My Home Pages
Joke Main
For a subscription
Today is Tuesday September 11,
the 254th
day of 2007. There are 111 to go. The Sun is
at 18-19 Virgo The moon is waning.
----------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to subscribe or unsubscribe etc. easily, or see the Fair Use disclaimer, just see the "housekeeping" section at the bottom of this message before the sig.
----------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to subscribe or unsubscribe etc. easily, or see the Fair Use disclaimer, just see the "housekeeping" section at the bottom of this message before the sig.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today is the 6th anniversary of the
9/11 attack, so
Maybe the bastards think we'll
eventually forget. No such suerte.
-------------------------------------------------------------
A
Fred-On-Everything
Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Thinking About Intelligence
More Trouble Than It's Worth
I
have decided that intelligence is pernicious, and should be extirpated.
It just causes trouble. Practically every damn fool, deleterious thing
our sorry race has done can be traced to intelligence. It is a bad
idea. When it is not merely a bad idea, it is usually a waste of time.
Consider. William Buckley is very
smart. So is Gore Vidal. Yet in their debates they wrangled like
excessively elegant cats and could never agree on anything, except that
they were both very smart. So what was the use? Two taxi drivers in a
Chicago bar could have failed equally well to decide anything. Or they
could have come to opposed and equally erroneous conclusions.
Pick your subject—economics, say, or
foreign policy, or crime. You will find brilliant men on Left and
Right, each arguing intricately to a bellowing claque of witless
followers who don’t know anything about it either. You can tell where
they will come out by seeing where they went in—on the Left or on the
Right.
Generally intelligence has no effect
on conclusions, which are glandularly determined. It just rationalizes
hormonal inevitabilities.
Further, there’s no point in
knowledge, except to show off with in sports bars. If you are in
Willie’s Rib Pit to watch boxing and know about the Long Count (in the
Cribb-Molineaux fight), then you amount to something. You do no harm,
anyway. All other knowledge is suspect. At best, it is a minor vice,
like crossword puzzles. At worst, it encourages people to do
catastrophic things with a smug sense of fundamental rightness. The
people who got America into Iraq were no end bright and could say
impressive things like “Twenty-Seventh Caliphate” and “Theravada
Sufism.” Much good it did them. Or us.
Brains just allow you to be more
elaborately and ornately disastrously wrong.
However, smart people are at least
interesting, like rare tumors, so early on I started having a lot of
smart friends. I noticed that most of them were crazy. The
right-wingers were hostile paranoids with the empathy of a torque
wrench who wanted to nuke somebody. I don’t think they really cared
who. The left-wingers were angry totalitarians-in-waiting with minds
closed tighter than Fort Knox. For this they needed IQs of 160? You
could do as well with derelicts in the Port Authority Bus Station at
three a.m.
See, what happens is, as kids the
bright don’t fit in. They don’t have much in common with anybody. They
dress funny and get made fun of. They can’t dance. They don’t get laid
much, or at all. This warps their heads. They retreat into isolation
with others like them, become contemptuous of everyone else to get
even, and deal in abstractions because it’s all they know. (I claim
that if Marx had been able to jitterbug, the Soviet Union would never
have existed.)
In short, a large IQ is an infallible
predictor of emotional inadequacy.
Where intelligence unfortunately does
work reasonably well is in the sciences. Really smart men have ideas;
lesser men, usually engineers, make them explode; the least men get the
triggers. This suggests that we ought to put a bounty on engineers.
Anyway, at first I figured my friends
were nut jobs because I just had strange tastes in friends. Maybe I
attracted the demented. Then I found myself on a list-serve of people,
mostly men (who are crazier by far then women), who were interested in
race, intelligence, and the differences between various human groups.
Many were professors at places like
Stanford and MIT—scientists and anthropologists not of the first rank,
nor of the second—too rigid, I thought, for originality—but nonetheless
highly intelligent. Sometimes one would demurely let slip that “I got
1600 on my SATs before they dumbed them down,” ( People attach their
self-respect to what they have. In high school I knew a country boy who
prided himself on being able to pee farther than anyone else.)
Here I figured was a window into
academe, full of towering minds like Plato. These were not squirrels I
bumped into in the back alleys of life. They were the real article. I
eagerly awaited clarity, dispassion, and the self-abnegation of earnest
bloodhounds in disinterested pursuit of Truth. Ha.
No. They too started with their
premises, which they didn’t seem to realize were premises, and reasoned
doggedly to…their premises. In this they reminded me of Pooh and Piglet
tracking the Heffalump around the bush.
An example: One of them used Google to
search for rescue operations in the US, Mexico, and China. He found
countless rescue stories for America—trapped miners, children in wells,
cats in trees, what have you—and only one or two for China and Mexico.
From this he did not conclude that the English press just doesn’t cover
Mexico and China well—I searched in Spanish and found lots. No. He
decided that Mexicans and Chinese do not regard individual life as
important. They just don’t bother to rescue people, see.
I don’t know whether this guy had 1600
boards, but if so, he needs to try for 3200 next time.
