy of the various sources of death reports.”

The GAO checked on a random sample of the SSA’s death reports and found problems:

Notice of about 500 deaths came to the SSA long after the person’s death; in fact 200 were 10 or more years after the fact, meaning that all kinds of benefits could have been flowing unchecked for years.
Another 150 people were apparently engaged in “back to the future” time travel—their date of death was BEFORE their date of birth.
Almost 2000 broke or nearly broke Guinness records—living between 115 and 195 years.

The GAO made some recommendations on how to improve the SSA systems, and maybe things will improve. It should be noted that, while the GAO focused on the SSA’s struggles with the death reports it received, Raymond O’Dell and a slew of others kept their relative’s death from being reported.

In the omnibus appropriations Congress passed this week, they offered their usual solution—more money—increasing the agency’s budget by $651 million. Oklahoma’s Senator Tom Coburn (R) and a few others are pushing the SSA to fix this and other fraud in benefit programs. As The Wall Street Journal notes, these members “are voices crying in the wilderness” as Congress focuses on spending more money, not making existing agencies and programs work better.
Read more at The Foundry.

STUPID PEOPLE ARE TOO STUPID TO KNOW HOW STUPID THEY ARE

This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. I’m not an elitist. I think I’m a realist. I try to observe the facts and come to logical conclusions. The more I observe my fellow Americans and the politicians we elect to office, the more I’m convinced we are doomed as a society. Incompetence combined with an irrational feeling of superiority and exceptionalism is a deadly combination. This scientific study just confirms what George Carlin put so succinctly, many years ago:

“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

Scientists say America is too dumb for democracy to thrive

The United States may be a republic, but it’s democracy that Americans cherish. After all, that’s why we got into Iraq, right? To take out a dictator and spread democracy.

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” “One person, one vote.” We are an egalitarian society that treasures the mandate of its citizenry.

But more than a decade’s worth research suggests that the citizenry is too dumb to pick the best leaders.

They know what’s best for the country.

Work by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and then-colleague Justin Kruger found that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas,” according to a report by Life’s Little Mysteries on the blog LiveScience.

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

What’s worse is that with incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

Let’s say a politician comes up with an ingenious plan that would ensure universal health care while decreasing health care costs.

According to Dunning-Kruger, no matter how much information is provided, the unsophisticated would 1) be incapable of recognizing the wisdom of such a plan; 2) assume they know better; and 3) have no idea of the extent of their inadequacy.

In other words, stupid people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

If this seems elitist to you, you are probably not alone. Maybe we should only let Ph.D.’s, Mensa members and Jeopardy! champions vote? At least require a passing an IQ test before you get to cast a ballot?

The scientists do say that the incompetent can be trained to improve, but only if they acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, which would seem to be a catch-22 since they are too ignorant to do so on their own.

Life’s Little Mysteries said that Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, ran a computer simulation of a democratic election based on Dunning and Kruger’s theories:

“In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters’ own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.”

It would appear then that democracy dooms us to mediocrity and misinformed choices. Not exactly encouraging news for the next round of California’s ballot initiatives.

Posted By: Mike Moffitt ( Email ) | Mar 09 at 9:29 am

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