Tea Party Mental Failure

The real problem with right wing movements like the Tea Baggers is pretty simple. Many of us sympathize with the complaints about our country's taxation, immigration, and healthcare policies. Many Americans think government has become too large, too incompetent, too invasive, and too unresponsive to be useful to working class citizens. Those are core issues for a majority of citizens.

The problem with the Tea Baggers is that they believe complicated issues can be comprehended, managed, and solved by simple-minded people. It's hard to imagine a problem simple enough for the capacities of characters like Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Beck, and the Faux News doofuses. Stupid people can not solve complicated problems. That's it. There is no issue involving a country of 300 million people or a planet with 6 billion souls that a bonehead like Glenn Beck could resolve. Sarah Palin was incapable of managing a state that has a population that wouldn't fill a decent sized lower-48 city. Not only couldn't she manage that simple state, she didn't have the mental capacity, durability, or courage to stay on the job for one full term.

Like the history of banana republic revolutions, simple people desperately want simple problems. They will always be disappointed. Human history is crowded with the story of cultures looking to idiots and nutcases for solutions and the disappointment that always follows. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler to Mao to Idi Amin to G.W. Bush, one moronic nutcase after another has drug his country down the toilet bowl of stupid fantasies.

After 8 years of brain-dead, corrupt Republican foolishness, the appeal of Obama was that the man isn't stupid. That's it. The country was desperate for a leader with an IQ greater than the number of fingers and toes he could count on. The entire Bush Administration couldn't put together as much mental capacity as the Obama family brings to the breakfast table, let alone enough synapse connections to solve simple three variable word problems. After experiencing the usual Republican "Rule by Fool" it was way past time to give up on the desperate hope that idiots might stumble upon a miracle cure for complex problems.

That is consistently the wingnut problem. Smart people don't hang out with stupid people and that leaves Republicans and the Tea Baggers with slim candidate pickings. The fact that conservatives are incapable of humor sadly describes the mental state of wingnuts in general. Not only is "conservative comedy" an oxymoron, but so is "brilliant conservative movie," "conservative think tank," and "Sarah Palin's great idea."

The allergy wingnuts have for "intellectual elites" and "college boys" is a fatal flaw. Economic elites are obvious enemies of the working class: multi-million dollar CEOs, trust fund brats, Wall Street bankers, and that ilk. Grouping economic elites with intellectual elites is so dumb that it ought to be an obvious mistake even to the uneducated. It, apparently, isn’t. “Elite” has a couple of meanings: “1) the socially superior part of society" and 2) "the best of a class.” If we chose “humanity” as the class we are speaking of, selecting “the best” of our species to make complicated decisions is only logical. The “socially superior” elites (of which Bush, Cheney, and most of that clan were perfect representatives) have almost nothing of value to contribute. They are the inbred hillbilly children of robber baron heritage and they represent the most conservative position in society: rich people who want to hang on to their wealth and power at any cost. One type of elite is expert at solving problems the other is only skilled at resisting change. Change is going to happen. Pretending the world is static is conservative and stupid.

Elites of intelligence come from a variety of backgrounds; there are PhD fools and high school dropout geniuses and everything in-between. The common ground smart people occupy is a low tolerance for fools, so it's often tough to entice them into politics. It's really hard to con them into having out with a group of non-stop idiots. As the nation's problems become more obvious and more difficult to solve, the Tea Baggers will, hopefully, become less relevant. However, in this idiocracy they may get a chance to make an even bigger mess of our complicated problems before the majority comes to its senses.

If the majority has any sense left.

The Tea Baggers are in a good position to restart our political system, but they are too well-populated with the same idiots who have created this mess. Somehow, the country needs to create a similar movement, but stock it with intelligent citizens who might offer up intelligent solutions and leadership.

Personally, I think the country needs to return to the system that picked George Washington as the first President. We need to draft the best people, even against their will if necessary. Politics is the kind of job that attracts the wrong people. Anyone who wants the job should be avoided at all costs. For the most part, the people who could best run the country would be happier doing practically anything else. For one, they’d have to hang out with politicians and their supporters and lobbyists. Anybody with a lick of sense would flee the country rather than put up with an hour suffering that crowd.

#198 Our Immigration Anti-Policy

The MSM talking head goofballs are shrieking about an Afghan terrorist cell discovered in Colorado. We're all supposed to be upset about the fact that a collection of Islamic refugees from a conservative loony bin have turned out to be crazy enough to be building bombs and planning mass murder in American cities. If that surprises you, you are exactly the 8-year-old intellectual capacity market the MSM caters to.

The rest of us should be asking, "Why are we still importing Afghan immigrants?"

We're at war with Afghanistan. We didn't import German immigrants during WWI or WWII. We didn't go out of our want to welcome Russian or East German immigrants during the Cold War. Why the hell is our dumbass government even considering immigration applications from Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Russians, Saudis, North Koreans, most of Africa, South America, or any of the places that routinely rant about "evil Americans?" It's not like we need their unemployed, unskilled, uneducated rejects. It's not like the "diversity" they bring to the United States provides the country with anything that will even support itself.