Here you have it: large IQ, zero grasp
of humanity, all is abstractions. (I have another theory that people
become psychologists because they lack the normal grasp of human
behavior and spend eight years trying to learn what everybody else
already knows. A doctorate in psychology is a sure sing of confusion.)
I have lived in both Mexico and
China—well, Taiwan—and can report that the fellow’s notions of
Sino-Mexican unconcern are highly cephaloproctological.
The tired business of one group or
another not caring about human life resonates among the insular smart.
It is perennially appealing to conservatives. “Defense intellectuals,”
scintillating types with flat heads from being dropped that you could
set a martini on, used to say that China could sacrifice five hundred
million people in a nuclear war without caring. Today it’s Moslems.
(Left-wing intellectuals, similarly afflicted, say “We must sacrifice
the masses in this generation to build communism in the next.” Both
like the idea of extermination.)
Does any of this make sense? I picture
young Pedro running to tell his daddy that sister Maria just fell into
the well. “Let her drown, hijo. We Mexicans don’t do no steenking
rescue.” After the earthquake that leveled Mexico City in ‘85,
passersby on the sidewalks doubtless ignored the scream of the trapped,
hands flapping piteously from beneath the rubble, because Mexicans
don’t do rescue. And at the firehouses, firemen insouciantly drinking
tequila and Squirt and playing cards, because Mexicans don’t do rescue.
We ought to put something in the
water to keep IQs down. Thee would be so much less noise.
--------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------
A cop
pulled up two Irish drunks, and asked to the first, "What's your
name and address?"
name and address?"
"I'm
Paddy O'Day, of no fixed address."
The
cop turned to the second drunk, and asked the same question.
"I'm
Seamus O'Toole, and I live in the flat above Paddy."
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
From
"aha"
I Said I Wanted a LINE Cut! Note: This was not done intentionally (by the pet owner), and the cat is back to normal. Let us take you, now, through a true story submitted to Aha! Jokes about a haircut, a groomer, a Southern accent, and one very angry cat!
My sister-in-law is from Oklahoma and has a slight Southern accent. She has cats, and when she lived in the south, she would take them to the groomer's and have what is called a Line Cut. To her, a line cut is when all of the fur hanging down below the cat's tummy is taken off (because it gets matted or snarled).
When she moved to Chicago with my brother, one of the cats fur got all tangled up during the move, so she took it in for a line cut.
She was quite surprised when she heard the price, as it was twice as much as it was down south.
She confirmed with the groomer that he understood what a line cut was and he said "yes, I know what a LION cut is." It seems her accent came out sounding like LION not LINE and this is how her cat was returned to her! She cried for a week -- but not as much as the cat. It was November in Chicago, and the cat needed all the fur it had.
Gas in car to go to groomer's $3.25
Cat car carrier $27.99
Grooming fee $80.00
Getting angry looks from one seriously upset cat -- priceless!
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm
|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A
Minnesota guide to computer lingo
LOG
ON: making the wood stove hotter.
LOG
OFF: don't add wood.
MONITOR:
keep an eye on da wood stove.
MEGAHERTZ:
when a big log drops on your bare foot in da morning.
FLOPPY
DISK: what you get from piling too much wood.
RAM:
da hydraulic thing that makes da woodsplitter work.
DRIVE:
getting home during most of the winter.
PROMPT:
what you wish da mail was during da snow season.
ENTER:
come on in.
WINDOWS:
what you shut when it gets 10 below.
SCREEN:
what is a must during black fly season.
CHIP:
what you munch during Vikings games.
MICROCHIP:
what's left in da bag when da chips are gone.
MODEM:
what you did to da hay fields last July.
DOT
MATRIX: Eino Matrix's wife.
LAPTOP:
where da grandkids sit.
KEYBOARD:
where you're supposed to put da keys so da wife can find em.
SOFTWARE:
them plastic picnic utensils, eh?
MOUSE:
what leaves dem little tings in da cupboard.
MAINFRAME:
da part of da sauna that holds up da roof.
PORT:
where da commercial fishin boats dock.
RANDOM
ACCESS MEMORY: when you can't remember how much you spent on da new
deer rifle when wifee asks about it
----------------------------------------------------------------
OK, move along, that's all there is, move along please ....
OK, move along, that's all there is, move along please ....
Housekeeping:
While I write some of what appears in my newsletters, mostly it is stuff that's merely passed on, often without attribution. If at all possible, attribution is given, and any copyright notice, if copyrighted material is used at all, is ALWAYS included. Written permission(s) (email-I can't handwrite) are sought where practicable. If you see anything at all that shouldn't be there, should be differently attributed, or is objectionable in any way, please let me know by simply writing to me . In no event is any income derived, and so the following notice is included:
*COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment..
[Ref. Fair Use ]
Group addresses:
Subscribe
Unsubscribe
List Owner
-------------------------------------------------------
"The difference between salad and garbage is timing."
-- Dan Kennedy
Home is where the grab bars are.