"The Greek Thing to Do"

“The future starts in Greece and we will be the first country to use the currency of the future, a currency that doesn’t allow third parties to tell us what to do or how to live, this is the Greek thing to do.”

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek Finance Minister

"They're Middle Class"

"If these people were humble people of the desert, poor people, they'd surely be stronger and more primitive, but they're not. Through their hands, features and family histories, it seems to me that they're middle class."

Uruguay President Jose Mujica

Ayn Rand Was a Man

"My Way"

Burger King buys Canadian chain and moves HQ north

"Legalized Robbery"

If You Like Your Way of Life You Get to Keep Your Way of Life

On the True Nature of Greed

Thomas Sowell bio

Willie Watson to Headline 2014 MusicFest 'n Sugar Grove

Willie Watson will perform Saturday 7-8:30 pm on the Main Stage at the 2014 Doc & Rosa Lee Watson MusicFest 'n Sugar Grove at The Historic Cove Creek School just west of Boone, North Carolina—the town where Old Crow Medicine Show was "discovered" by Doc Watson.

MORE: MountainTimes.com

THE POWER OF STUPIDITY

It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people--in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality:nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:

1. one is generally caught by surprise by the attack;
2. even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.

The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult-like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."

"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity"

by Carlo M. Cipolla

Professor of Economics

U.C. Berkeley 

SEE: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/Stupidity/