As crazy as it may seem, the United States, like practically every other country on the planet is overpopulated. While Americans have been making something of an effort to control family size, our idiot government has been making up for the "shortage" in idiots-being-born by ramping up immigration from the underclasses of the world. Bush/Cheney saw the Mexican boards swung wide open and more than 20 million illegals poured into and through our southern states during those brain-dead 8 years. If you had the feeling that the national IQ has been dropping in recent years, you might look to the Nation of Babble conditions our school systems are dealing with as the requirements for ESL classes overwhelms those facilities. You can't spend a lot of time on math and science when half of the classroom can't read or write the common language.

For an established nation, immigration should be a tool to temporarily obtain needed skills, technology, and innovation. We don't need more Section 8 "renters" or more Food Stamp consumers. There is a surplus of unprofitable shopkeepers in the inner city. Importing more minimum wage grunts than the economy can employ or moderate-skill workers intended to keep labor prices down is treasonous. We don't need to import intelligent, motivated students to compensate for the fact that our children are drawn to menial "creative" jobs because our corporations and factories are mismanaged by a pack of idiot MBAs who couldn't properly organize a dozen eggs. Like most every other country in the world, instead of exporting discontents or importing the same we need to fix our economy, education system, democracy, and political system before we arrogantly head off to build some other nation.

Yeah, I know, isolationist. I can live with that. I'd rather be isolationist than imperialist. It's hard to create vicious enemies when you are minding your own business.

Our current tax system was designed by idiots who shouldn't be allowed near sharp pencils. A rational system would be rewarding innovation, education, ecologically and economically friendly activities and making the opposite of those activities pay its own way. Our current system rewards speculators, the worst of all economic activities, and punishes innovation. Our system has been designed to protect the least useful of our giant and inefficient corporations--banking and finance--and to repress every industry that has a fighting chance at turning an honest profit.

Where our best companies get hit the hardest is in the talent they can find from our own citizens. Eight years of "No Child Left with a Mind" has decimated the talent pool and it will take at least that long to fix that mess. Fixing the education system could be financed by revising the tax system to encourage corporations to reward employees who upgrade their skills and by removing any corporate tax deductions for salaries and other perks over $100,000. Companies that attract people who are only motivated by money are only hiring mercenaries who will rape and pillage the business as quickly as they would leave for the next company that is foolish enough to hire them. The reward for that kind of stupidity ought to be a rational tax system that discourages idiot activities.

Instead of trying to fill the holes in the workforce with untrained, unskilled, and uneducated immigrants, our policy ought to be one that aims for quality not quantity, with a core desire to improve our own citizens' lives first.

Customer of Size

One of the beauties of being old and poor is political incorrectness. As I write this, Southwest Airlines is taking a load of crap for not being able to seat a moderately huge Hollywood character, Kevin Smith director of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and other X-Gen drivel. Southwest issued an "apology" after Smith whined about his poor treatment on Twitter. Finally, content that is appropriate for something as lame as Twitter and Tweeting, although most of the crap I've seen on Twitter ought to be more accurately termed Whimpering.

I have to admit I enjoy the politically correct phrase "customer of size." It's much nicer than lardass, hippobutt, ton of flab, walrus boy, tank, or any of the usual descriptions of those of us who can't turn down calories and never saw a meal we couldn't finish. But look at this guy. He's huge! He couldn't fit into a queen sized bed, let alone an airline seat.

The thing that bothers me the most about this episode is that someone as unimportant to the scheme of life generates any national attention at all. I mean, come on, Clerks? Isn't that like being the guy who stunk up the boy's shower with a really nasty fart? Sure, some people remember stupid stuff like that their whole lives, but people with lives and families and real jobs forget pointless junk like Clerks the moment the credits roll. I'm pretty sure I saw Chasing Amy, too. Probably on a thin Netflix night. It didn't make a mark, though. I have no idea what it was about, unless Amy was a runner and the movie was about all the girls behind her in some kind of race.

As for fat folks in airplanes, "discriminating" against people who actually cost more to haul into the air and across the planet is only logical. I have always thought that cars and people ought to be taxed for the resources they consume. Big, heavy cars and trucks ought to cost more to buy and license. Lardasses ought to pay more to ride in buses, trains, and airplanes.

Conversely, if you can fit into a normal airline seat without touching the person beside you, you should get a discount. If you can't, you should either pay the person next to you for the real estate you're stealing or the airline for extra territory. Why is that so hard to figure out?

People are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. It's not an affliction, an unavoidable handicap, or a reason to be treated with special consideration. In the end, nature is going to be particularly ruthless with diabetes, heart failure, stroke, and a boatload of misery to go along with all those boatloads of gravy. This is another example of Americans taking the victim road too seriously. "Customer of size," my ass. The dude is a hippo. He might be able to cram his butt into a seat, but he'll be spilling into the seats on either side of him.