The Difference Between Ignorance & Stupidity

A person who is ignorant lacks knowledge. In fact, the etymology of the word "ignorant" is "without knowledge". A neurosurgeon who can't fix a car is not stupid, nor is a mechanic who can't do brain surgery. For the same reason, most children are not stupid.

Stupidity is more complicated. One kind of stupidity involves being short-sighted, such as sitting on the wrong side of the branch they're sawing. Another form of stupidity is really more a kind of laziness. A good example is a person who is too lazy to gather information and check it before doing something new. Yet another kind of laziness-stupidity is the inability to sort truth from falsehood. The last and most severe form of stupidity is the inability to learn. This includes learning from mistakes, learning from others, and using logic.

To sum up:

A wise person learns from others' mistakes, a sane person learns from his own mistakes, and a stupid person never learns.
 

Brilliant Youtube Comedy

The Case for Abolishing Summer Vacation

Summer vacation exists because in the days of yore, children were needed on the farm to help with harvesting crops. Since child labor is no longer needed for that, the original reason for summer break is obsolete.

If the school year lasted 12 months instead of 9, students could complete 1 and 1/3 grades per year instead of just 1. This would shorten the overall time needed to complete 12 grades from 12 years to 8 years. Furthermore, since students would not need to relearn material forgotten over the summer, the total time to complete 12 grades could probably be reduced to 6 years.

I don't know about you, but I would have gladly sacrificed 3 years (12 3-month breaks = 36 months) of summer vacation in order to get out of school 4 to 6 years earlier.



 

My Favorite Yakety Sax Clips

 

 

Behold the Power of Cheese

 

Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling

 

It's A Wonderful Tax

George: Well, I tell ya, I wish there were no taxes! Oh, now wait a minute. That's an idea now, isn't it?

Clarence: What do you think? Ahhh... All right, George, you've got your wish: there are no taxes.

* * * * * * *

George: Wait a minute, what happened to the Cowboy Poetry Festival?

Clarence: There isn't one, because you didn't pay taxes for it.

George: And Farmer Joe, what happened to his subsidy for corn ethanol?

Clarence: He doesn't have one either because your taxes weren't there.

George: Where's the tattoo parlor and the strip club and the army base?

Clarence: They're all gone. The based was closed and without the soldiers, the tattoo place and the strip club closed too.

George: OH GOD!

Clarence: Strange, isn't it? Each man's tax touches so many other lives. When it isn't around it leaves an awful hole, doesn't it?

* * * * * * *

Clarence: You see George, you've really paid a wonderful tax. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to just keep your own money?

George: Clarence! Clarence! Help me, Clarence! Get me back! Get me back, I don't care what happens to my money! Get me back to my taxes! Help me Clarence, please! Please! I wanna pay again. I wanna pay again. Please, God, let me pay again.

* * * * * * * 

 

How Much Does It Cost To Kill a Terrorist/Insurgent/Whatever?

Art Buchwald wrote a column during the Vietnam War in which he calculated the cost of killing a Viet Cong soldier- something like $300 in 1960s dollars, which works out to around $2000 in current dollars. He arrived at this figure by dividing the monthly cost of the war by the monthly enemy body count.

I thought it would be interesting to repeat this exercise for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to see if the military has found more cost-effective ways of killing over the past 40 years.

One difficulty is that the military has not been keeping track of how many enemy fighters they have killed, so I decided to estimate the enemy killed at 100,000. The total cost of the wars to date is approximately $1.5 trillion. This means that it costs approximately $15 million dollars to kill one bad guy. Keep in mind that the bounty on Osama Bin Laden was $25 million.

40 years since Vietnam and it costs more to kill? I think this figure best summarizes what is wrong with the strategy in these wars. If it costs the US $15 million to kill one guy, the US is going to run out of money way before the Taliban runs out of men.

For a few thousand dollars, most of these guys could be bribed into giving Americans foot massages.