Paying No Attention To The Men Behind The Curtain

Are They All Idiots?

Google was giving this link at the Huffington Post, but as you can see, it’s dead now.  Gone.  Looks like nothing has replaced it, either.

What lead me on that search was this from economist Megan McArdle.

Her questions to the bankers are so bizarre that they don’t know what to do. Ken Lewis looks like a deer in the headlights as Waters asks her about offshore loss mitigation efforts. He can’t even figure out what she’s talking about, and neither can I.

She’s talking about Congressman Waters, who has apparently gone off blathering in a Congressional finance committee.   Barney Frank had to tell her to calm down.  It’s too bad the video is no longer available at Huffington.

That’s not the only idiocy going on in this great country.   What is one to do about crime in California?  Why, release 57,000 prisoners, of course.  Patterico quotes the LA Times:

A panel of three federal judges, saying overcrowding in state prisons has deprived inmates of their right to adequate healthcare, tentatively ruled Monday that the state must reduce the population in those lockups by as many as 57,000 people.

The judges issued the decision after a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons.

Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it had lost the trial and would have to make dramatic changes in its prisons unless it could reach a settlement with inmates’ lawyers.

Freeing 57,000 prisoners all at once is such a good idea… The kicker is that all three judges were appointed – by Jimmy Carter.  Sigh.

Then there’s this story at JammieWearingFool, that effectively demonstrates the AP is enumerate.  He quotes Yahoo Sports News:

The AP originally reported that Figge swam from the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa to Trinidad (2,100 miles) in 25 days while escorted by a boat. She was said to have rested every night and hopped back in the water in the morning.

How nice – that’s quite a feat.  But, um… does anyone have a calculator?

The real issue stemmed from the fact that swimming 2,100 miles in 25 days is impossible. (Some newspapers picked up on this.) It’s infinitely more impossible when somebody only spends 21 minutes swimming during one of those 25 days. Michael Phelps swimming his fastest would take about 20 days to cover that distance. And that’s his fastest pace, sustained for three weeks, without ever stopping. Impossible.

Yet, somehow, the AP ran the story even though a few seconds of thought and a pocket calculator was enough to disprove it.

Idiocy.

Oh, and speaking of calculators, do you know what you get when you divide $800 billion by 4 million “stimulated” jobs?  If I quit my job now, can I get one of those $200,000 babies for myself???

You know, in my younger days when I read things like this, I would reflexively assume that I was missing something, or that I was ignorant of some issue, or something like that.  Things just could be as they seemed, and perhaps a humble attitude is the right attitude for a young man to take [Especially for you. – ed.].  But I’ve seen too much of this now, and I’ve learned there’s nothing mysterious going on.  These people are just idiots.

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